Listen to “The Power of Awareness in Daily Life”.
Awareness is the act of being present to the moment. It means being fully alert, fully conscious and fully here. It means inhabiting the present moment with all five senses. To be truly aware you must take in everything the moment has to offer.
Inner peace begins with awareness, and more importantly, with the ability to remain aware. The beauty of awareness is that it connects us to consciousness and, more importantly, conscious living.
If we expect to live happy and fulfilling lives, we cannot go on living unaware of the things we say, the way we feel and the ones we hurt. Therefore, we need to look more closely at ourselves and pay attention to how we think, feel and act.
Your entire reality is created and exists in the present. Your work, relationships, home-life and day-to-day experiences all spring from the thoughts, feelings and actions that occur in a string of infinite moments.
Thoughts, while potentially amazing, profound, and brilliant, are also the source of enormous suffering. We all have negative thoughts sometimes. They can make us worry, be judgemental, compare ourselves to others. For most of us, we often feel guilt, shame, and are too self-critical.
Recognition is key! We often harangue ourselves without noticing we are doing it. Merely noticing our thoughts at the moment we have them can be enough to help relieve them.
Anyone facing paralyzing anxiety, jealousy, loneliness or despair knows that ditching old unconscious conditioning is easier said than done. After all, we adopted our family’s unconscious conditioning as toddlers. Despite rebelling against certain behaviours in our adolescence, adulthood finds that these deeply ingrained values—and the habits that support them—remain the only reality we know.
The simple mindfulness practice of returning our wandering mind to the present moment is the foundation. When we get submerged in shame, self-hatred, and guilt, we can train ourselves to come back to the present moment and find relief.
When you learn to observe negative thoughts, they lose their power over you, and they stop disturbing you so much until they eventually disappear.
When you watch negative emotions, the same thing happens. They lose their power over you and then they too disappear.
When you watch your positive emotions, a different phenomenon happens. They grow stronger. As you keep watching them, you start experiencing them more and more often.
When you watch your behaviour, something else happens. You will become aware that anger always makes you and everyone around you miserable. You will see that holding a grudge is pointless, as all it does is make you miserable.
If we realize and accept that awareness changes us for the better, then it makes sense to spend as much time as possible living with awareness. The more aware we become, the more we can grow as a people and the more we leave our miseries and past conditionings behind, and the happier and more fulfilled we will be.
