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Hypothetical story: A girl late for work walks down the street distracted by her need to run she crosses a red light and a car hits her. she is out on the floor and in a second everything within her blames the driver, she knows from the bottom of her heart that if she gets hit then the hitter is the one to blame. She blames her parents for raising her up that way, she blames the driver, she blames everyone around her and she always finds someone to blame because she is too afraid to face herself with the truth of her share of responsibility towards everything that happens to her and around her. She is a part of it one way or another even if she thinks she is not. She wonders why she can’t control her life and everything around her so that nothing goes wrong but then she realizes that she was too oblivious to see that her life is hers only and because of her experiences that she is here today, now and that the only thing she can control is herself. She decided to wake up late, she decided to take a walk, she decided to cross a red light without paying attention, and she decided when she could’ve easily decided something else. She was hit by a car but again everything within her blames the driver.
Well, take that car to mean a lot of things in your life, Perhaps you lost a lot of relationships in dating or friendships, you can only think about how they were the problem and you don’t see how you were responsible. We certainly can’t control what happens to us but what we can control is how we react to them. This is in no way means self-judgment or self-criticism because you just can’t seem to stop a bad habit or can’t overcome your weaknesses, it merely means self-awareness and therefore self-acceptance.
Believe me, I have been there, I’ve spent nearly 2 years of my life only focused on my weaknesses, being so critical and thinking constantly how much I am a victim in my own life. It has certainly depilated me and stopped me from ever achieving anything or moving from my bed. It became empowering to know that I am no victim and that I have the power to change, lead and drive my life to the place I desire.
This story is an example of the lack of self-awareness that I was feeling at the time. Without self-awareness, we’ll never take responsibility for anything that happens to us and we’ll stay victims. Without it we’ll stay oblivious to how we’re controlled by our impulses, feelings, thoughts, and patterns, without it we’ll stay ignorant of the only subject that demands our knowledge which is ourselves. We’ll repeat the same patterns and mistakes over and over and we’ll still blame external factors for it.
The fact is that the majority of our thoughts and actions are on autopilot. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, sometimes we don’t need to think twice before we start a car or wear our shoes. The problem is when we’re on autopilot for so long that we forget we’re on autopilot. Because when we’re not even aware of our own habits, routines, impulses, and reactions, then we no longer control them; they control us. A person with some self-awareness is able to be like “ hmm every time I am dissatisfied I end up scrolling social media for hours” or “every time my dad calls me I end up partying till the morning” while a person without self-awareness just hits their phone or a party without thinking twice.
So what is self-awareness?
People have had different views on how they view self-awareness, some say it is simply being there to observe what’s happening within and around you, and some say it’s how you see yourself + how others see you. They both lead to the same thing which is self-acceptance and it is the sole purpose of self-awareness
The idea of self-awareness has been around for centuries. “Know thy self”, it was originally a philosophical idea that then turned into a psychological one, there have been massive studies on self-awareness and its effect and it's estimated to be a huge factor behind success and finding your purpose in life. cause if you don’t know what works for you, you won’t ever know why are you here on earth and without a purpose life becomes meaningless.
According to an article written by Mark Manson Self-awareness is divided into three levels:
Level one: Actions
We avoid suffering and pain through distractions, we transport our minds into another reality, we use books, movies, games, and music to carry us to another world where no pain exists and we obsess about the past and the future forgetting that our only power lies in the present.
There is nothing wrong with distractions. We definitely need distractions to survive but by the time, we can be aware on how to incorporate distractions into our time in a healthy way. So, instead of playing video games for 12 hours because we have some feelings that we don’t want to face, we can incorporate it in a way where we play for 2-3 hour after work for example.
The truth is most people spend much of their day drowned in a sea of distraction without even realizing it. I do it, too. I open my phone to check my to-do list and I automatically find myself scrolling Instagram for hours, or like a moment ago I suddenly just left the word office open and I went to check Facebook, well, that only happens around 30 times per day but being aware is one step closer to fixing the problem. Perhaps that is what people mean when they say they became conscious rather than unconscious “autopilot” but let us remember our role is simply to observe with no judgment.
Level two: feelings
When you start eliminating some distractions and certainly not all, you start to face feelings that were bottled up for a while and sometimes that can overwhelm you. This is why meditating for a long time freaks a lot of people out; meditation is basically the practice of training your mind to become less distracted and more focused on your immediate experience.
This is the level that people talk about when they say they are “finding themselves” — they are discovering how they actually feel about the things going on in their life, and often they have been hiding these feelings from themselves for years.
Level 2 is an uncomfortable place to go to. People spend years in therapy navigating Level 2. It takes time to become comfortable with all of your emotions. It requires a lot of focus and a lot of effort. But unfortunately, a lot of people get held up in level 2, because emotions are very powerful especially if it had been suppressed for a while. some people recall feeling extremely profound feelings and as a result, they think that this is the highest level of self-awareness some even call it “the ego death” but this is false because first emotions are endless, second they don’t necessarily mean anything, oftentimes they’re self-induced. The purpose is to recognize the emotions and let them pass without digging more into other emotions because the hole is endless.
Level 3: your blind spots
As you start sorting through your emotions and desires, something will become clear to you, how flawed our consciousness really is and that we’re all indeed full of shit. Most of our actions are based on feelings that have happened perhaps a while ago but were still in action in the background. Until we realize how to recognize the heart’s language, we’ll keep falling for our blind spots. For instance, having a fight with your wife earlier caused you to hate the movie you’re watching now even though the movie was objectively good but because you were blinded by your feelings earlier towards the fight with your wife, you hated the movie.
What this means is that the majority of our thoughts and actions are pure reflections of our feelings. Our brain spends most of its time justifying and explaining what the heart has already declared and decided.
By the way, if you ever wondered why we tend to fight the most with the ones we love the most, this is partly why: we use them as an emotional punching bag to validate all the crap that we are feeling, whether they deserve it or not and usually they don’t.
Conclusion: As human beings, we may never fully understand ourselves, if there is such a destination in the first place. But, perhaps it is the journey of exploring, understanding and becoming ourselves that makes life worth living.
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