What Does It Mean To Build Awareness?!

The HWK's

Aug. 9

Questions. Questions. Questions. Awareness is all about deep diving. Asking question after question. Inquiring about self in all ways, not just one. It is about getting know who you are and why. It involves getting to root of our thoughts, beliefs, emotions and feelings. Understanding where and how they stemmed into our way of being. It is about knowing and not assuming, judging and/or just living.

Awareness is about arriving at answers, connecting the dots between what we say and do, what we think and feel. And the only way to do that is by questioning everything that we think we know about ourselves and our life. And how we do that is analyzing and identifying our behaviours and thoughts.

For example. What patterns do we see in our life? What cycles are apparent? Furthermore, what dynamic is in place? Most importantly, what story is at play?

You see, we all live through stories, thoughts and beliefs that we tell ourselves about ourselves and about life. The question is if they are true illustrations, or are they illusions?! Illusions taken to be true and passed down through generations, patterned belief systems that we live by, but didn’t create. This is something I wrote about in a previous article, Generational Game Changer, the noting of what is ours and what isn’t. Most importantly, how we feed into all of it, without even knowing.

Patterns and Cycles

What patterns can we see in our lives? Are we repeating the same scenarios, just in different circumstances?! Do we keep trying to protect ourselves to only ruin ourselves? Or do we ruin ourselves to protect ourselves?! Are we refusing to see lessons to only have them repeat themselves? Are we learning from our mistakes or are we avoid them?

So many of us, find ourselves battling the same things over and over, without realizing they are the same. Different people, different time, but yet the same lessons… the same message. And we overlook, because most only see the surface and not beyond. But the thing is, we must question the surface in order to see beyond. We must analyze our role in why it occurs. As it has nothing to do with the other person and everything to do with us.

Accountability and Acknowledgement

Building awareness requires removing everything else, but ourselves. It requires taking onus on everything that has happened in our life. As we are the only thing constant. No matter how much we want to redirect responsibility every where else, we must not. Granted that, we can’t change others, we can only change ourselves. Therefore, it is about understanding our responses to that which happens around us, rather than justifying. Is it about finding the reasoning behind our responses.

What had us acting and behaving the way we did? What belief were we living through? And why? What did we feel? And how come? And then from there, digging deeper into where it even stemmed from? Was it something we created, or was it something passed down? Did something happen? If so, what?!

Understanding and Release

Awareness is about going down a never-ending rabbit hole of questions, in order to arrive at an answer. And answer the provides us release and understanding. Something concrete in that we can pinpoint and choose to live freely from, no longer consumed by the stories and beliefs we told ourselves. But instead, relying on the acknowledge of what we know about ourselves, our behaviour and how we move.

For once we come to understand how a machine operates we can begin to adjust its mechanics, no longer allowing the old functions to remain. Creating new operations that grant the ability to move in conjunction with its core. And that is the beauty of awareness, is understanding the machine we are working with and manipulating it so that it is of service to us, rather than the other way around. Because we can’t develop that which we know nothing of, and so we must make ourselves aware, in order to evolve and improve.

And what is most important about building awareness is the clarity that we gain in knowing what it is we want and need. As we can’t know any of that, until we know ourselves.

Featured