Embracing Inspirational Awareness: Five Perspective-Changing Benefits
Articles By Melissa Wadsworth
Live Aware! Sounds simple enough. And yet, for many of us, living with true awareness takes practice and commitment. It requires that we nurture our sense of wonder, curiosity and genuine interest each day. It requires that we refresh our connections to the people and essential elements of the world around us. Only then can the "Aha" truth of awareness resonate with us: What you notice matters!
Living with awareness naturally opens our eyes to the gifts to be enjoyed in daily life. At the same time, conscious intention and imagination opens our hearts to the fantastic possibilities that exist for creating a more satisfying life. Need more persuasion? Consider the following inspirational benefits:
1. Awareness enhances your receptivity.
We're each receptors of energy and information. Awareness improves your receptivity to signals and signposts that can help with daily decision-making. Awareness increases your receptivity to the sensory surprises and gifts that are present. As an open channel your life tends to become layered with enhanced visual richness. This inevitably switches on your other senses, which in turn naturally enhance your daily life experience.
Likewise, awareness helps you to be more aware of the particular energy and information that you send back out into the world. Thoughts and words like "no one will notice," and "it doesn't matter" should begin to fade from your vocabulary.
If you go through life half asleep or tied to limiting habits, you may be blocking all kinds of information from making it to your conscious mind. Living aware can help ensure that you are cognizant of all the resources available to you.
2. Enhanced awareness facilitates focus.
We all get busy. And without an intention to stay aware we can move through our days on the surface. It's a little like giving a presentation and looking over everyones' heads. You're not making real contact.
Awareness fine-tunes your innate ability to focus on life components. As you first practice awareness you may take in a grander view of everything in "your sights," but then your awareness lands - like a butterfly coming to rest. It may land on something that adds beauty to your day, it may land on a conversation of useful information, it may land on a bus banner that points you to just the resource you've been seeking. Focus lets you know what's important to you at any given moment. Be aware of what catches your attention and why?
Focus also lets you know how you are feeling about your life and often signals when change needs to occur. For instance, a travel expert who used to be a stewardess said that she knew it was time to quit when she kept focusing on the one obnoxious traveller on each of her flights rather than all the other friendly and polite passengers. Recognizing what your focus tells you empowers your life.
3. Positive awareness generates appreciation.
After all you can't appreciate what you don't notice. Taking the time to notice something new or to re-consider something you've taken for granted can refresh your sense of life appreciation. Photography is a great tool for building awareness and appreciation, since it naturally directs you to focus on objects of interest and beauty. You can also simply practicing seeing the world with the eye of a photographer. Look around and consider what is photo-worthy.
4. Active awareness stimulates life clarity.
With your observational powers turned on high, the brain seems to respond to mindfully presented stimuli with correlations, personal insights and revelations. Mindful awareness simultaneously quiets the mind and sharpens our mental processing so that helpful data can surface. So leave spaces in your day for quiet awareness and contemplation, even if it's for five minutes. Often we just work so very hard at trying to make it all work out right. Consider whether you need to provide more space and awareness so things can unfold. Consider whether you
leave enough room in your days, or in your life perspective, for the easiest route to your goals to reveal itself.
5. Open-hearted awareness leads to connection.
Awareness tends to tether you to your life experience with tiny treads of connection, acquired one at a time.
Being aware of how you are in the world may result in you feeling more connected to your unique qualities and talents. Being aware of opportunities to interact with others can help you feel more part of a community. When you really listen, which is a type of awareness, you can better hear what other people can offer you, or how you can help them. Such satisfying connections just make existence feel more successful.
Living aware leads to you being more receptive, to enhanced focus, to greater appreciation and more life clarity and connection. That's a pretty good return on your efforts. So practice awareness and just see what happens. Copyright 2006 Melissa Wadsworth
About the author
Melissa Wadsworth is a self-help author and speaker specializing in creative awareness and personal growth topics. Sign up for her free "Living Awareness" e-newsletter at: http://www.melissawadsworth.com/ and receive a FREE copy of "Personal Insights: Seven Steps to Empowering Yourself."
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