Awareness
3 Quotes
“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.”
- Abraham Maslow
“Awareness is the first step in healing.”
- Dean Ornish
“Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Awareness is simple and complex at the same time. It’s really just paying attention to what is happening inside of you and around you. Yet entire fields of psychology, meditation, and consciousness research seek to better explain the concept of awareness.
Throughout all of my reading, researching, and podcast listening, awareness has come up countless times. It seems like a universal truth that awareness needs to be the starting point on any quest for change or self-improvement. Awareness is the beginning of transformation. Paying attention is the beginning of awareness. Awareness is a process of slowing down, paying attention, and connecting with different parts of yourself.
Throughout this blog, I’ll present numerous podcast episodes about increasing awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and physical body. Becoming aware of the internal dialogue running through your mind is incredibly powerful. Noticing what you’re saying to yourself and the tone in which you speak to yourself is the first step to understanding limiting beliefs or mental blocks.
Noticing your feelings and being able to name them is the starting point of processing the many feelings that flow through you. We’ll get into this deeply, but being able to process uncomfortable feelings without beating yourself up is a superpower that we would all benefit from learning. Awareness is the first step to connecting with your feelings.
Body awareness is helpful too and can be a more concrete starting point for people to start with. Closing your eyes and scanning from toes to head, paying attention to how each body part feels is an easy way to slow down and tune into yourself.
There are so many different entry points to increasing awareness, depending on what comes naturally to you. A few things to try:
Mindfulness and meditation
Breathwork
Journaling
Logging or tracking apps
Somatic or body awareness exercises
Tuning into your 5 senses
Walking in nature
Making time for stillness
Two Podcast Episodes
Being Well Podcast
Episode: “Increase Your Self-Awareness”
In the Being Well Podcast, host Forrest Hanson interviews his dad, Dr. Rick Hanson, a clinical psychologist. I was wary of this concept at first, but their dynamic is so charming! I was hooked after just a few minutes. Dr. Hanson packs a lot of great information about self-awareness into this episode which runs 1 hour and 8 minutes long. He does a good job of blending complex, psychological information with funny, relatable stories. He shares his epiphany that he is a nerd but not a wimp.
If the whole process of delving into your psyche and becoming more self-aware sounds scary or intimidating, Dr. Hanson shares that about 80% of what his patients become aware of are positive aspects of themselves. “A lot of the time, what we become aware of is good news,” he says. How encouraging!
Tara Brach Podcast
Episode #1330 “Meditation: The Sea of Awareness” https://www.tarabrach.com/meditation-sea-awareness/
If you’d rather skip past the information about awareness, and DO something to increase your awareness, try this guided meditation from Tara Brach. It’s about 15 minutes long. If you’re not familiar with Tara Brach, she is a Ph.D psychologist, author, meditation teacher, and the possessor of an extremely soothing voice. Tara Brach is one of the top meditation teachers in the world, and we can all listen for free and learn from her. Although she’s an expert, she’s so down-to-earth and relatable. No wonder she is wildly popular! Her podcast episodes include guided meditations and talks that incorporate humor into information about meditation and mindfulness. There is also a gong noise that sends my cat into a panic every time.
1 Resource
The resource this week a Psychology Today article by Gustave Razzetti called, “How to Increase Your Self-Awareness and Peace of Mind.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-adaptive-mind/201904/how-increase-your-self-awareness-and-peace-mind
