The Basics & Benefits of Self-Awareness
A mildly literary description of building self-understanding (and why it’s hard but good to do).
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Self-awareness is like a romance. Elusive, exciting, ever-evolving. We don’t know how far to tap into our self knowing, but we know that we want it. The feeling of self-awareness is both awe-inspiring and entirely terrifying.
To understand who we are with increasing objectivity is a part of time passing. As we grow up and gather experiences and data of all kinds, we generally learn who we are with increasing accuracy. Unless, of course, you can’t stand self-knowing and drink or scroll or gossip or zone out instead.
Or, worse yet, if you think that you enjoy developing your sense of self but actually don’t. So you disregard the hints of friends and therapists and journal out things that, perhaps, aren’t as true as you want to believe. You meditate upon false concepts of self and brag about the wrong things at parties.
Or, ideally, you are someone who cares about being good in this world, and about being good to yourself, too. You want to have clear awareness of yourself. You want to create an accurate yet changeable knowledge of your identity and your presence.
So, you don’t fixate on yourself. Instead, you allow in real information and catalog it, consciously and unconsciously, with efficacy. Then, you apply that information to continually iterate upon your life and way of being as needed.
And we cannot disregard the strange crux of self-awareness: the point of view. Objectivity is a complicated term for this idea. What’s more, the idea of perspective is muddy, convoluted, and quite often almost painful.
The torrential rains of external data and the thick layers of compacted dust of details that make up our internal identity meet at the ground of our being. The image of who we are among fellow humans becomes clouded and obscured, caked with its contradictory substance. So we build up a more flexible picture of ourselves and hope for accuracy.
Lastly, we can observe our relationship to ourself and, perhaps, to something much greater. This final aspect of self-hood and self-awareness is the most philosophical, and has been widely described or identified by ancient figures, religious leaders, and contemporary thinkers. The relationship to ourself is often reflected in our relationship to all of existence, nature, or the idea of God.
And, just as we interact with the natural world or spiritual concepts, we interact with our own nature — with the internal experience of being within ourselves. Although we might displace our love or frustrations toward ourselves onto something greater, we still feel the feelings of inhabiting our own body and mind.
When we really notice the truth of this self-relationship, we may feel things like reverence, self-pride, self-compassion or love, fear, joy, anger, and far, far beyond. This internal emotional, mental, and physical experience is intricate like any other, but also often ignored or taken as a bland fact of reality.
When in meditation, many find this experience of self-hood to be exactly the same as all other humans across time, beneath the details of self-concept or identity. But that is only one perspective and we all must find our own. Even if we try to avoid knowing ourselves entirely, then that, in itself, becomes the experience.
Yet, we all have these three components: relationship to awareness, relationship to society, and relationship to self or existence.
Our self-ness shows up in all three. And our awareness or lack of awareness drastically influences the experience of all three aspects. So, we must fight the very human impulse to shy away from ourselves and our self-awareness. We must bravely commit to learning about exactly who we are and how we change over time. This can be a retrospective process, too.
But more often, as we live through each moment, we notice the history of past moments like an unpredictable tide, ebbing and flowing in and out of our consciousness. And, I’ll add, we must understand that the unconscious mind is vastly larger, greater, faster, and more comprehensive than what we can consciously “hear” within. We must give our unconscious permission, as such, to gather data well.
We much consciously understand the loving benefit of allowing ourselves to self-see from within.
Then, we can let the program run. We can accept that we have set forth the instructions to learn ourselves, and notice when it works. We can release the reigns of self-fear and ride bareback through the forest of an expansive view.
We can throw down our weapons and pick up our friends and family. We can hold our own hand, the hands of others, and the hands of the truth, too. We can accept the process of self-discovery — for it is only through self-discovery and awareness that we can truly accept the experience of being human and, as such, embrace the reality of being alive.
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Sources of Inspiration & Their Creators
(… and how they contributed to my understanding)
Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication
by Oren Jay Sofer
(Say What You Mean is a book about interpersonal communication, which inspired me to see the ways in which self-awareness can become a massive asset, and all the ways that I hadn’t yet considered the task.)
To See Ourselves as Others See Us
by Michelle Scorziello
(This Medium article uses a similar style while talking about visual self-knowing. Michelle’s writing for this allowed me to realized that I can discuss philosophy in a way that feels warm, literary, and linguistically or emotionally interesting, rather than just rote analysis. That giving concepts life is exciting and, also, a totally smart and acceptable thing to do.)
On Self Awareness Without Change, Toxic Spirituality, & Chasing Spiritual Insight by jaqueline winkler (or, hood.winkler on Instagram)
(This TikTok video from Jackie was massively helpful for me and definitely significantly inspired my writing of this article. The premise, from my view, was about actually applying self-knowledge, rather than just wandering around looking for more.)
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