In this article, I will share tips on how to develop awareness. The development of awareness - it sounds somehow painfully mysterious and mysterious. At the same time there is little mystery and mystery here, this is quite a concrete concept (I already wrote on this topic more generally, in the article Why live with the mind ?, in this article I will try to touch on the specifics regarding awareness, on the basis of the example considered, I will also answer the question of how to develop awareness.
What does this mean awareness? Let's try to figure this out right away. Awareness is the ability to rational, mediated by consciousness, detached from emotions to an adequate analysis of external reality and internal subjective state, the formation of behavioral models based on conclusions from this analysis, the ability to track emotions and unconscious impulses of the psyche and the ability to resist them. In other words, awareness precedes any rational evaluation and activity.
Example of awareness
The definition itself was invented, so do not scold. Of course, I will not leave it in this form and will try to explain with a specific example. Before we talk about how you can develop awareness again to talk about the nature of this quality, to come to full clarity. The main thing to understand is that awareness in many situations may be preceded by some kind of physical action. Let's give an example. You have an important meeting, a serious exam or a responsible interview when applying for a job.
In general, this is a situation in which you experience nervousness. Here is a case of a mental reaction that is NOT characterized by awareness: you came to a conditional meeting, nervous and emotional, you understand that you can’t do anything, because you think you know yourself well and because in such situations you usually worry in this will be too. Because of the nervousness, you are confused in the presentation / answers to the questions of the examiner / personnel officer (although you had already spoken in your mind and everything looked much more slender and more logical).
You are losing your thoughts and cannot extract the necessary information from the memory, as you are worried. Your speech is confused and uncertain, the consciousness is not focused, you answer worse than you answered if you were not nervous. As a result, the examiner / personnel officer / business partner did not receive full satisfaction from your performance. HR concluded that you are not self-confident and have low stress tolerance, the examiner noticed that you were worried and could write it off to a poor knowledge of the subject. As a result, you have achieved worse results than you could get if you were collected and calm.
How does mindfulness manifest?
Now I will give the opposite example of a conscious reaction to what is happening and your literate behavior arising from this.
So you came to the interview, meeting, exam. You began to worry as a responsible event. You know yourself well and understand that almost any person will experience stress in such circumstances, BUT only on condition that they do nothing and leave it alone. You are well aware that excitement is meaningless, it does not give you any advantages, but only prevents you from achieving your own. As a result, you may not get a good job or pass the final exam badly, just because you could not control yourself and thus made a bad impression. So why do you worry? This is not enough that it still can harm and harm! (This was the ANALYSIS).
You bring your breath in order, calm your heartbeat, calm yourself, come to the conclusion that the outcome of the meeting will depend on how well you can keep yourself and how collected and focused you will be. You are already adjusting to such a calm mood, and an ideal model of your behavior appears in your head, which you plan to adhere to. You deeply appreciate your ability to hold and control yourself, as you believe that this is a sign of your spiritual strength and psychological discipline. And you intend to use this skill.
Do not pay attention to the natural anxiety, you go to our conditional meeting, if you have not reached inner peace, then at least try to portray it with the cold-blooded expression of your face, because you know that not only your condition determines facial expressions but vice versa: your facial expression causes your condition ( I will write a separate article about it).
Stay well, speak confidently, if something is forgotten, pause, remember and play back calmly, and if something is not remembered, then you do not start panic under the strict views of colleagues / personnel specialists / teachers, and tactfully get out of the problem. Even if your knowledge of the subject leaves much to be desired, then you will make a pleasant impression on those around you as far as you are confident, focused and calm.
Since you are relaxed and do not experience signs of excitement, you can compensate your gaps in the presentation with successful tactical tricks during a performance and good contact with the audience. (This was the very same physical action) Following the results, you got what you deserved, and maybe even more (if you succeeded in having obvious mistakes in the presentation to bribe the public with your confidence and manipulate it with attention), you successfully passed the exam or passed an interview.
Analysis and will
This is an example of awareness and the volitional impulse that followed it, designed to put into practice the pattern of behavior created in the head. Here we observed an adequate, sober and balanced analysis of our emotions. Our experimental specimen did not succumb to feelings and nervousness, he showed ANALYSIS: calmly and calmly laid on the operating table and dissected the tension in his mind, he realized his nature, which consisted in utter senselessness and uselessness.
And then drawing conclusions from ANALYSIS, formulated a model of his behavior in his head (he was determined to be calm and confident, or at least to depict calm and confidence) and went into action, which was expressed in attempts to comply with the chosen model, when he calmed the nerves into premises and calmly defended his position as a student / applicant / employee.
There may be another outcome. Our subject realized that the excitement is meaningless, tried to calm himself, but due to the lack of practice, he did not succeed. Anyway, he was nervous and fidgeting in his chair. And then, after analyzing again, I saw in this a problematic place, over which it would be necessary to work and promised myself to take measures so that this nervousness would not manifest itself in the future. Maybe here he suffered a failure or he did not achieve what he wanted, because he could not completely cope with the anxiety, but in terms of self-development and developmental awareness he made a significant step.
He realized the nature of his excitement, made absolutely correct conclusions about her and gave himself the directive to help ensure that this did not manifest in the future. He managed to distance himself from his feelings and passions. And he intends to continue to work on himself and train his willpower, which he lacked in internal discipline. Even in spite of the fact that it was not possible to cope with emotions so much, the hero of our mental experiment no longer identified himself with his feelings!
And this is the most important thing! So do not worry and do not scold yourself if at first you will not be able to confront your destructive, harmful emotions and in the end they will triumph over you. The main thing is that you always realize these negative impulses, try to resist them and never give up, seek new ways to overcome character weaknesses.
This example clearly illustrates that awareness can also be understood as a skill that causes you to stop identifying yourself with your desires, emotions, passions and fears. You begin to perceive it as something else that still affects you, has power over you, but is not part of your personality and therefore can be controlled and trained. This is the power of awareness! Imagine what a useful skill you will gain if you make an effort to achieve states of awareness!
You can have a habit of being fascinated by feelings and anxiety, fully surrender to their power and think that these impulses are a logical continuation of yourself and they stem from the characteristic features of your personality. You allow these feelings to turn and control you, confuse your life, bring confusion into your understanding of yourself and those around you, lead you away from your goal and move you away from its awareness.
But you can sensibly and soberly fix the impulses that arise in yourself, which prevent you from living and achieving what you want. To realize them, to make an effort of will to gain control over them and thus live happily and in harmony with oneself, achieving the best for oneself, rejecting fears, anxiety and insecurity!
What is mindfulness for?
In order not to be unfounded and not be limited to just one example, I will explain about any such negative impulses that need to be aware of and with which to fight, I say, after which I will tell you how to train awareness.
What can cause lack of awareness?
- Nervousness, excitement, anxiety
- Malice, irritability
- Envy
- Fear, anxiety, insecurity
- Depressiveness, tendency to despondency, sincere depression
- Shyness, timidity, shyness, isolation
- The influence of bad habits
- Inability to adequately perceive criticism and opinion of others
- Other character flaws
Now I suppose you understand that the need to develop awareness in order to analyze, and then cope with the above-mentioned qualities, is not conditioned by my personal predilections. Above, you can watch a list of things that really interfere or can interfere with the life of almost everyone and not only! On a scale of whole humanity, these properties are manifested in the quality of universal evil: social disasters, misunderstandings, conflicts, diseases and deaths.
In order to be able to withstand them, not only one awareness is enough (willpower, discipline, firmness of mind, spiritual independence and developed critical ability are needed, how to develop it all - let's talk in this blog), but this is a necessary stage that allows one to calmly assess the appearance of these feelings , to spiritually distance themselves from them and stop perceiving them as part of their personality.
Awareness - reflects the desire of a person to live with reason, to resist instincts, passions and vices, to control their emotions and make correct, balanced decisions, to strive for well-being for themselves and others, to pacify anger and envy, to think rationally and cope with prejudices. Increasing awareness is one of the key stages of self-development.
How to raise awareness
Now, finally, my presentation brings me to the answer to the main question of this article about how to raise awareness. I apologize for the long introduction that precedes the transition to the practical part of the article. I would not have placed all this material here if I was not sure of its need for our understanding of what we understand by awareness as one and the same. After all, before talking about something, you need to define it and come to a common understanding.
So there is no better means for developing awareness and training than regular daily meditation.
As well as the best opportunity to learn how to swim is to actually swim, there is also no more reliable way to increase awareness than training it. Meditation can be defined as training, the practice of awareness. These are the sessions during which you place yourself in a state of awareness and try to keep it in every possible way.
In this state, you reach full concentration, fix your attention on one thing. You relax and begin to see the internal processes of thinking and the movement of feelings as if from a distance. All your attention freezes at one point from which you calmly observe what is happening inside, realize this is happening.
During meditation, you may be enticed by some thoughts or feelings, memories and vanity of the day, but you still try to concentrate on something and distance yourself from them. This distance, the distance between the point at which your will and attention is focused, and your internal processes is the measure of your awareness !. And the longer and more correctly you meditate, the more significant this distance becomes.
This should be clear and logical. I mean the principle that I described above. I don’t appeal to tricky terminology, I don’t try to describe the process of meditation from the point of view of the work of energy centers, subtle vibrations, etc. I describe it as I feel and understand it, drawing on the conclusions reached during the results of this practice and its positive influence on me.
And if you do not believe me, then try it yourself, it will not take much time and energy (strength will only increase), but I assure you that during the practice you will feel the same as me, you will feel the beneficial effect of meditation and my reasoning will be fair to you. I think the main advantage of my system of self-development is that many of its conclusions are not abstract theoretical in nature, but can be easily tested in practice, which I strongly urge you to do!
But in order to develop awareness it is not enough just to meditate! Yes, meditation is where to start, but then, when it brings the first fruits, you will need to take another set of awareness exercises, which include the following:
- Meditate!
- Try to be relaxed during the day. Keep a calm state of mind.
- Do not rush to give in to sudden spiritual impulses that lead to non-rational actions. It is necessary to analyze the causes of these feelings. If inside boils do not immediately express it in action. Get out, calm down, cool your head and think about everything.
- Rest more often during the day, let the brain relax, think about something else during such a holiday, not related to the realities of the current day. This will help you keep your distance and not let you sweep away with a whirlpool of routine.
- Everywhere try to include the mind. In every detail regarding your behavior, habits and relationships with people. You will notice that many of your actions that you are accustomed to perform from day to day are not rational. Assess their impact on yourself and your life and select those that bother you. Work on eliminating them.
- Constantly give yourself an account of your health and condition, determine when you are tired, anxious or nervous. This is necessary either in order to take prompt measures to stabilize one’s mental state, or in order not to do something silly (I’m at a glance, I’ll go out on the street to get my breath and put my thoughts in order, or at the moment I’m in emotional anxiety so I will postpone acceptance important decision for later, when calm down)
- Analyze the causes of problem situations, it often happens that you have drawn yourself into a problem situation and there is nothing to complain about
- Be honest with yourself in evaluating your motives and motives.
The development of awareness in practice is described in the second step of the self-development plan; there are exercises that you can perform to develop awareness.
Do not be discouraged if you will not be able to perform all of these items. Learning to be relaxed and not to give in to emotions is a very long and painstaking work, which you still need to train yourself. But as you practice meditation, it will be easier to follow these recommendations. Also on this site, I promise to reveal in more detail the components of this program to increase awareness.
Fulfillment of these points not only helps to deal with difficulties and to realize the reasons for their actions, but also teach you to analyze, to the habit of looking at what is happening in yourself from the outside, which greatly contributes to the formation of awareness.
Do not take much for yourself! No need to strive to immediately overcome all their shortcomings and cope with the strongest and uncontrollable spiritual impulses. Start with small things, with trifles: do not be nervous and do not be angry when someone stepped on your foot in the subway - close your eyes, focus and calm down, think about something pleasant. And gradually, from such trifles, go to the global, most serious problems, when you feel that you are ready to solve them.
Это что-то вроде постепенного увеличения веса при тренировках в тренажерном зале: начиная заниматься вы не принимаетесь упражняться с большими весами, а начинаете с малых чтобы не получить травму и не запороть эффект от тренировки. Также и в повышении осознанности начните с малого! И медитируйте, по ходу практики вы начнете обнаруживать у себя удивительные способности самоконтроля и самоанализа, которыми никогда до этого не располагали!
Вот пожалуй и все пока. Стараюсь быть кратким насколько это возможно, но все равно чувствую насколько малую часть своих знаний и опыта я пока передал, ведь есть столько еще всего о чем хочется рассказать и чем поделиться. Поэтому до встречи!
