The Secret To All Growth Is Developing Self-Awareness

Developing self-awareness is the key to changing your life experience and overcoming poor self-esteem.

Any spiritual or personal growth book worth reading will probably only make only two points important…

• developing self-awareness
• radical acceptance

The secret to having a life of inner peace and contentment and building your self-esteem is to accept and simply experience what is there for you right now.  Once you have developed greater awareness you have more choices about how you will think about what you experience.

Why It Takes Some Courage

It takes some courage to surrender to what is really going on.  Once you stop denying your experience and finally realize that your experience has richness, self-love and meaning, then you do not need anything outside of you to be OK such as material possessions, a partner or recognition.

Until you can see what is happening you cannot choose to change it. To be able to see it you need to be constantly developing self-awareness.

If your foot was numb you would need to be aware your foot was numb and be aware of why before you could consciously do something to change that experience. You would see that you are sitting on it and so now you can change that condition. So too it is with emotions, although more complex.

Similarly you need to see and acknowledge the way you are thinking about yourself and the world before you can see that the end result of your thinking might be an experience of anxiety.

You need to be able to see you are attached to something not happening before you can see that your attachment makes you fearful.

Increasing Understanding

Awareness is not a skill and it is not something you develop as such, it just is as it is but it gets covered up a lot of the time.

This is the difference between having your attention on what might happen (imagination) or what has happened (memory) and instead having your attention on ‘you’.  Which part of ‘you’ is real and which
part is always changing or up for changing, and therefore not real?

There is always a part of you still and silent and observing. In times you are daydreaming or rehearsing a conversation in your head or replaying an incident the awareness of you disappears doesn’t it? Try it, play with different uses of your mind and see when ‘you’ disappear. Of course it doesn’t go anywhere but it just sort of gets forgotten.

Engage your peripheral vision for a few seconds while you stay aware that you are conscious. Now concentrate on an object or read a few words. Is one mode of vision easier for you than the other to remain conscious of you?

I was watching my nephew recently at eight months old waving his arms around when he had the sudden
realization that he was doing the waving through intention. He stopped and looked at his hand and moved the fingers and he was more intrigued than with any toy.

This is what I am talking about. Developing self-awareness that you are aware and conscious that you do things.

Meditation, Contemplation and Mindfulness

And this leads us to meditation, contemplation and mindfulness.

As you go about your day in mindfulness; watching without judgment, anything you do which is destructive, painful or unnecessary for your well-being will have a greater chance of simply dropping away. Meditation helps bring this impartial awareness and watcher to the foreground and this is transformative all by itself. It really is all that there is to do fundamentally.  Become self
aware, then accept what you find.

Developing self-awareness and accepting everything you are aware of now is powerful and is a permanent way to increase poor self-esteem.