Building and Cultivating Awareness

Introduction

Building and cultivating awareness is a fundamental step in not only achieving growth and success, but also for healing. It involves recognizing current circumstances, identifying behaviors and habits, understanding challenges, and being mindful of opportunities to make skillful choices for improvement.

Building Awareness

The process begins by consciously acknowledging the present state or where you are now. This includes increasing the ability to notice your current experience, how you respond to different stimuli, and choosing responses that serve your highest good and the highest good of others. When we do this, we can start to understand where we get in our own way, or sabotage our best efforts to live the life we want to live.

Cultivating Awareness

Cultivating awareness goes beyond initial recognition. It requires ongoing reflection, practice, and adaptation. Through continuous observation and learning, we can deepen our understanding, make informed decisions, and foster a healthy, loving, and compassionate mindset.

Pay Attention

PAY ATTENTION

To pay attention is to be fully present to your experience as you are living it. There are many ways to increase your presence. It takes practice to become more aware. Studies show that we humans are generally present only about 50% of the time, and that is being generous.

Why is being present important to your over all well-being? Because when we are operating on auto-pilot we often don’t question the things we do. We do things because that’s the way our parents did things, or that’s how we learned to do it. A great example is noticing how you handle stressful situations.

Some of our destructive habits and stress reactions are often similar, if not identical, to how our parents managed emotional pain. In other cases, we consciously, or unconsciously decided we would not be anything like our parents, but adopted or created other coping strategies that helped us feel safe.

PRACTICE

Try this today:

Pause three times during the day.

What am I noticing right now?
What is happening in my body?
What story is my mind adding?

Reflect:

Take one slow breath and quietly ask yourself:

What is my automatic reaction to stress?

Watch the ABC’s of Mindfulness

Key Takeaways:

When you are the noticer, you create space between the event, who you are, and how you respond.
Awareness gives you choices over how you respond.
When you are able to step back and observe, you understand that what’s happening is not who you are.
With awareness you create freedom. You are not bound to anything you see, hear, taste, touch, feel or smell. You are not tied to your thoughts, beliefs, or history.
When you pay attention, your perception changes.