The Art of Self-Awareness

Nothing is more imperative for the enhancement of our personal life than the development of our self-awareness; proficient self-awareness is the primary source of our effective intellectual and emotional life that has one essential result- quality.

"Self-awareness--... to understand the inner world of needs, motives, thoughts, mental states, emotions and bodily feelings..." ~ Nathaniel Branden (1997)

And the older we get the more extensive and substantial these flexible features of our consciousness become- we have wider vistas with more and more potentials, but to get more we need an increasingly efficient process of intelligent self-awareness.

Just as engineers become increasingly efficient with a widening understanding of their professional field, we can become increasingly efficient with the widening fields of our personal life.

Internally, we are a system of reciprocal processes of mind and body that define, understand, make decisions and then intelligently act to propel our experiences forward- around hazards and toward rewards, both external and internal.

And when our three fundamental centers- our body, emotions and intelligence- are all pulling together we think, feel and act efficiently as a whole person, and it is our pro-active self-awareness that effectively orchestrates this process.

Our processes of living are going to continue irrespective of our degrees of focused self-awareness- life happens anyway- but the higher the degrees of our self-awareness vis-à-vis the higher the quality of our life experiences; self-awareness is our built-in guidance system that keeps us on the solid roads of life and out of its swamps.

That's what human awareness is all about to begin with; just look at how much effort we put into the 'teamwork' relationships of our social and employment responsibilities where we increasingly learn to effectively navigate that world without stumbling into obstacles and stepping on one another's toes.

And we all know what it feels like to 'stumble around' bumping into internal obstacles and stepping on our own toes- human growth is the appearance of new vistas and desires that have a propensity to leave our old desires- with their values , responses and actions- behind.

But with this continuous process of 'chrysalises' inner turmoil can arise causing conflicting inner relationships between our new and old thoughts and emotions- it's an unavoidable process of living.

Internally we are just as complex as the external world, if not more so, and we require just as much attention. Self-awareness is an art that requires the same intentional efforts we give to the external world yet will yield the same constructive results, when we listen to- and are mindful of- our 'self'...

"... if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself." (Rollo May, 1975)

Sounds harsh but its true- we've all had our external standard of social trust betrayed by someone else in life and it stings when we become aware of it; and we all have experienced internal stings as well when we've come close to betraying our changing, expanding internal standards; that's self-awareness in action.

The fundamental premise of self-awareness (1) is monitoring our shifting internal compass and expanding topography: the sustained development of our ability to adhere to our own expanding personal desires, goals and standards of morality and ethics requires authentic self-awareness 'today'.

Authentic self-appraisal is especially crucial when it comes to understanding and guiding our complex emotions, which are fully capable of 'slipping under the radar' of our intelligent self-awareness and becoming 'loose cannons' on the deck of our life- emotions are re-active