Self-Awareness Part I: Do You Seek Liberation from Suffering?
Understanding Self
Before you begin this process, you must come to understand the 3 components that create a self-awareness practice that is sustaining and successful. When you implement a life-long practice that strengthens your relationship to self you naturally strengthen intuition and become a deliberate creator in your life. This role is important if you want to lead a life full of inner-peace and in alignment with your full potential. To create a sustaining and successful journey, self-integrity must be established to act as the roots that facilitate healthy growth and long-lasting results. The 3 components that will help establish self-integrity are:
1. Creating Boundaries
2. Monitoring Thoughts
3. Self-Love
The practice of all 3 will create a space for self-integrity, thus, facilitating a sustaining and successful journey through a practice of self-awareness. Here’s a quick breakdown on how you can practice all 3 components.
1. Creating boundaries within yourself and with others are equal aspects that need to be practiced. Setting up boundaries as small as saying no to an engagement regardless if your schedule is free and open is an opportunity to practice or as big as turning down a job opportunity because the establishment is not one you consider ethic or aligned to your inner world is worth the effort. When it comes to making or turning down a commitment, I find it very helpful to practice saying, “Let me check my schedule and get back to you”, or “I need the day to think about this”. Giving yourself the gift of time helps you determine what will be a beneficial or detrimental exchange with endeavors moving forward.
2. When you monitor your thoughts, your job at large is to separate Ego from Love. Sifting through our thoughts can sometimes feel confusing when we focus to much on a word or a definition. I find it much clearer to ask, “Is this message encouraging and uplifting? Is this message degrading?” It comes much more naturally separating our thoughts using this format. For more complicated thoughts, for example, when we need to reflect or critically think, you can separate the ego out when a judgment polarizes and not rebalances. It is okay to polarize any matter, and in fact is extremely helpful, because with every polarizing thought lies key information about your thought pattern. This pattern could signify an unbalanced perspective, or an area that needs a change in action. A change in perspective or an action plan are your options. You can use this style of judgment to your benefit by using your thoughts to create a serving perspective, or a serving plan of action. These thoughts come from Love and evolve from Ego. A quick rule of thumb here about Ego and Love, Ego doesn’t solve, Love solves by finding solutions with every Egotistic thought.
3. Self-Love is by far the most important component and in my personal experience is what helps build healthy boundaries and thought patterns. This is probably the most difficult practice we need to adopt into our every day lives because of the many facets and layers that make up this practice. Self-love nurtures every aspect of our being, including a practice that creates healthy boundaries and finds solutions to unhealthy thought patterns. Self-Love encompasses all our senses that embraces a sacred approach to how we receive and give. Speak, Hear, Taste, Touch, Sight, and Intuition all need to be in equal consideration to practice self-love to its highest vibration. Looking into each one of these senses and how we relate to them is an insight into the kind of self-love we practice. Do we truly speak with integrity through our words, thoughts, and intentions? Do we listen to our body, our desires, or to our soul? Are we in tuned to our 5 taste receptors or are we prisoners to our addictions? Do we feel throughout our body systems and know when something needs nurturing? Do we see with intention and allow for serving perception or do we drown ourselves in false impressions? Our senses are not only used for survival, they are energy channels that harbor multi-dimensional possessions that bind together to create an intuitive powerhouse helping balance body, mind, and spirit. When we practice self-love to this degree, we can put forth the same care into our outer world and the people in it. Create a practice that begins within first, then consider how you will approach your life and those around you after you begin a self-nurturing transformation and see how the results benefit you.
Are You A Victim or A Creator?
When we think about our experiences we usually believe one of two things. I am a victim, or I am a creator. The Universe only understands energy and reads the vibration of victimhood as a lack of responsibility. Anytime you have the mentality of the victim the Universe understands it as a disconnection to creation. Being in the mind-set of a victim neglects creative credibility, because this mind-set discredits choices we have that we did not take, regardless of having this awareness, we have the will to do what we chose. We create every experience we are in, every exchange we go through, every word we speak, and every thought we affirm to our-self. Stating or believing that you are the victim doesn’t have to be worded in sentences or spoken out-loud, it doesn’t even have to be realized. It is a state of vibration, an energy field full of frequencies that are direct messages to the Universe. Your thoughts, actions, lack of awareness, and repeated offenses are frequencies spoken in the language the Universe speaks. It translates these frequencies to ‘refusing responsibility’ for your experiences and reflects the absence of self-awareness. It’s letting the Universe know, that you were never an energy channel that contributed to your experiences, it obliviously blames surrounding energies for karmic retribution, and it becomes an energetic agreement that automatically defaults your vibration through experiences that validate this cycle of victimhood. To break out of this never-ending cycle of energetic roulette, you need to apply yourself mindfully and live with intention throughout your experiences and free will. It is important to end the victim role and begin your quest towards self-awareness if what you seek is liberation from suffering and strengthening intuition.
End Suffering
Speaking to the Universe sounds complicating, but in these next few paragraphs, I break it down in practical terms. Keep in mind that there are energies reflecting everything we do and say, and that the Universe does translate these as messages permitting IT to send you experiences that mirror those energies. Educating yourself about understanding these energies doesn’t have to be something you need to learn or become an expert at, in fact, speaking to the Universe in ways that will create serving and desired experiences has more to do with self-awareness than it does about taking an ‘energy’ crash course. It is important to recognize its existence, but it is not the tie breaker. I do encourage you to acknowledge a couple of things that happen to us when we create our experiences, because how we chose to create has everything to do with how we master these energetic conversations. Learning to have self-integrity is really all you need to know how to do, creating with mindfulness and intention is how you will achieve conversations with the Universe and, most importantly, self-integrity.
The frequencies we vibrate in, come in many forms, some are serving, and some…not so much. No matter what vibration you are in, your emotional guidance system is your means of discerning which of these frequencies are channeling the state of victimhood, or the state of creation. Our emotional guidance system, (intuition, emotions), is set up as a tool for helping us discern our Truth from Fears and these are directly linked with understanding the kinds of conversations you are having with the Universe. If you want to know why you are experiencing undesired outcomes in any area of your life, just tune in to your emotions, that will be your guide as to what you are saying to the Universe. If you are in an unhappy state of emotion, the Universe will send you experiences that will further validate that unhappy state. By feeling unhappy, you are asking the Universe for experiences that reflect unhappiness. Unhappy is an energy, and that energy is a permission. Breaking this cycle has everything to do with strengthening self-awareness and implementing a life long practice.
Practicing Self-Awareness
Step 1.
What permission(s) are you asking for in your life? Tune into your intuition and feel your experience through your emotions and not with your thoughts. What emotions are you experiencing that are undesired feelings? Write down a list.
This is the 1st Step to understanding if the choices you are making are in alignment with your Inner Truth. Asking permission in any state of emotion is the primary language the Universe speaks. It is important to recognize that these permissions do not dictate your inner peace, your inner peace is only a reflection of those permissions. You have the power to change once you become aware of those permissions through practice and strategy. So, what do you do when you become aware of these undesired emotions, or permissions, that are keeping you from inner peace? Once you recognize those undesired emotions, you must discover and observe what experiences or perspectives reflect those emotions.
Step 2.
What experiences or perspectives are reflecting the emotions you wrote down? Take time to think about this, this can be tricky at first to recognize. Write down possibilities and be open to things you dismiss or that make you uncomfortable, sometimes these are the things that need to be reflected on.
This is the 2nd Step to understanding were our emotions stem from. The transformation happens when you can bridge those emotions with those experiences or perspectives. Pin pointing these experiences and perspectives are crucial to creating change within. Creating change must happen within the experience or perspective, not the emotion. I have found that most of us concentrate too much on our emotions as the cause. That is like prescribing Xanax to a patient because they feel an undesired emotion. We must take a deeper look at the root cause of these emotions, because the emotions are just a symptom reflecting the experience or perspective. Our inner peace, or lack thereof, is reflected by the role we put into our life and thoughts through the choices we make or think, which is our free will. Believing we are the victim and not the creator causes imbalances on top of pre-existing ones. This cycle is one that harms our deeper sense of self that leads to a weakened intuition. It is our free will and how we use it, that truly is the root of our suffering or our peace, and why we are ultimately the creator and not a victim. This goes back to taking responsibility for our experiences instead of blaming surrounding forces. As important as it is to work through our emotions, the long-lasting results lay in the form of our free will. Your free will to express yourself through experiences and perspectives determine your state of suffering or inner peace, which reflects a strong or weak sense of self and intuition.
Discernment & Self-Awareness-Do I Change My Experience or My Perspective?
As you practice the art of self-awareness, you will often discover that sometimes it is not the experience that is causing undesired or desired emotions, but that it can be as simple as changing perspective. Aiming to discern between the two is part of practicing self-awareness over a consistent amount of time. Mastering discernment comes with experience and can take time to learn, be patient with this process and allow yourself to make mistakes.
Understanding how you can learn discernment is something that you will need to work at with trial and error, mistakes, and faith as you practice self-awareness. I like to break it down in a few ways: Whatever emotions you are feeling, the Universe will respond to as a permission to send you experiences that reflect those emotions. In simple terms, what you energetically ask for, you energetically get. Emotions are energy and they come to us in the forms of feelings and are the conversations we are having with the Universe. The genius behind this is those undesired emotions and Universal permissions are messages coming from your emotional guidance system telling you that your experiences or perspectives need to change. Living the same experience with the same thoughts will only facilitate the same feelings and permissions and over a long period of time will worsen. The upside to this is that this is how you use emotion to your benefit. Emotions are information to understanding your intuitive guidance system and using that information to help you change your experience or your perspective. Once you take this leap of change, the desired emotions will follow and reflect the new shift you make. If you are uncertain with the leap of change you’ve made, whether it’s the experience or your perspective, and you need clarity, listen to those new-found emotions, do you feel the same, worse, or better? If the emotion is still off, then you know the change you made is out of alignment. If you find that your emotion has transformed into a desired feeling, then you have chosen a path that is serving and in alignment. This strengthens intuition making discernment clearer and self-awareness stronger.
Mindfulness
To sum it up, before you change anything, reflect on what needs to change first. Consider that you may not need to change the experience at all, consider changing your perspective instead. I find that changing perspective is less dramatic and can be a baby step into finding clarity in it all. Often, we make the mistake in blaming our experience for something we don’t desire, and we tend to forget that the real change lies in our thoughts. Changing our experience first is overwhelming and can have detrimental effects on us and the energy around us. In most cases, I have found that changing perspective first is all the change that is needed and can be a more pleasant transition than changing our experience.
There is a huge benefit that comes with changing perspective over changing your experience. A domino effect of change trickles down into the experience the moment we change our thoughts, take notice that when you do this, the experience blossoms into alignment on its own and becomes an experience that reflects that new perspective. Choose your perspective wisely. You can almost sit back and relax when you focus on thought and practice your new perspective. Changing our thought pattern creates a couple of things that will shape our experience automatically. Choosing a serving perspective will create a serving experience. When we change our thought pattern, we often see something new in our experience that we otherwise missed because of limited thinking. Another thing that happens is that when we change our thought pattern we learn something that otherwise couldn’t have been learned in our narrow views. Changing perspective leads to learning and expanding out of our limitations and creates space to transform the experience with clarity or transform the energy from a lower frequency to a higher frequency. Most times, that is all that needs to happen. Perspective is your experience and using the power of your mind has a magical consequence. Think mindfully.
Precaution
I have understood that there are times when changing our experience immediately has more benefits than changing our thoughts and can be a life saver. There are dangerous experiences that will harm us if we continue to live in certain circumstances that need intervention. These are demands we cannot ignore. If for any reason you feel your life or someone else is in danger and needs immediate change, consider changing the experience and taking matters under your own hands…or reach out for help if you need a friend, loved one, or professional to step in. Sometimes, changing perspective is not fast enough to see the trickle-down results happen nor the answer to something more serious. It’s okay to override intuition in these cases, especially when intuition has been foggy and hasn’t been practiced for quite some time. Practice is not something that comes easily or has immediate results. In these cases, it’s important to consider changing your experience to place you or someone in a much safer place. Then, and only then, can you practice self-awareness safely.
Words of Encouragement
Practicing self-awareness takes time and blossoms from mistakes. Be gentle with yourself through this process. Remember to choose your thoughts mindfully and live your life with intention. Keep in mind that Ego can be used to your benefit, discerning between these thoughts and thoughts of love can be sifted through by asking yourself if that thought is solving a problem or causing harm to it. Love solves, Ego harms. The process takes time to master, but with enough practice it becomes a simple and natural process and part of reprogramming un-serving patterns. When we do shadow work, or heal traumas, blocks, karmas, we often give too much power to the emotions associated with it. The long-lasting results we seek with undesired emotions ultimately have to do with changing our experience or perspective. Using our emotions as a tool to detect what experience or perspective is causing that emotion and focusing on changing the experience or perspective is how we use intuition. This is how we reprogram our feelings without addressing our feelings, because our emotions are part of a guidance system, the system itself does not need to change, but the way we experience life through the choices and thoughts we make. The emotions are what reveal if those choices and thoughts are serving our well-being.
Namaste.