It All Begins With Awareness
Increasing your level of awareness or climbing the scale of consciousness as Dr. David Hawkins refers to it, I believe is the single great thing any person can do to improve their life in all areas health, wealth, happiness, love, and fulfillment. So what does increasing our level of consciousness mean and how exactly will doing so improve our lives? That is exactly what I want to explore with you in this blog.
Awareness is your level of understanding of yourself, your surroundings and how all of it is connected. Just being aware, that you want to be more aware, is a great place to start. To start understanding awareness you can begin by paying closer attention to the thoughts that run through your head on a daily basis. So many of us just float through, life bouncing from one thought to the next, never taking a second to first observe and be aware of the thought that is coming to us, but second to analyze and get to the root issue of why that thought came to mind. Every thought that comes to our minds usually has a root cause behind it and digging deep and discovering that root can have a profound impact on your life.
This is best understood in an example. So walk through this exercise with me. You’re driving down the road and some guy pulls out in front of you and cuts you off. How does that make you feel and what thoughts, words and actions follow this event? My guess is it is something like this.
“You mother f’er why where the hell did you learn to drive.” Horn honk, middle finger and possibly in some cases physical violence. There is absolutely nothing wrong with experiencing anger, it is a normal human emotion, it is how we deal with the emotion and the thoughts after the incident that are important. First we have to become aware that we are experiencing the emotion of anger and second become aware of all the thoughts that are going through our minds in relation to this emotion. Now that we have taken the most important step of being aware, we can begin to break down this anger and get to the root causes of why we experienced it. After calming down play out this scenario in your mind
Q: Why did that guy pulling out in front of me make me so angry?
A: he’s a stupid idiot
Q: Why is him being a stupid idiot get me so angry?
A: He doesn’t care about anyone else, he could have killed me. I’m always cautious and I’m always thinking about other people
Q: was there ever a time in your life when you pulled out in front of someone accidentally?
A: Yes but it was an accident, I didn’t see the person
Q: How do you know that guy just didn’t see you?
Immediately with a very quick awareness and analysis of these emotions and the thoughts that followed we begin to let go of the anger. Putting yourself in other people’s shoes or thinking back to a time where you weren’t considering how your actions affected other people, will help you with your level of acceptance. We can go even further with this to get deeper down the rabbit hole and get to the root causes of this anger.
Q: So you realize it could’ve been a mistake but what if it wasn’t, what if this guy purposely cut you off?
A: he was trying to kill me and doesn’t care about anyone else’s safety
Two parts here. If he doesn’t care about other people’s safety how does that make you feel? If you answer angry, then dig deep and get to why that sparks emotion within you. For me the answer was someone that is only looking out for themselves might have an advantage over me, as I can care for many people and it could hold me back. It could also be something in your childhood with regards to lack of love from a parent that sparked some inner rage. Or it could be that you feel superiorly intelligent to that person and because of that they are below you. Whatever it is there is a root to the emotion and becoming aware of it and analyzing it in this fashion will being the process of truly letting it go forever!
There is more analysis that could be done here with regards to the fear of death but I will save that for another blog.
Now here is the crazy thing, we did this analysis on just this one thought and each of us has hundreds or even thousands of thoughts every single day. Without being aware of these thoughts we might allow one guy pulling out in front of us on our morning drive to work ruin our entire day, maybe even our entire week. Without the awareness, something else might happen when we get to work and not properly dealing with the anger from the guy on highway could lead to more anger and more stress. 90% of doctors agree that the root of all illness is stress related. You can almost feel the tension build as I talk about this scenario and how before reading this blog you might have been going through life without ever really paying attention to how one small thing could have a profound effect on you. But now you are aware and it all begins with awareness. I just watched a great interview with Jay Z and in that interview which I linked below he says “you have to reveal if you want to heal.” Pretty profound stuff from Jay Z.
I will leave you with this one simple thought, and I will do a full blog on this thought in the near future but for now here it is:
“It is NEVER about what is going on out there, it is always about what is going in here”
Increasing your level of awareness or climbing the scale of consciousness as Dr. David Hawkins refers to it, I believe is the single great thing any person can do to improve their life in all areas health, wealth, happiness, love, and fulfillment. So what does increasing our level of consciousness mean and how exactly will doing so improve our lives? That is exactly what I want to explore with you in this blog.
Awareness is your level of understanding of yourself, your surroundings and how all of it is connected. Just being aware, that you want to be more aware, is a great place to start. To start understanding awareness you can begin by paying closer attention to the thoughts that run through your head on a daily basis. So many of us just float through, life bouncing from one thought to the next, never taking a second to first observe and be aware of the thought that is coming to us, but second to analyze and get to the root issue of why that thought came to mind. Every thought that comes to our minds usually has a root cause behind it and digging deep and discovering that root can have a profound impact on your life.
This is best understood in an example. So walk through this exercise with me. You’re driving down the road and some guy pulls out in front of you and cuts you off. How does that make you feel and what thoughts, words and actions follow this event? My guess is it is something like this.
“You mother f’er why where the hell did you learn to drive.” Horn honk, middle finger and possibly in some cases physical violence. There is absolutely nothing wrong with experiencing anger, it is a normal human emotion, it is how we deal with the emotion and the thoughts after the incident that are important. First we have to become aware that we are experiencing the emotion of anger and second become aware of all the thoughts that are going through our minds in relation to this emotion. Now that we have taken the most important step of being aware, we can begin to break down this anger and get to the root causes of why we experienced it. After calming down play out this scenario in your mind
Q: Why did that guy pulling out in front of me make me so angry?
A: he’s a stupid idiot
Q: Why is him being a stupid idiot get me so angry?
A: He doesn’t care about anyone else, he could have killed me. I’m always cautious and I’m always thinking about other people
Q: was there ever a time in your life when you pulled out in front of someone accidentally?
A: Yes but it was an accident, I didn’t see the person
Q: How do you know that guy just didn’t see you?
Immediately with a very quick awareness and analysis of these emotions and the thoughts that followed we begin to let go of the anger. Putting yourself in other people’s shoes or thinking back to a time where you weren’t considering how your actions affected other people, will help you with your level of acceptance. We can go even further with this to get deeper down the rabbit hole and get to the root causes of this anger.
Q: So you realize it could’ve been a mistake but what if it wasn’t, what if this guy purposely cut you off?
A: he was trying to kill me and doesn’t care about anyone else’s safety
Two parts here. If he doesn’t care about other people’s safety how does that make you feel? If you answer angry, then dig deep and get to why that sparks emotion within you. For me the answer was someone that is only looking out for themselves might have an advantage over me, as I can care for many people and it could hold me back. It could also be something in your childhood with regards to lack of love from a parent that sparked some inner rage. Or it could be that you feel superiorly intelligent to that person and because of that they are below you. Whatever it is there is a root to the emotion and becoming aware of it and analyzing it in this fashion will being the process of truly letting it go forever!
There is more analysis that could be done here with regards to the fear of death but I will save that for another blog.
Now here is the crazy thing, we did this analysis on just this one thought and each of us has hundreds or even thousands of thoughts every single day. Without being aware of these thoughts we might allow one guy pulling out in front of us on our morning drive to work ruin our entire day, maybe even our entire week. Without the awareness, something else might happen when we get to work and not properly dealing with the anger from the guy on highway could lead to more anger and more stress. 90% of doctors agree that the root of all illness is stress related. You can almost feel the tension build as I talk about this scenario and how before reading this blog you might have been going through life without ever really paying attention to how one small thing could have a profound effect on you. But now you are aware and it all begins with awareness. I just watched a great interview with Jay Z and in that interview which I linked below he says “you have to reveal if you want to heal.” Pretty profound stuff from Jay Z.
I will leave you with this one simple thought, and I will do a full blog on this thought in the near future but for now here it is:
“It is NEVER about what is going on out there, it is always about what is going in here”