It’s the key to everything – to Freedom!

 

If you’ve read the awareness introduction, you might already have an inkling as to why there’s such a strong emphasis on this faculty of mind and its centrality to personal growth and freedom. There are so many aspects to our psychophysical existence that create limits for us, or more accurately that we allow to.

 

The greatest of these are our thoughts, beliefs and ideas about who we are and what we perceive the world to be. All these aspects, including our emotions and feelings are highly conditioned by our environment, programmed into us since birth through a lifetime of experience.

 

The sad truth is, the world in its current form is not very invested in us living in a truly free and holistically healthy way, so we pick up all manner of suspect beliefs, ways of thinking, habits, feelings, responses and ways of relating that don’t serve us well. We’re not only dealing with the conditioning of our own unique cultural and familial upbringing, we’re at the mercy of the predispositions and tendencies that we brought into the world with us and where they lead us.

 

All these form a very complex filter through which we perceive the world. We’re mostly unaware of this conditioning process and how it informs our reality. If we fully understood it and the human condition, we would be more proactive about consciously directing our minds in healthy, effective and positive ways to alleviate our unhappiness and suffering.

 

This is the whole point of this article and website, to help people be informed about effective ways to lead us towards complete psychophysical freedom, and away from all the things that hold us back from realising our dreams and potential.

 

Since we’re mostly unaware of what’s happening in any given moment of our lives and why, it can be fraught with difficulty and questionable decision making. There are conflicts and self-sabotage, simple situations can seemingly spin out of control, or we feel like we have no idea how we’ve arrived at this point in our lives. We get angry, disappointed, sad, we’re constantly chasing our likes and avoiding dislikes, acting on unhealthy biases, we experience great stress, we’re unsatisfied and unhappy. 

 

We’re all just trying to get on with life, but how much perspective do we have about how that’s playing out? For the most part, we are completely oblivious of being a mish mash of conflicting feelings and emotions informing biased and mostly delusional thinking that rationalises our goals of seeking pleasurable circumstances and avoiding painful ones. We may have highly sophisticated ways of expressing that, but ultimately, it all boils down to the same thing.

 

The role of awareness or mindfulness in all this is to become fully conscious individuals so that we can start directing our life experience, rather than being its half conscious unsatisfied passenger. This is the fundamental point behind The Inspired Warrior’s invitation: ‘Change your mind, change your life’. Real freedom of mind can only come from being aware of and understanding the conditions under which we exist.

 

Over time, with continued application of mindfulness, what is revealed to us is the nature of mind and body and how these phenomena, with all their complexity, inform our experience of reality. This includes the way we think, the way we hold beliefs, what underpins our biases and likes versus dislikes. Welcome to know our emotions and how they affect our perceptions and thinking, also how our ‘feeling tone’ affects how we rationalise our positions and points of view.

 

With observation comes perspective, we realise that all these inputs have less veracity than we thought they did, in fact they are so changeable and dependant on conditions as to be completely unreliable. These same wayward phenomena have been informing our decisions and actions our entire life!

 

As we gain greater awareness, clarity and understanding, we can free ourselves and unhook from these ‘taught’ ways of relating and thinking, behaving and reacting and start choosing different ones based on a grounded and mindful presence and perspective. A profound freedom emerges because up until this point, our lives have not really been our own. With awareness, we become fully conscious and can direct our lives with as much forthrightness and clarity as possible.

 

Waking up in this way, we become activated. We want to get across all areas of our life and start tuning everything up, but we do it in a caring, gradual, intuitive way that is guided by our awareness which naturally corrects in the most positive sense of the word.

 

There’s a continual subtle increase in our sensitivity to what we think, feel and do. We naturally begin to enact helpful behaviours and strategies, and retract from negative ones. We become more aesthetically aware, we care about our environment, the spaces we inhabit. 

 

This positive movement is greatly supported by the practice of meditation which substantially deepens mindfulness in our daily lives. It trains this powerful faculty of mind that observes and penetrates reality and reveals what’s behind the overlay of our mistaken perceptive and thinking tendencies. Awareness is in a very real sense a superpower and make no mistake, it will radically change our lives, and it can never be exhausted for deeper practice and understanding.