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

Intuition versus ego

This morning, I finally let the anger out! After my morning run (which is great to let go of anything bothering my mind!) I started yelling and cursing at myself for not being financially responsible in the last year. All along, I thought I was following my intuition but I recently discovered that I was in fact following my ego. I spent all my money on nice hotels and restaurants and I had a GREAT time!! But now I have to watch every penny I spend to make sure I have enough until the next paycheck. So that brought up my eternal questioning about intuition versus ego.

I’m not totally disappointed in following my ego though. I see it as the “cost of learning”. Because, if I had never spent all that money, and had always “protected” myself from financial trouble, I would have never explored myself fully and known that the ego was hiding in my finances too!! So it all depends on your perception of things. I could see what I did last year as totally irresponsible and disastrous for my future and my credit score. But I choose to see it as a learning experience that allows me to know myself better. And there is just no price for that! Experiencing life SHOULD mean getting to know yourself better. KNOW THYSELF as it says on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi!

So what should I do in the future to prevent this? Or, should I even prevent this from happening again? How can I listen to my intuition better and detect when it is my ego talking? I’m not even sure if the question is relevant at all. Because, in the end, if you see everything as a learning experience, and that you enjoy your experiences all the way, then the question becomes obsolete! What matters is following the voice inside, be it your intuition versus ego, in the end, things will be alright IF YOU PERCEIVE THEM AS SUCH!! I love this quote from Wayne Dyer…

Let me know your thoughts on that!

Martin