Photo: Vasyl Hnyp
Creating Awareness Can SUCK!
I do it almost every day, help people create awareness around their thoughts. I preach it. Let’s gain awareness because it truly is the changing agent. When we see what goes on in our minds/behaviors, we can start to slow everything down. We become less reactive and in turn, suffer a lot less because we get a grip on our emotions…in the long term.
But when you actually start seeing what is happening in your mind (in the short term) without any distractions, it freaking blows! You see all the judgements, all the faults, all the things. You can start to become even more emotional and more frustrated with your own cognitive patterns as well as the things that are happening around you. This can kind of suck..at first. It can feel overwhelming and all the feels as you walk around just noticing more of you and others.
So why? Ignorance can be bliss. I’d argue that conscious awareness starts the level up process. When we become more cognizant of our thoughts and what is taking place around us, we then have the opportunity, the power, to choose how we want to respond to things. We begin to understand that much of our emotional discomfort is related to thoughts rooted in our upbringing or judgements FROM others or our societal norms. Most of us (myself included) operate in a way that doesn’t entirely serve us. When we start to understand these thought patterns and how they begin to make us feel some type of way, we can then make a decision to continue reacting in the same way OR we can change our thought process for the positive. The start to understanding your mind and patterns of thought can suck, but the end goal can create a lot more positives, if you make the conscious choice.
There’s an old adage that says if you place a teaspoon of salt in a glass of water, it entirely changes what you’re about to drink. If you place a teaspoon of salt in a pond, there’s no noticeable difference. Creating awareness can help transition us from only seeing the brief moment causing us emotional discomfort (salt in the glass) to seeing that one specific incident as only a small portion of what is fully happening around us (salt in the pond).
Be well my friends and enjoy your day!