Thrive and Awaken® Tip

Awareness is always here. It is the quiet presence noticing your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and experiences. For most of us it sits in the background while the activity of the mind takes center stage. Thoughts, worries, plans, and reactions become so loud that we forget the deeper awareness in which they are appearing.

When we become more conscious, we expand our capacity to observe inner and outer experiences with clarity, presence, and choice rather than automatic reactivity.  Awareness, the knowing presence, becomes more apparent. Instead of being completely absorbed in every thought or emotion, you see them arise and pass. You will still think, feel, and react; but there is also a subtle sense of watching it happen.

Over time this awareness moves from the background to the foreground of experience. Life continues to unfold with its joys and challenges, yet there is more space around everything. You begin to experience yourself not only as the one thinking and feeling, but also as the awareness in which thinking and feeling occur.

This shift does not remove you from life. Rather, it allows you to participate more fully and consciously in it.

Reflection

Take a moment today to be the awareness that is noticing. Thoughts may come and go, emotions may rise and fall, and the body may shift from calm to tension and back again. Something quietly knows all of it. Rest your attention there for a few moments and see what you discover.