Enjoying Awareness

If we become estranged from ourselves in childhood, our road back to our Heartland will be through growing awareness. Awareness is another term for ability to feel. What happens when children bury their pain is that they become cut off from their own feelings, and the feelings of others – they become unable to feel.

Much of this becoming aware again will not be much fun, as it involves feeling pain we’d buried (so as not to feel it) – but gradually, as we come through our hurt, and learn to withstand our fears, awareness becomes the medium for enjoyment of life.

Gradually, we come to notice more and more of what goes on, both within ourselves and around us. Noticing – paying attention - is itself an act of respect and tenderness, of love and belonging.

Discovering the permission I have to feel what I feel, see what I see, and be who I am is an invaluable blessing, and enabler.

So often, we put ourselves down, we inhibit our own natural responses to things, we judge ourselves harshly. All this is ego, spouting scripts internalised from childhood, perpetuating disapproval which came from adults who were handing on the pressures put on them, in their own childhood, by thoughtless and insensitive adults – and so on, down the line.

Each generation has had its reasons for resorting to such heavy-handedness – but each generation can take responsibility for its own behaviour – and many, in each succeeding generation, do.

Once we begin to stand up to these voices in our minds, life becomes kinder and more friendly. We start to enjoy being here, we ‘fill out’ inwardly, we begin to relax, and take up our space. (Someone once described it to me as ‘inhabiting yourself more fully’.)

We can learn to enjoy life inclusively, so our enjoyment is not based on excluding or denying any of our feelings. This does mean learning to savour different flavours of experience, including some we don’t tend to think of as ‘enjoyable’.

When we get the hang of this, our sense of wellbeing becomes grounded in reality. It feels like no big deal, just how things are. Enjoying awareness includes acknowledging imperfections and limitations – our own and other peoples’. Miscommunications and failures of communication can be accepted as belonging to our human condition, sources of humour – and unhooked from ego’s grievance-fishing line.

As we learn to deal with our fears – by feeling and acknowledging them as our fears, yet not letting them bounce us into Egoland – we start to notice a lowering of inner pressure, and life begins to feel very different. In place of a sinking, resistant groan of ‘What do I have to do today?’ it becomes a matter of interested attention: ‘What feels like the next thing to do?’ This is not far from ‘What do I feel like doing next?’

However, while we feel more and more at ease in our skin, this way of proceeding is not haphazard, or in any way reckless or oblivious. It is precise and attentive, caring (taking care) to notice (know ‘tis – to discern what’s real from all that isn’t, but pretends to be) what’s going on, on the inside – not just on the surface – which we know by sensing how things feel. (See CA and HM, Oracle, on the inner senses and the commonsense.)

Happiness, in the Heartland, is to no longer feel like a closed book to myself - to be able to read my own heart.