How to raise your awareness?

How to raise your awareness? I came across a very interesting idea recently: if you understand less, you feel more and your subconscious mind is therefore more involved. When you consciously concentrate on listening to your feelings, you actually bring more awareness into them and you become conscious of them. You therefore slowly expand your consciousness over your subconsciousness.

But listening to your feelings, when you have a very rational mind like mine, and come from a very rational family where emotions aren’t shared, can be a serious challenge. A big change came from one of my readings: it said to pay attention to our vocabulary. I realized that I was always saying: “I think this…” or “I think that…” and I tried changing it for: “I feel this…” and “I feel that…” This trick was really helpful as it forced my subconscious to say what it felt instead of what it thought! Over the years, I slowly realized that I had “forbidden” emotions such as sadness and sorrow. I would never say that I was sad, even when I was. After I started to be more genuine with sadness, I realized that there was also repressed anger under the sadness. Today I’m a lot more confident in expressing anger as well. You can read my article on letting anger out if you’d like.

Once you start letting your emotions flow freely, it will become easier to detach from them too. That’s when the real benefits begin. Meditation has helped me a lot to reduce the mental activity, to pay closer attention to my feelings and to finally return to a normal flow of emotions. Finally, as you detach from your emotions, you increase your awareness over what happens to you and you detach yourself even more. I’m not sure if the increase in awareness or the detachment from emotions comes first but they are surely parallel events that will greatly increase the quality of your life!

Enjoy!
Martin