Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is one of the most important aspects of personal emancipation and empowerment while being one of the most underappreciated. Some of the advantages of self-awareness are improved emotional regulation, such as having a calm and settled body, better decision-making for all your life decisions, and greatly improved relationships. You see, once you know who you are and what moves you, you can then make appropriate decisions and choose who you want to be with from your authentic self and not from your conditioning.
Getting to know yourself and growing your self-awareness is not a complicated process but a high, holy, and sacred process. I label it high, holy, and sacred because our journey here is about emancipating your small human self with a small ‘s’ to your higher SELF, with all caps, that is the Self of you that connects with the self of all humans.
When I was a young pup, I thought that being aware meant that I had to be aware of everything that was going on everywhere around me all the time. Could you imagine if that were true—that would be totally crazy. Clearly, I had the wrong idea. I recently turned to my Facebook family and asked people to describe what they thought self-awareness was. The answers were varied and wonderful to read. The description I offered above was an aggregate of those answers.
As a teacher of Forgiveness and Shadow work, I am honored to witness students grow their self-awareness through these healing practices. My students, as they begin to learn about their internal and emotional motivations, which are born of many things, including their child-rearing and trauma, quickly find their awareness to be curative. Awareness combined with wise choices redirects one to a more authentic and glorious life.
Growing self-awareness can conjure up a new world of possibilities of a life of freedom. When you know what causes you to move toward or away from someone instead of being on automatic, you will learn about your internal conditioning, which is a necessary feature in order to redirect your attention.
I see much of the world moving in patterns that have been predetermined. The collective is easily manipulated due to the lack of self-awareness. The political climate we are experiencing right now is a clear example of what happens when someone does not have the self-awareness to stop and see the bigger picture or to recognize how one is complicit with the conditioning. We grow our self-awareness to free ourselves from the game board of life. As our self-awareness grows, our choices multiply. Freedom and choice become a way of being.
Self-awareness plus choice = freedom; acting from this place is personal power.
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Photo credit: Magoi
