Fridays - Spiritual Healing
Self-Awareness: The Art of Living in the Moment
October 29, 2017
Opening Comments:
The world today has many ways of getting us connected to everything else but ourselves. The phone and other electronic devices bring us information up to the minute. I’d say many times overloading us with information, which causes us to become disconnected with the present and from ourselves.
Many of us also get carried away with work and our busy schedule and forget to be present. Many times acting like robots and not being able to fully experience life’s moments.
How can we put in to practice what we learn if we don’t know who we are? In my opinion it all starts with getting to know oneself. Becoming self aware is one of the most important jobs we have as we seek to learn and evolve. The work starts from inside out not the other way around.
That is why I choose today’s topic, which is:
Self-Awareness; the Art of Living in the Present Moment
By Dick Rauscher
When you stand on the edge of the ocean and listen to the waves rhythmically pounding the shore as the setting sun touches the water and turns the clouds into a brilliantly painted red sky, do you stand in stillness and awe of the beauty before you, and allow the moment to fully enter your consciousness, or do you reach for your camera to take a picture?
If your impulse is to take a picture, you are probably not fully present to the moment. Your body is there, but your mind is focused on the future thinking about what a great picture you will have for your photo album. Your heart is there, but it is not fully open and present to the moment. You are lacking presence.
Presence is the spiritual ability to be fully in the “now“.
A healthy spirituality means you have learned to embrace life with an open heart and a consciousness is fully present to the experience of “thin-places” in life.
Stated simply, when you are spiritually present and embracing the “now” with an open heart, you are able to experience those “thin-places” where the veil between this world and the world of spirit is thin and transparent.
The only authentic response in those thin-place moments is the spiritual impulse to “be”; to create poetry, to dance, or to simply stand in the stillness of the moment.
Developing a healthy spirituality is one of the greatest joys that life offers, but it is often difficult to find.
A healthy spirituality is born when we have the courage to look inside; the courage to shine the light of our consciousness into the shadows of our psyche’s dark nature; the courage to become intentionally self-aware.
Until we do, the unconscious fears and heart wounds of childhood trauma will keep our hearts closed and our minds obsessing about the past or worried about the future. The wounded heart has little to no interest in what is happening in the “now” of the present moment.
As children we are essentially born as heart. We were fully open to the awe and wonder of the world. We played and behaved without self-consciousness. We didn’t worry about how others would judge us or whether we looked cool or not. We played with abandon in the present moment.
As we grew we used the relationships we had with others to determine who we were and how we “should” behave. We began to create the “self” we thought others wanted to see.
We rejected our true self and began to create a false self.
Each time we put our true self away and strengthened our false self, we increasingly closed down the heart and spirit of our essential self. We began to embrace fear; the bedrock of all prejudice, judgmentalism, and rejection.
The fear that who we were was not enough. The fear of failure. The fear of loss. We began to feel shame; the sense that we were somehow flawed.
As we created our false sense of self, we hid our “true self” behind an unconscious wall of shame.
We became self-critical and self-judgmental. We found it more and more difficult to belong, to fit in with others. We began to isolate ourselves. We put our feelings away.
We learned to feel good about ourselves by judging others. We were good. They were not.
Over time our spirituality, our sense of awe, and our ability to live in the moment with full presence and full authenticity was also put away.
Our world grew very small, mundane, and often painful. We spent most of our time dreaming about achieving happiness in the future.
Fortunately, the skill required to attain happiness, spiritual growth, and the ability to live in the “now” is simple.
It only requires the courage to begin the inner journey; the journey into self-awareness. Self-awareness can only be experienced in the “now“. It’s the spiritual practice that allows us to discover the beams in our own eye; the beams that our ego would like so much to project into someone else’s eye.
The spiritual practice of deep self-awareness can be a powerful tool for self-growth and self-understanding whenever we find ourselves being judgmental or rejecting of others. It allows us to explore the unconscious beliefs and assumptions we have about ourselves.
Self-awareness allows us to search for the beliefs hidden in the shadows of our psyche that create the negative energy of judgment and rejection. Self-awareness is the spiritual practice of intentionally looking for those beliefs.
Looking into the shadows where our dark nature is hiding can be challenging. But when we have the courage to do that work, we are often amazed to discover that much of the energy and passion for life we enjoyed in childhood has been quietly hiding the shadows of our psyche.
We were afraid to look into that terrible darkness because the childhood feelings of fear, inadequacy, and shame were also hiding there. We preferred to project the shadows of our dark nature onto others.
When we project our unwanted shadow beliefs and traits onto others, we tend to judge others very harshly and our ability to manifest compassion and empathy becomes very limited.
Until we find the courage to look into the dark nature of our own psyche and face our own shadows, we will continue to see those traits in others. The world around us will remain a painful reflection of the world inside of us. Changing the world inside us will change the way we see the world.
When we learn to pay attention; to shine the light of conscious awareness into the shadows of our psyche, whenever we find ourselves judgmental or rejecting of others, we will soon discover that every person we meet has the potential to be a teacher that reflects back to us the contents of our own mind.
The greatest of those teachers will be those people who drive us crazy; those people we can’t stand to be around; they, more than any others, have the power to help us shine light of our consciousness into the shadows of our own dark nature; to illuminate the shadow material that we have spent a lifetime projecting onto others.
It is only through self-awareness that we will learn to see the thin-places that life continually offers us. It is only through self-awareness that we will find the wisdom to put the camera away and stand in silence, stillness, and awe with full presence when we encounter spirit in the “now“, the only place spirit can be found.
From: http://stonyhill-nuggets.com/self-awareness-and-the-art-of-living-in-the-present-moment/
The question, then, is how can we cultivate and develop Self Awareness further:
By becoming self aware and present we can work on our selves and understand the lessons that life is presenting to us.
Tips to practice being self aware and living in the present moment:
Practice Acceptance:
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Offer 'No Resistance'. A spiritual way to live life is to completely accept the present, the way it is and offer no resistance to the flow of life within you[1]. If you could truly realize that resistance is futile and serves no purpose, then a big part of your spiritual practice is done.
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There is a saying in Zen: All that arises, passes away. This means that you cannot stop the flow of life. So completely accept your present circumstances, routines, people around you, habits (bad or good), your personality, thoughts, outer form (physical appearance), fundamentally accept anything in your present as if you have chosen it. [2].
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"Why are there so many ups and downs in my life?” Do you think resisting things like this is going to change one bit about it? In fact, instead of dissolving an undesirable situation, it keeps it there[3].
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True acceptance comes when you don't ask "Why is this happening to me?"[4].
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Don't confuse "no resistance" with "no action." No resistance does not mean to just accept the present and do nothing about it. It means to offer no internal resistance to what is, then the intelligent action comes from deep within you.
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"To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness." Eckhart Tolle.
Be grateful. Feel genuinely grateful for what you have, especially for the present moment. Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation[5] of all abundance
Meditate. On a deeper level, meditation is all about staying in the present.
Be in the present. The enlightenment lies in the present. When our mind wanders to past and future that's when we feel unproductive and irrational pain. So be in the present moment and make it your best friend. Its cause time is always now[6].
Have you noticed that when you replace your worries with a productive and/or joyful task, their magnitude reduces drastically? On the other hand when you take your mind off the task at hand, you feel uncertain.
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Simply just observe. Just observe things, people, the environment around you, thoughts etc, like a background presence, without adding any interpretation to them.
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Smile. When a situation becomes tense, too serious, sad, anxious or fearful, and you feel down, then just smile. Its cause smiling tricks your mind to release feel good chemicals like dopamine. Its like transmuting and channeling the negative energy. Plus it helps you become more aware of sense perceptions.
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Although its not an effective practice to always use a negative situation to smile or become present. Instead be aware as much as you can. Being aware doesn't mean not to think; it means even if you are thinking be there as the background witnessing presence. You are that presence[7].
Sources and Citations
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↑ A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, pg 177
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↑ Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle, Pg 67
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↑ Stillness Speaks, Eckhart Tolle, Pg 25
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↑ A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, Pg 116
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↑ Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle, Pg 21
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↑ Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Vancouver, BC: Namaste Publishing, 1999. Page 135
A time dedicated to our Spiritual and Physical balance and harmony. Everyone is welcome. No previous experience with any spiritual teaching is needed. This meeting is recommended as a “Spiritual Support” to help all of us face our challenges and overcome them with balance and wisdom.
We hope to see you soon at
Spiritist Society Towards the Light.
