The Joy of Awareness

The Joy of Awareness

Why does my awareness matter? Why bother? Who cares? I just want to get by. My life is hard, I don’t want to be paying more attention to it.

Here’s a funny thing. When we become present in our lives, and let go of our negative moral judgments, our life gets better.

Here is how it works.

Most of our misery comes from our minds. Worry, anxiety, anguish, are mental events with physical manifestations. By becoming present in our bodies, noticing where we are in our space, aware of our breath, aware of what we are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and sensing, aware of our thoughts, but letting them flow, not thinking on them, we shift our focus from our mental events to our physical body.

For our bodies, experience is neutral. Have you ever seen a little cat whack themselves jumping off something? They lick it, and carry on. The doggy runs and slides into the wall, shakes his head, and carries on. They don’t have all sorts of feelings about their experience, they just go on to the next one. They aren’t judging their experience as bad, it’s just an experience.

For every thought we have, our brains have a neurochemical response. This is literally where thoughts become things. The neurochemical responses trigger hormonal responses, and we start having feelings because our bodies are flooding with these chemicals. Negative thoughts release stress chemicals, positive thoughts release calming chemicals.

I’m not making this stuff up. There is a lot of new research happening on this topic.

When I hurt my shoulder a while back, I tried an experiment. I stopped judging the sensations I was having as bad. Intense, yes, oh yes! But I stopped using pain-language to describe it. When I would use pain-language, my whole body seemed to join in. Even though the experience was just in my shoulder joint area, I would feel my chest collapse in a bit, my breath got shallower, my mood sunk. My bad posture encouraged other stuff to start squeaking, and within minutes, my whole self felt terrible; body, mind, and spirit.

Without the pain-language, it was just experience. It tended to stay isolated to the joint area. Sometimes it was very intense, and made my eyes water. On the other hand, It healed faster than it “should have” for someone my age. Hmmm.

Awareness takes me out of my habitual thought loops. Awareness gives me the space to see how I am hurting myself with my bad thoughts, my bad creative questions. Awareness gives my organism the room it needs to heal, to grow, to evolve. When I am really aware, I have no bad habits, I have choice. I cannot worry when I am being aware. I am not a victim, or a martyr, or an abuser when I am aware.

How have I changed from avoiding my life to lavishing myself in my awareness?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 06252013