AWARENESS | The Secret to Stop Being Scared?
What if the secret to Self-awareness is the term I use for being aware of the aspect of your self that is aware. What do I mean by this statement? Inside you, right now, there is an awareness that is aware of this moment happening, including for instance, the words you are currently reading. Yes, your mind is reading, but your awareness is aware of the words on the page. See the difference?
Some call this awareness the ‘observer’, the ‘witness’, the ‘stillness’ or the ‘being’. It really doesn’t matter what we label it. What matters most is that we are aware of its presence within us and make it a priority to experientially engage life with self-awareness from now on.
Awareness is aware of all of your inner thoughts, emotions and physical sensations, along with your external events and experiences. Awareness is still, silent, spacious, peace-filled presence; it is not otherworldly, but as real as you can get. It is the most permanent and unchanging aspect of you, so I would go as far as to say it is who you really are.
Silently observing the happening of every inner and outer experience that you’ve ever encountered. There has never been a moment in your life when this awareness has not been present within you, even if you haven’t always been aware of its presence. Awareness is aware of the full spectrum of life and by being self-aware you can find it is possible to coexist calmly with anything that comes your way.
In the same way that the sky doesn’t care what flies through it, your awareness is not concerned with what it is aware of. Irrespective of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ life appears to be on the surface, your underlying awareness remains still, calm and well – always.
One of the core reasons why we tend to recoil from experiencing the full spectrum of life is that we’ve tried to do so without self- awareness. We’ve been taught to think about life, rather than directly experience it from the safe haven of our permanently present and peaceful awareness.
Thinking about life gets us caught up in a world of thoughts and, if they happen to be negative, then that is how we feel. However, by being self-aware – aware of the aspect of your self that is aware – you can experience the unconditional calm of your awareness, instead of only the ups and downs of your conditioned mind.
Without self-awareness, our thoughts about what’s happening determine our experience of, and relationship with life. But here lies the problem with relying solely on this non-aware thought- based perspective on life: The mind makes sense of reality by judging if it is good or bad, right or wrong, better or worse, or positive or negative.
If based upon our preconditioned mind-made judgements, life appears to be bad, wrong, worse or negative, then the habitual tendency is to resist the perceived problem and experience the negative side effects of our resistance to ‘what is’, including anger, anxiety, sadness, fear, guilt, grief, shame, frustration, loneliness... the list goes on. But as already mentioned, your awareness is an ever-present ongoing state of still, silent, spacious calm within which you can comfortably coexist with all of life.
