A short reflective dialogue (YouTube, 2010) about the difficulty of aligning one’s tone of voice with moment-to-moment awareness. The speaker distinguishes between intellectual noticing and a stronger "real awareness" or witness that can interrupt emotional reactivity, and urges cultivating potency in that awareness so it can 'crash the party' and alter tone in real time.
So I'm wondering, as I continue to work with this process of being kind to myself and dedicating myself to the awareness of my tendency of going into my old behaviors, one thing that's really gotten in the way, even in my best moments of awareness, is my tone of voice. Because no matter how aware I am, my tone matches the emotion more than it matches the awareness. And that continues to be a roadblock for me. Congratulations on having that dual awareness. And the key is that the real awareness is the one that just spoke, which is what I've called my awareness of seeing. My tone of voice is actually not the real awareness. The real awareness is the one that can say out loud to Justin or to someone I'm talking about, you know what? I'm aware that my tone isn't matching what I can see. And this third awareness, or this third element over here that is seeing, gee, I know my tone kind of sucks, but I still can't get control of it, is starting to be seen by the real witness or the real awareness that's saying, stop, stop right now and admit this out loud. It's not enough that the intellect is seeing, that the tone is not the kind one or the warm one or the sensitive one. It's not enough. Now, the difficulty is again that this awareness, the real awareness, doesn't have potency yet. It doesn't come in and actualize itself and crash the party of the moment. And so what you really want to do is again, go to that kind place inside you that says, I want to build the potency and the fire in this real awareness that's going to crash the party in the moment. And it's going to come in and say, let me stop right now and say what I see, that my tone is not where I really want it to be. I. I want to say out loud. And then bringing that overtly into the moment is when you know you're in real awareness. And the fire, the strength, has matched the emotion. And until you're bringing it into the moment, you know that you're not in real awareness yet. And you're still a work in progress, sincerely developing the potency of awareness. Because awareness is a sacred, powerful force stronger than emotion, and it can come in and interrupt anything.
