Man in the Mirror PROJECT - Raising Your Awareness through Feelings

Increasing your awareness is like kindling in a fire.  You can increase the temperature and produce
bigger flames if you start to add the kindling a little at a time.  Awareness or consciousness works the same way.  If you begin to pay attention to how you feel, when you feel it and ask yourself why, sooner or later you'll begin to burn the fires necessary to burn away the unconscious sleep you had been in previously.  Answers begin to just come seemingly out of no where as your consciousness takes center stage.

Being aware of our feelings is perhaps one of the biggest steps we can take to better our lives.  We all think way too much.  Half of us can't sleep at night because the conscious mind engages in patterns of worry, tension and "what if" thinking.  So if you can't seem to quiet the mind, the next best thing would be to feel your way into a new state of awareness.

My mother comes to my door unexpectedly.  My stomach turns into knots.  My mind issues a "Why does she always do this to me" as she helps herself in without knocking.  She checks my house room by room as if she expects to find me hiding Bin Laden somewhere, then proceeds to say she can't stay long, she just stopped by to say hi.

When she leaves I find myself irritated.  Of course my mind is engaged in all kinds of thoughts but I begin to notice my body instead.  It feels alarmed.  The undercurrent of the feeling is that I have done something wrong.  But what?  As I replay the events I realize it was her actions that made me feel that way.  A prominent figure in my life was casting guilt on me without saying a word.  She checked my home as if she expected to find something.  She dropped by unexpectedly as if she was going to "catch" me doing something.

To most people, we would tend to think that this is just bad behavior, but for someone looking into the deeper issues of life it's a learning experience.  When I ask myself why I always feel like I am the culprit, this is the place I come back to.  The action taken by my mother made me feel that I should feel guilty.  In reality, my mother had an affair on my father.  It was her issue, her guilt that  was being projected onto me.  I lost count of the number of affairs she told other people I was having.  I only wish I could have remembered one, because in my "real" life there weren't any.  However, these are the real life issues that you can use to begin to raise your awareness and to tap into what's really going on internally.

There is within us a store house of emotions and underlying beliefs.  Some have been put there, like me accepting blame for something I never did, without us even realizing it.  If we dare to dig deeper, ask questions and clearly see patterns within ourselves, we can begin to not only unravel, but uproot those negative seeds that have been planted.

If there are situations in your life that tend to make your stomach get in knots, it's a sure sign that some unconscious pattern, feeling or belief is acting out in your life.  Start there by naming the feeling:  guilt, sadness, anger, etc.  then ask yourself why and what it could be.  You may be surprised to find something so very simple has permeated your life and now you can begin to change it.