Being Aware of Awareness, Episode 126

Awareness that heals episode 126. A very warm welcome to season three of awareness that heals where we have progressed to be able to focus on one challenging emotion at a time. This will allow you to choose a specific emotion that you’ve had challenges with, and each one will have a progressive series of guided meditations that will allow you to go deeper and deeper into self-compassion. For me, it’s truly inspiring because each emotion has unique nuances for both self-care and responding to your environment at the same time, this is subtle and a rare skill as all too often we don’t stay aware of how we can care for ourselves as we are. I hope that you’ll not only find it helpful, but also give you deep resources that you can internalize when the emotion is most emerging.

(01:07)
A warm welcome to our new series on awareness that heals where we’re going to focus on caring for our feelings of inadequacy, and we’re going to do it in a series of six progressive meditations. So we can take it very slowly, one step at a time, and we’re going to start today with something that sounds obvious, but it’s actually very, very subtle. And I would say don’t even expect to fully understand this first step until you hear it repeated through the meditations that will follow, that will continue to grow as we add more steps. So we’re starting with focusing on awareness itself, and I’ll give you a little bit of a clue before we start the guided meditation so that it will make it a little bit easier once we go into it. So awareness itself is actually something that most of us have never really considered.

(02:20)
And awareness is a feature that human beings have that is unique and we very rarely, if ever extricate or separate it from our thoughts or what we see or what we feel or our body sensations. But we have the capacity for our awareness to notice awareness itself without linking it to any particular object. And by object I’m including thoughts, feelings, anything, visual, anything. And so if we can gain the awareness of this unique and valuable part of ourselves, awareness itself, being aware of awareness. So imagine yourself like you’re in a cave and you’re just pausing for a moment and you just close your eyes and you’re thinking about, I wonder what awareness is, and you go quiet and thoughts come up, and then you just save yourself, which we’re going to do in the meditation awareness. I just want to stay aware of you. I don’t want to think about anything. I just want to be aware that you are the central core of who I am. And if I can identify you separate from my thoughts, it will empower me to guide my attention, to guide my awareness to go where I want it to go. So hopefully that will help you get a headstart on the guided meditation that we’re going to begin now.

(04:18)
So start off by just being aware of where your awareness is starting. Maybe you’re aware of a mood, maybe you’re thinking about other things. Maybe you’re listening to my voice. And just notice that as you’re listening to this, it’s your awareness that is able to pay attention and then close your eyes so that you’re not distracted and just ask yourself awareness. Can I just be aware of you? Just aware of my awareness itself? It’s a non-visual. It’s a non-thinking, and it requires a bit of silence where the only thing you might be saying is I want to be aware of awareness itself and don’t be discouraged if this sounds abstract at first because it’s hard to experientially understand this unless you’ve had a long meditation practice. So just say awareness. I want to be aware of you and not attach you to any thoughts. You are doing this so that you can gain the empowerment of recognizing that you have a free awareness that isn’t automatically drawn into a feeling or a thought, but you can be that freed awareness itself more and more. Now, I don’t believe any of us experientially understand this completely. So this is something that you’re trying to gather in this meditation of what is this awareness? What is it like to be aware of awareness itself and not immediately associated it with something else?

(06:28)
And once you get a glimpse of that, which is all we’re trying to do right now, then focus your awareness on reviewing any times, any glimpses you have of when you’ve been feeling inadequate. Maybe it’s in relationship to work, you might feel inadequate because your work doesn’t seem meaningful, or it may be your sex life and you need to talk to your partner. Or it may be to do with your relationship with your parents or your kids. There are so many areas where all of us could feel inadequate, but the most important thing is you find yours. Now, as you focus on inadequacy feelings, either in the present or times in your past, you’ll probably notice that it’s almost like a disease where we avoid awareness of inadequacy because it doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t validate us, and we’ve been taught that we want to feel good.

(07:36)
We want to be okay, we want to be adequate, we want to be superior. We want to be feeling good all the time. So it’s very paradoxical to be aware of your inadequacy, which gives you then the chance to develop your adequacy in the area that you’re feeling inadequate. Now, more often than not, if you look closely, you’ll see that you generally do one of two things. One is you will fleetingly go unaware of your awareness of inadequacy and you will suppress it. So that’s one way to go. And the other way is that you will judge it like, yuck, I hate feeling inadequate. And then you’ll flee. So if you can stay aware of your inadequacy feelings, it gives you immense potential to then work on the feelings themselves, listen to them and see what you need to develop your adequacy in the area that you feel inadequate. Hopefully, you’ll get a glimpse that if you have inadequacy feelings and you run away from them, either by judging yourself or by just suppressing them, that they’ll be frozen forever. And it’s only by staying with somewhat of a neutral awareness that we have a chance to really develop. So thanks for joining us in this first step, and we’ll be adding more steps in each meditation. So I hope that you’ll join us all the way through the six meditations. Thank you very much.