Show Notes
Welcome to this episode of a journey to inner wisdom…it is all about awareness today…well mostly if I can stay on topic! There are other words that I will interchange with awareness…attention and awake for example…but I will always relate to awareness.
I hope you had a chance to consider the transitions that you have or are going through in your life and how you are going or have gone through them. And have you noticed any fractals on your daily journey? I was out walking, looking into the canopy atop the forest and the patterns are amazing. I have parsley growing in my greenhouse and the patterns are wonderful.
I always like to start by looking at the word itself and where it came from.
1828 - Aware – late old English – watchful, vigilant
-Ness -denotes action, quality, or state
1752 – awaredom
Today: Merriam-Webster Dictionary
knowledge and understanding that something is happening or exists
situational awareness is simply knowing what is going on around us and being able to assess how it will impact the near future. Like driving, or cooking or walking, and seeing a dog!
I know, you are thinking, ‘that is so obvious…. of course I am aware of what is happening!’ “I know that I am listening to this podcast…I know I am also driving or walking or making dinner.’
Think for a moment of a time you were driving or going somewhere on the subway or a train and suddenly you wonder, “how did I get here? Did I go through a red light? Did I miss my stop? We often run on automatic in our busy world.
Tony DeMello once said:
Most people even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They are born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed in their sleep, they die in their sleep without even waking up. They never understand the loveliness, - beauty of this thing called human existence.
- George Gurdjieff.
“Awakening is possible only for those who seek it and want it, for those who are ready to struggle with themselves and work on themselves for a very long time and very persistently in order to attain it.”
Sometimes we have numbed ourselves in order to avoid pain or face a difficult situation. We can do that with substances, work, gaming, or disconnecting from the now. When we do this, we are not present to the present…it is like we are a wraith going through life and not engaging with life.
- George Gurdjieff.
“In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep.”
There is the rub!!! We often don’t realize that we are asleep.
According to Deepak Chopra, awakening happens when you are no longer living in a dream world where you filter everything through your ego and focus on the future and the past. Instead, you have an almost simultaneous awareness of your individual self and the connection between that and everything else. This is beyond situational awareness! Richard Rohr
Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.
Conscious and unconscious are really what I am talking about when I talk about awareness. According to Alfred Adler, “The unconscious is nothing other than that which we have been unable to formulate into clear concepts
If we are sleeping through our lives, what is it that we must wake up to in order to fully engage in our way of being…in our deeper way of knowing.
In order to do this, we must go beyond just knowing and understanding that something is happening or existing. We need to go beyond situational awareness which can be called the first order of knowing…we notice and maybe do a bit of reflection and conclude that we understand what is going on around us.
When we go deeper into what more is happening besides what meets the eye or any other sense for that matter, we may begin to notice more than our conscious mind can register. Our perception actually gives what is happening a twist, a tint, a bit of an interpretation that others do not have. I am often not even aware of the twist or bias of my own perception. It falls in the realm of I don’t know what I don’t know and resides in my unconscious.
Let’s explore what deeper awareness may look like. In education and psychology, we talk about cognition and metacognition. Cognition is comprised of our mental processes, our conscious mental activities – thinking understanding learning, and remembering. Metacognition is the awareness of one’s own learning or thinking processes.
What if we could enter into the realm of meta-awareness and observe how we pay attention and react to the world around us? What if by entering into the deeper level or second-order awareness, we become aware that our unique perspective on the world is our own creation and we can change that perception at any time. We can do this because we created it in the first place. Okay, I am already talking about beliefs and perception and am jumping to the next episode!!!
When I shift from situational awareness and enter into the field of meta-awareness, as DeMello states I wake up and I begin to notice what is going on at a deeper level, and then I am able to shift my perspective. I now have more choices. I begin to notice patterns. As de Mello states, “that is what wisdom means: to be changed without the slightest effort of your part, to be transformed believe it or not, merely by waking to reality that is not words, that lies beyond the reach of words.”
How do we shift to meta-awareness? There are many roads to meta-awareness – yoga, meditation, guided retreats, therapy, energy work, coaching, The awareness exercise, to name a few. I have used all of these and perhaps the simplest way to develop your meta-awareness is by using the Awareness Exercise. I was first introduced to a form of the Awareness exercise on a 7-day silent retreat 40 years ago. I have used it myself and with retreatants as well as taught it at workshops over the decades. It will take you into meta-awareness when used consistently.
So to reiterate…Meta-awareness involves waking up to what’s going on with us – with our thoughts, our feelings, our body sensations, and impulses – in each moment. We are simultaneously ‘in’ our experience (feeling and sensing what’s going on) and at the same time, we’re able to notice some of the ways it’s unfolding for us.
When we have that awareness, then we can choose what we do next. When we don’t have it, we’re stuck in the rut of our familiar, habitual reactions.
Meta awareness: How do we pay attention?
Whatever tools of awareness that we use, what is important is that we are paying attention with all of our senses, our head, heart and gut, our imagination and memory, and our intuition.
Our senses will give us a cursory inventory of what is happening around us. What we see, hear, taste touch, and smell. Our brain is directly involved with interpreting what our senses sense.
Our energy centers, our heart, our head, and our gut, will take us to deeper levels.
Our heart will reveal our emotional response, both positive and negative, to what is/has happened. One of the big obstacles is that we often don’t pay attention to our negative emotions and sometimes overemphasize our positive emotions. When we are in meta-awareness we can observe in a somewhat detached way and learn from our emotions rather than being ruled by them.
Of course, our head/brain is directly connected to our five senses, however, I am talking here about our mind and the spin we put on what we experience. Our mind is always looking for evidence that supports our perspectives. Our mind can also get in the way! Especially when we have a two-way conversation and argue with ourselves. Michael Singer’s book The Untethered Soul will help with that!
And our gut/body will give us information about whatever is happening to us. Our body is a repository of our memories and emotions. Think for a moment of a great vacation and you can experience the emotions and even have a body reaction. If I think about being bit by a dog when I was 8 years old or touch the scar on my leg, I can experience the scene as if it was yesterday. So our bodies hold trauma as well and if your body is holding trauma be sure to get professional help to release the trauma.
With each energy center, we need to be aware of how we are reacting/interacting with the experience. Often, we are not…and so it is a moment when we are asleep!
Usually, we have a dominant energy center but as we become more aware, we can develop the other two centers to be more active and responsive to the world around us.
Our intuition often downplayed in our culture is another way of knowing and serves our awareness. Our intuition is the soft, still, voice that reveals our deepest wisdom.
Our imagination and memory also impact our awareness. Our memories are about our past and our imagination is more about our future…even when we recall a memory and then we imagine it happening again we take it into the future.
Using all of these ways of paying attention, we become more aware of our inner and outer patterns of being and doing. As we become more aware of these patterns, we then have more choices about how we engage in the world.
When I practice the awareness exercise, I begin to notice aspects of my day that I missed or didn’t pay attention to and I find that there is a richness to my day that I was not aware of. With regular practice, I being to notice those moments as they happen rather than later in the day.
For example:
You are waiting for the subway and it is a hot muggy day. You begin to be irritated and your thoughts are in complaint mode. You become more tense and uncomfortable. Cranky and irritable.
Another way is to be aware that you are hot and sweaty. Your jaw is clenched, so you relax it, you notice others around you, you scan your body to get a reading on how you are experiencing the situation. You notice your irritation and your crankiness. Simply by noticing, you are able to make a choice to stay irritated or to relax and let life unfold…there is not much you can do about the heat and you cant make the train come any faster! Your choice…but now you are aware…
Meta awareness brings the unconscious to our consciousness.
In episode 1 I talked about transitions, let me get back to transition for a moment. I have been reflecting on transitions since the last episode and I want to take the conversation a little further. I was speaking about the big transitions that we go through in our lives…graduations, weddings, births and deaths, work, business, moving our home, etc. Eckart Tolle in his book the Power of Now, states
As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out the present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love - even the most simple action.
Eckart Tolle
Think about what the present is…it is a moment in time, a pause between the past and the future that is gone in an instant. If I am not aware, meta aware, I miss the moment. I am either thinking about what just happened or planning for what will happen next. Don’t get me wrong, it is important to plan, but often our minds spend more time in the future than in the Now. For some of us, our minds spend more time analyzing the past, or being sentimental about the past and how we would love it if the present were the same…and we just missed the present!!!
Meta awareness brings us fully into the present and we become more available to choose how to live and respond in this moment.
So I invite you to practice meta-awareness…review your day, notice your reactions, notice your lack of reaction, notice what you didn’t notice before, and soon you will begin to notice patterns and uncover beliefs about your life, and your world. Let your unconscious knowing rise to consciousness and begin to understand what you don’t know you don’t know!
Next time we will explore those beliefs and patterns that we begin to discover and uncover when we are practicing meta-awareness. I am sure you have already noticed that a journey to inner wisdom is not a linear journey. Each of the topics that I explore will impact the others and they are all intertwined in an intimate and sometimes mysterious way. But then isn’t life just like that…it certainly is not linear!
See you next time…on a journey to inner wisdom.
"Many people in this world are still so identified with every thought that arises in their head. There is not the slightest space of awareness there."
Eckart Tolle