Building Internal Awareness

Too often, our lives are spent on autopilot. We go through our routines and interact with the world around us, reflexively responding to situations as we go. Through the busyness that entails most of our days, it's rare for us to take the opportunity to turn inwards and reflect on our present internal experiences. That's exactly what I want to draw attention to today.

Building awareness entails the act of mindful noticing of the present moment without judgement. It is often referred to as mindfulness and it can involve noticing many forms of our internal experiences. It can involve paying attention to our physical sensations such as feeling hot or cold, noticing an upset stomach, hunger, shortness of breath, or having tense muscles. It could entail noticing our emotions, such as how we may be feeling excited, tired, at peace, resentful, and how those feelings change over time. Often our feelings can also be found in the aformentioned physical sensations in some way. We could also pay attention to our thoughts, which involves images or a commentary of our selves, others or the world running through our minds in any given moment.

Unfortunately all three of these aspects of our experience tend to be ignored when we rush through our days, with little opportunity to reflect on what is existing within us. In the process, we are missing many signals from our body that could help us reflect and process our experiences, respond effectively, protect and look after ourselves, look more critically at our actions or thoughts, or understand why certain thoughts tend to arise as they do. For the aspects that do reach conscious awareness, they may come and go so quickly that we may react to a situation without even recognizing what we are really reacting to.

I believe that cultivating internal awareness of our physical sensations, thoughts, and feelings is an important first step in making positive changes in our lives. After all, how can we know how to respond differently to a situation if we don't know how we're responding to begin with? By noticing our patterns and paying attention to our body and brain, we regain the ability to reflect and choose whether we want to respond differently.

If you are interested in building your own awareness, a simple starting point would be to try the following exercise. First of all, in a quiet environment stop whatever you are doing and simply be still. Now pick an aspect you'd like to pay attention to - whether it be your emotions, physical sensations, or thoughts. These three tend to impact one another so it can be tricky to tease them apart, so just be gentle on yourself and trust that it will get easier the more you practice this. You could try closing your eyes to reduce the external stimuli coming in to make it easier. Once you've picked your focus, try to turn your attention inwards and fill in the following:  I am noticing ____________.  Try not to judge whatever arises, all you need to do is notice it exists. You can continue this process for as long as you like, noticing what comes and goes, what changes, even noticing when you get distracted and refocusing back onto the exercise (which I should add is a natural and expected part of this process).

If you filled in the blank, well done! It means you just practiced being mindful of an internal experience. The more you practice this skill, the easier you'll find it gets to do this.  

I want to briefly note that we can increase our external awareness towards the physical actions we take or through the senses in which we experience the world. Sometimes it can be easier to build this mindfulness skill before turning inwards. As I discuss in another article, this skill can also be cultivated intentionally.

If you found this article interesting or would like to further expand your mindfulness practice, I would encourage you to seek extra resources. There are many apps, YouTube videos, and websites that discuss and lead guided practices to further cultivate this skill. Finally, seeing a therapist who incorporates mindfulness into their therapeutic approach could help support you in further building awareness.