Energy and Awareness

I have been studying awareness lately. Learning how to connect with my self and listen to my inner dialog with my heart AND my head.. which can be difficult. In this world where life can seem to be something that just happens to you, and not something you have much control over, it is hard to imagine that you can "direct" and "steer" where you want your life to go. To take control of the energy that you have inside, and use higher awareness in your everyday encounters... seems like the stuff of fairy tales or "hippies". But there is science behind it, decades of research and hundreds upon hundreds of great intelligent minds, that have brought about the new age movement of finding inner peace and awareness.

We seem to loose touch with ourselves on a pretty regular basis. We loose that connection with our own "possibilities". Instead, we fall into a robot-like way of seeing and thinking and doing. In those moments, we break contact with what is deepest in ourselves and affords us perhaps our greatest opportunities for creativity, learning and growing. If we are not careful, those clouded moments can stretch out and become most of our lives.

We need to stop and "feel" the present moment, to hold it in awareness and thereby come to know it and understand it better. Instead, we often seem preoccupied with the past, with what has already happened, or with a future that hasn't happened yet. We look for someplace else to stand, where we hope things will be better, happier, more the way we want them to be, or the way they used to be. Most of the time, we are only partially aware of this inner tension, if we are aware of it at all. What is more frightening, is we are also only partially aware at best of what we are doing in and with our lives, and the effects that our actions and, more subtly, our thoughts have on our lives. Like in a dream state, we go though life just letting it happen to us and not directing it at all, unaware of the potential that lies within each and every one of us.

Not knowing that you are even is such a dream-state is what the Buddhists call "ignorance", or mindlessness. Being in touch with this "not-knowing" is called "mindfulness". The work of waking up from this dream-state is the work of meditation, the systematic cultivation of wakefulness, of present-moment awareness.

So... while I study Awareness and Energy and learn from great minds (such as Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Merton, Joseph Campbell, Jon Gottman, and the list goes on) I will comment and reflect here, at A Place for a Woman. Feel free to add your own comments and reflections.