The Death of Self-Awareness

It's so incredible to see in the popular culture people talking about mindfulness and about self awareness and being present again because those things are so vital to our ability to feel engaged and happy and joyful and fulfilled in life. But a lot of people are struggling with those things about feeling that sense of self awareness in their life, that. That real connection, that real presence that. That vitality in the now, that. That experience of the moment, if you will. And. And so let's talk about that, because so many people really do feel detached from that. They kind of feel numb as they go throughout the day, or so frustrated or so stressed that they're not feeling that bliss or that connection of vitality that could be experienced every single moment. So why I call it the death of self awareness or the Four Horsemen of self awareness, you know, if these things are at play in your life, then it's a lot harder to experience the day as magically as it could be experienced. It's hard to feel that sense of the charged life. So let's talk about those. The first horseman of the Four Horsemen of self awareness is lack of direction. The people are somehow directionlessness, if that's a word they have during the day. They're just kind of going through the motions. They're showing up unconsciously to the world in a reactive state all day long without any of that proactive, more conscious or intentional idealization of what they want, who. Who they are, what they want to achieve or feel or sense that day. Right. It's like you could walk across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and just be like, I'm at the Golden Gate Bridge. Let's walk across it. Boop ba doop. Or you could say, this is going to be amazing. I can't wait to see the things and have a real sense of aliveness, vitality, enthusiasm about the experience. Right? To really sense it and feel it. I know you've been to landmarks or you've been in relationships, something that was amazing. Maybe you had a wedding and you can remember every single moment because you looked forward to it and you said, you know, I'm really going to sense this. I'm really going to experience these times. Maybe when you had the birth of a child, or you dropped a child off at school and everything kind of played in slow motion because you made the moment meaningful. You were mindful to it. You were attentive to your senses. You were attentive to what was happening around you. You were attentive to details and moments and just the experience. It's bringing that attentiveness to the moment that is mindfulness. It's being alert and aware to what's happening around you and engaged with it, allowing it, accepting and feeling it and sensing it in a way that life starts to pick up its sense of aliveness. Right? It's what makes life so magical and meaningful for people when you can get to that state. But you have to have the direction in mind. You have to say, okay, this day I'm going to experience this day. I've just been ho humming through the days, been going unconsciously through them. I today I'm going to experience the things. I'm going to experience and sense and feel and understand what's happening around me. I'm really going to connect with the now. And you have to give yourself that gift. It's a direction in your mind that says, hey, experience this world, guy, gal, right? It's getting in it. It's really sensing and feeling the second horseman. If lack of direction is the first one, the second thing is detachment. And that detachment is detachment from any feeling emotion or even sometimes expectation to the day. It's not feeling anything and allowing yourself to feel things even when they're good. You know, a lot of people have done so much work in their life to blot out negative emotion that they're not letting in positive emotion or so many people feel like they've been failing so much in their lives, they don't have a connection to the things when they do succeed. So they're not integrating success. They might have a good series of things happens to them, but they don't feel them. They don't allow themselves to take that success in that win in it and really internalize it and say, wow, I did that. And sense that moment of satisfaction or pride to doing something amazing. They never allow themselves any of the positive emotions of life and they don't allow those positive emotions to stick to settle in. That's why one of the first things that a psychologist will do in working with a new patient is make sure at the end of the day they start journaling positive things that happen throughout their day. It's been scientifically proven that you can essentially just start a gratitude journal and lift up your level of happiness in life. Why? Because now you're paying attention for the things that do bring you positive emotion and happiness in life. You're recording them, you're writing them down. It's physicalizing that memory and feeling it and sensing it and allowing it to come in. So try that. You Know if you feel like you've been detached from emotion in life, it's time to allow that back in. To allow yourself to feel passionate and excited about things again. To allow yourself to get dorked out about a new learning opportunity, a new thing you're gonna see. To allow yourself to say, you know what? I did that good for me to have a sense of pride about some things. You know, you deserve that you did some good things. And it's also allowing yourself not to be detached from negative things. You know, so many people are so scared to experience a negative thing that it's like they've never developed any strength or capability of dealing with those things. Right. Do you know anybody who can't handle conflict? They're always running from conflict because they've always detached from that emotion. Oh, I'm scared. I'm scared. Part of the way that we become mature and enlightened adults is we start to face the things that we are fearful of or we are scared of. And we allow ourselves to feel it and to sense it. It's okay to feel the fear. It's okay to feel uncomfortable about something. It's okay to feel vulnerable. It's okay to feel what other people might call negative or scary or uncertain emotions. Because the more comfort that you start to have with uncomfortable emotions, the more comfort you have with uncomfortable situations, the more you start to develop more consciousness about how to deal with them. Right? And the only way you're ever going to develop comfort with them is allowing yourself to accept that and acknowledge, wow, this is the feeling I'm having right now about this. Why am I feeling this way? Is this how I want to feel? Will this add or contribute here? Is there anything I can do to shift or generate a new emotion that would be more positive or healthy for me? That's consciousness. So you have to be. You don't have to. You can't do that. If you're detached from every emotion or every opportunity and every experience that comes into your life. You have to feel again, the third horseman that steals away our own sense of self awareness. It's so simple, it's so obvious. And that is disassociation. And that is disassociating ourselves, our identities with situations. Not just detaching from things, but going through experience of our lives and saying, well, that's not me showing up every single day and doing something, going through the wall. Well, the real me wouldn't do that. You know, that's not the real me. You know, the real me is more Passionate than that. Or you go out with your friends and you go home, and now you're like, well, you know, the real me is more fun. You just didn't. You, you know, you didn't give me a chance. We needed another date before you'd realize how much fun I am. And there's this disassociation that you've gone through experiences, and you're saying, well, that's not me. No, that is you. Good news and bad news. What you've been showing up as in this last week, this last month, this last year, that's you. Even if you disassociate it from, say, well, that's not me. And that's what a lot of people try to do. They say, well, Brendan, that's not the real me. No, that's the real you. That's what has been showing up. That's what the real. The real result, the real effect, the real behavior. That was you. Stop trying to dissociate it from it. Part of awareness is accepting who we truly are, not just in our mind, but in our behaviors, in the world. To accept and say, you know what? Gosh, that was me. I did do that. I am responsible for myself. I am responsible for my actions, my emotions, my attitudes, how I treat other people. And you know what? I need to evaluate that, and I need to ask, is that the person I want to be? Am I happy with that? Am I proud of that? Is there something I could shift in my character or my behavior or my beliefs that would make me a better person? And, you know, if we always disassociate and say, well, that's not the real me, that's okay. You don't understand. The real me is like this. You know what? If you haven't been showing the world the real you, then you have not been practicing self awareness. You have not been demonstrating consciousness. You've been demonstrating the opposite of disassociation. So it's about time. Reconnect. Take ownership and responsibility for the person that you've become, even if some of that is negative. For you to say, oh, gosh, okay, I got to change this. I remember in my own life, I would find myself as I got hurried sometimes when I was in a big hurry, I'd be rude to people. And I would say, well, I'm not a rude person. But wait, if I'm being rude to people, I am a rude person. And I had to take that at heart and say, well, Brendan, that's not the real you. Well, it is. That's who you're showing up as. So I better shift my behavior. And the way I experience those moments of hurry and how I treat people in those moments of hurry to become the person I know I could be versus the person I was being. I know you follow that, and it's so important. And so I hope that you'll find some inspiration there to really take a look at your life and ask who's been showing up and are you happy with that person? And if not, show up in a new way, Change. Find something within that enlivens you, and it puts you in a more positive attitude and more positive character that you're proud of. And I'll say the last horseman is distraction. You know, distractions steal people's awareness. You know, we know from the art and the science of studying flow or that neural connection in which we can see that people are truly engaged in whatever activity they're doing. Well, we know for sure that the more distractions that come in, the less engaged they are. And the challenge is, we're also distracted in a million ways right now. And with all this distraction we're experiencing, we're not having the opportunity to have any full awareness to a moment because our phone's texting at us or our cells going on over here, or our computer's over there, or the kids need this. And we're lacking the ability to bring our phone essence and energy into the moments that are meaningful in our lives and to create meaningful moments in our lives by bringing our full essence and energy into those minutes and moments of our lives. So you have to say, okay, can I minimize distraction? Because the biggest art of developing more awareness in our life is knowing how to deal with distractions, but have a focal point of what we desire, what we intend to feel, give, contribute, or create and be focused on that and be aware to it and feel and experience and be part of that and not allow. 50 things. There's a reason when you go in an artist studio, it's the artist sitting there alone by themselves painting or by themselves working or by. There's a reason that there's these moments in our lives when we need to create something significant, we need to get away. And that's because we need to apply our full awareness to it. And so look at your life and ask, on a scale of 1 to 10, how distracted am I? 10. Being so distracted, nothing is felt, experienced, or moved or progressed in life. And one being, hey, you're pretty focused. You know, you're good. You're totally focused. Ten's a problem. One's not a problem if you're at a 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 in distraction. Trust me, you're not getting experience the magic, the joy that is a sense of presence. You're not getting that experience of consciousness, that experience of vitality and real engagement with life, because you're being pulled in too many directions. And at some point our energy, the more it's dissipated by all these distractions, the less we feel in life. But the good news about all these things, every single one of that I've just mentioned, are under your command. These are things you can't control. You can get more direction in your life without just choosing to have it basically right. You can choose not to be detached to experiences, rather engage with them, to not be disassociated as a person, but rather choose the person who's experiencing and creating those things. And you can minimize distractions in your life when you do that. And an entire new level of life opens up to you. It feels so incredibly engaged. You're so enthusiastic to experience it and every single day. And that's what we call the charge life.