Step #4 to Less Stress: Emotional Awareness
In Inquiry Method, the process to living with less stress and creating the life you want there are six steps. Over the last several months we have covered the first three steps. This article covers the fourth step, emotional awareness.
Emotional awareness follows safety or sanctuary. Sanctuary follows recognition. Recognition comes after denial. Each of these steps is essential to the next. In the last post we discussed that a deep sense of safety, or sanctuary, is essential to relaxing and opening to a profound “awareness”. Only when we feel safe can we become emotionally aware.
It is important to point out that awareness is different from the earlier recognition step; recognition is the acknowledgment that something is wrong. Recognition is often something you can put your hands on like a strained relationship, a health issue or a “failure” of some sort. It’s just saying, “This hurts and I don’t want it in my life anymore”.
Awareness is the insight and understanding into the emotional basis for something that is not working in your life. Awareness begins to answer the question of “how did I create this in my life?”
Awareness, particularly emotional awareness, is the connection with what is inside of you, in your body, how you feel, your bodily sensations. It is not the thoughts you think, or the story you have told yourself about how you got here, but a deep profound connection with your feelings.
We cannot create the life we want or live with less stress unless we relearn the capacity for emotional awareness (we were born with it, unfortunately it gets programmed out of us). Emotional awareness is profoundly life changing because it opens us up to doors that have often been closed for much of our lives. Awareness provides insights in to deep seated anger, depression, judgments and/or other unwelcome or counter-productive behaviors.
Through emotional awareness we are able to transcend the things that keep us limited, that keep our interactions with life within the boundaries we have set up long ago.
Often times awareness is accompanied by a profound insight either from the past, or links to the past that influence our behavior or interpretation of life today. These are the “ah ha” moments that help you create lasting change in your life.
We are a fundamentally mind based culture, we remember our lives by the stories we have been told or that we use to make sense of our lives. Underneath these stories lies a vast amount of information in our bodies stored in the form of physical sensation and emotional responses. These sub-conscious but powerful memories guide and direct our behaviors and patterns. Relaxing into the body and your feelings leads to a deep awareness that is key to creating the life you want.
Read the whole Less Stress series here.