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What is Self Awareness?

Self awareness in its simplest term is knowing ourselves.

Why is it important and how to know ourselves?
How is it done through meditation?

"Knowing others is wisdom,
knowing yourself is Enlightenment." ~Tao Tzu

As we develop self awareness, we are able to make changes in the thoughts and interpretation we make in our mind.

Changing interpretation of our mind allows us to change our emotions. Read more on Mindfulness of Emotion Having self awareness allows us to see where our thoughts and emotions are taking us to.

If we want to change our life we need to know ourselves before we can act. We need to know what we need to do in the right direction and it is not possible to do that until we know ourselves.

As we grow in self awareness , we will better understand why we feel what we feel and why we behave what we behave.

These understanding give us the freedom to change things we would like to change about ourselves and create the life we want.

"All you need to do is keep your sense of simple awareness solid and strong, and nothing will be able to overwhelm you"~~Ajaan Fuang Jotiko

Self awareness is developed through practices in focusing our attention on details of our personality and behaviour.

We can't learn self awareness from reading a book or reading this website,by doing so, we are focusing our attention on the reading material not paying attention to our own behaviour, emotions and personality. Read more about Self Awareness Exercises

Your State of Being: Where are you now?

For most of our waking life our attention is directed outward - to the workplace, to the television screen, to newspapers and magazines, to films and video, to canned music, to the noise of traffic and to the voices and demand of other people.

Small wonder that we have little or no time to stop and look inward and address the vital mystery that accompanies us each day of our lives,the mystery of who and what are we?

So the question 'where are you now?' refers to where you are within yourself.

For much of our lives, particular during the formative years of our childhood, other people have been trying to tell us who we are. And on occasion these voices may be conflicting.We grown up with a bewildering number of labels that other people have chosen for us.

Parents and teachers, friends, partners, colleagues, politicians, marketing executives, theologians, bank managers, biologist and physicists have all tried to tell uswhether we are good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, sensitive or insensitive, thrifty or extravagant, unselfish or selfish and so on.

Although we are right to take some heed of what others tell us, for we live in a social world, the only person who can really know you is YOU yourself.

You are your own expert.

The question of "where are you now?" is designed to ask you to think a little about yourself - not in terms of worldly success but in terms of your state of being.

• Have you come to believe in all the labels others have chosen to fasten on you, or can you discriminate between them?

• Are you at peace with yourself, and at home in your own mind?

• Are you aware of the pattern of your own thoughts, of the things that preoccupy your mind?

• Are your thoughts under your control?

• Who is in charge within you mind, you or your mental chatter that insist on returning to things you would rather forget, on past arguments and embarrassments, on vain wishes and longings, on unproductive fantasies?

Begin To Know Yourself Here:

Recommended Reading

Awareness is sometimes described as the ‘witness’, whereas the thinking mind is the ‘judge’.

Focus Awareness: The Path of Concentration
We begin the journey by developing a more focus awareness. This includes a level of sustained concentration and additionally contains an element of self observation.

Using the mind in this way is very different from how we use our mind in daily awareness.

Concentration is not an end itself but the necessary precondition that excludes distractions and diversion. Without it no subject for meditation can be held in the mind.

Ordinary Concentration vs Meditation Concentration
In ordinary concentration the mind is focused on an external object or a mental idea. From childhood we have been practicing concentration on external objects as a part of the natural process of perception.

Real meditation is a complete reversal of this process of perception. It means turning the mind or the self back upon its source.

To turn the habitually outgoing mind inward to its source is an admittedly difficult task.

Daily Awareness
"The objectives is to be in awareness, you must simply be aware of what you do when you are doing it, not afterward."

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