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Healing Journey: What Has Awareness Brought You?
One thing we love saying and frequently express in life is awareness. I sometimes use it as well. Awareness can be defined as “knowledge or perception of a situation or fact.” When we discuss awareness in our lives, it can sound like this: “At least, I am aware now.” In the case of someone who has been or is in an abusive relationship, it can be expressed as: “At least, I am aware that they’re abusive.” For someone on their healing journey, it may go like this: “At least, I am aware that I have not healed from my past, and I know I have some work to do.” And for someone with addictive or self-sabotaging behaviors, it might go like this: “I am fully aware that my behaviors are nowhere I want to be.” The list goes on and on. You read an article, watch a YouTube video, listen to your favorite gurus, and you feel grateful that they’ve shared insights that resonate with some of your current struggles in life.
So, the question is, what has this ‘awareness’ brought into your life? What has the awareness of trauma, inner child wounds, beliefs, ADHD, etc., or all those other labels brought into your life? Has it kept you stuck, given you an excuse, or fed you with a conclusion of where all your problems come from? Has it stopped you or paralyzed you from taking action in your present life? Has it kept you from seeing things logically and just relating everything you do presently? Has it inflated your ego?
Or has it liberated you from the thing you’re aware of? Has it enabled you to process that which you’re aware of? Let’s look at two types of scenarios here: the scenarios where you think you’re aware, but the thought of being aware is blinding you from taking action in your present, and the other scenario where you’re aware of the trash in your basement, and you’re inspired and motivated to clean up the trash by taking action in your present life. I will be using a lot of analogies in this, so take some time to reflect on where you currently are. Maybe this is the final piece you need to fully take action in your life or perhaps the last article you will read from my blog before taking action.
Scenario 1: Not Much ‘Awareness’- Awareness without Taking Action
You might be aware of how stuck you are in life, and where we get stuck is when we remain in a state of surface-level awareness, without really delving deeper into those profound aspects that we now know affect our lives. A good analogy is to imagine having a visitor come to your house and then they notice a pile of trash under your seats. They first notice the stench, and upon closer inspection, they notice a pile under your seat. They then point to you and say, “Hey, there’s dirt under your seat.”
You look at it and then respond to your visitor, “Thank you so much for making me aware of the stench and the source of this stench in my house.” You, of course, feel a sigh of relief, knowing that your house is not that bad, and you now know what’s causing that terrible smell. But when the visitor leaves, you get on with your life, now feeling grateful for your awareness, but you do nothing about the elephant in the room, which is cleaning the trash.
As always, life comes along, and you get busy with your unhealthy relationships, work, or other things in life until you even forget what was brought into your awareness. Then another visitor comes into your house, and they remind you of it. You do the same thing, you thank them, and only remain in that state. You are aware but you’re not taking the necessary actions to make things better. So, how has the awareness of the foul stench in your house and the trash under your seats made your life better?
Scenario 2: Awareness as an Excuse
The other instance, or what normally happens, is that now that you’re ‘fully’ aware of the trash and the foul smell in your house, you end up using it as a justification for everything happening in your life. You have a leaking roof, you cannot close your door, your house gets broken into, and you blame it on the trash. So, even things which are totally unrelated, we just end up trying to make associations with that thing we’re now aware of.
Actually, this is where we get stuck the most, in the trap of “this happened because of that.” Yes, there are correlations in life, but we do get stuck in this thought loop, not even giving it a second thought, as we use the things we’re aware of on the surface level as good alibis for our present circumstances. They make good alibis, actually because when you explain it to yourself, or even when an expert explains it to you, you really feel like it makes sense and you can’t think beyond it.
Continuing with our analogy, you may convince yourself that your leaking roof is because of bacteria eating your house, and the source of bacteria is your trash. It might be the source, but it might not also be the source; it’s a conclusion, and most of your conclusions will always reinforce your current false identity. You cannot even see the fact that before you were that ‘aware,’ you used to see things logically without much association.
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s how we get stuck in a negative feedback loop or even victimhood and give away our present life responsibility to that which we became aware of. You end up feeling so powerless and helpless as everything in your life looks like a self-fulfilling prophecy of that which was brought into awareness.
Scenario 3: Awareness and Accumulation of Knowledge
I talked about this in-depth in my article on the trap of learning about narcissism (you can check it out here). In this scenario, you become aware of the trash, and you now devote your life to studying the trash. Instead of focusing on cleaning up your house first, you want to study the problem while still comfortably living in the same house with a foul stench. The more you study, the more you get attached to it and even identify more with various subsets of the trash or the problem. The more you study about the trash, the more you begin explaining to your visitors the source of the foul stench in your house and even describing the chemical composition of the stench and the trash.
Studying is great, but you don’t need it to really clean up the trash; you’re just postponing the inevitable, which is cleaning your house. You might understand the chemical composition of the stench and all those other terminologies, but it will not take away the smell. You might even find a good air freshener that lessens the foul smells in your house, and your house smells better, only for the smell to come back after a few months because you’re not really dealing with the root of the problem. You end up buying more and more air fresheners (equivalent to more books), but you end up dealing with the symptoms (foul smell) and ignoring the trash, which is where you need to focus on, dealing with the root of the problem.
Scenario 4: Awareness and Taking Action
Now, this is where I want you to be. This is where you understand that dealing with the stench on the surface level will only provide temporary relief, but the foul smell will come back. This is where you understand that there are limits to what you are currently doing to tackle the smell, and the more you do it, the worse the smell gets. This is where you understand that it might be easy to mask the smell with air freshener, and it’s the path of least resistance and a very easy path.
But you know that it will not be rewarding in the long run, and the air freshener will end up affecting your health, leading to physical symptoms like low immunity or even causing autoimmune diseases. You realize that once you take action to deal with the root of the problem, most aspects of your life will improve because, as you know, “problems go hand in hand with other problems.” You eliminate the excuses and look at how you can clean the trash; even if it means hiring a bulldozer to remove it, you do whatever it takes.
Don’t you prefer to fully clean up your house and deal with the root cause of your problems instead of bingeing on these articles?
Mind and Self-Preservation
Here’s the thing: your current identity or the current foul smell in your house is your comfort zone and familiar space. It’s a foul smell, but it’s also serving you or providing you with some indirect ‘benefits’ in life. It might be keeping you safe from taking action in life, taking risks, or even being vulnerable. In a twisted kind of way, preserving the smell is more of the mind keeping you safe from the infinite possibilities of letting in fresh air in your life.
But do you want to continue living that way for the rest of your life? What are you missing out on in life by just sticking to the familiar stench?
Conclusion
In conclusion, simply being aware is not enough to break free from what you’re aware of. You have the conscious choice to do whatever it takes to deal with those root causes that you already consciously ‘know’ about. Awareness is wonderful, but when it keeps you stuck in life or becomes an alibi or an excuse for all the things that are happening, it simply means you’re not truly aware; you’re still in a dream that has convinced you that you’re awake. You owe it to yourself to be aware that you’re stuck and half-asleep. You wake up when you remove the trash from your life and work on those underlying issues. You wake up with your eyes wide open when you deal with your root causes and observe how you justify all your present actions with your past.
Awareness is not in the past; awareness is in the letting go of the past and fully immersing yourself in the present moment. You might be consciously aware, but those aspects buried in the dark recesses of your mind are still controlling you and driving you to self-destruct or live in a house with a foul stench. You can look at healing as shining a light on the dark corners of your mind and releasing the stubborn stench that doesn’t want to be removed. So, hold this question in your heart, “What has awareness brought you in your life?”
Note from the Author
If you’re ready and you’d like my help with healing, finding peace in life and breaking free from these toxic patterns, then you can book a FREE BREAKTHROUGH CALL with me HERE. Happy healing 💙💙. Feel free to share and comment! Use this information with caution, it comes from my own thoughts & bias, experiences and research😊.
