Life is rarely a ‘walk in the park’, but it can become much simpler to follow its path if one is paying attention to it. This means learning from the experiences of the past, and applying the knowledge towards making choices in the present; that’s what creating the future is all about.
That may be obvious, but it’s often taken for granted in the midst of strong emotional situations, which can also be times of important decision making. Whether we react to events with the melodrama characteristic of emotional outbursts, or respond to them with wisdom gleaned from lessons of the past, determines how easy or difficult life will be.
Why is this so? When we react to life with strong emotion, we carry the energy of it with us, and at some point, that energy needs to be transformed into something positive, or it will eat away at us in the form of guilt, which is self-blame. This can lead to manifesting illness, injury, or one apparently negative consequence after another.
Remember that we create our lives, and thus no one can be blamed for how we feel from one moment to the next. How we feel is strictly a matter of choice; we either recognize how we’ve set ourselves up to feel one way or another, or we blindly barge through our days blaming the world for our troubles. This is a favourite trick of ego, and is used to give the appearance that we’re not responsible for our choices, or how they make us feel. By projecting blame outside of the self, we ‘escape’ accepting our responsibilities. However, it’s an illusory escape; taking responsibility for our choices is the only way to dissolve guilt, or prevent it from occurring in the first place.
Accepting responsibility is not about blaming ourselves, however; that’s only going to create more negativity, and more guilt. It does mean understanding that we’re human, and therefore fallible; we don’t always recognize that the choices we make, no matter how ‘wrong’ they may appear to be, are really moving us forward in life. The key to self-acceptance, and the growth of our self-awareness, is realizing that we’re always learning, no matter how we may feel about a choice we’ve made.
We might not always feel good about our choices, but as we grow in awareness of what they mean for our progress through life, we can at least begin to change our perspective of them, and find comfort in knowing that they’re helping us discover more about ourselves. This eventually leads to a sense of inner calm, and greater presence of mind to bring to the moments of life. We begin to respond to those with increased calm and thoughtfulness, rather than just get lost in our emotional reactions to them. Who doesn’t want to be calmer, more responsive, and less reactive?
Self-awareness is completely individual, and therefore totally subjective. A person can only determine for themselves how deep their self-awareness is, and may be so lost in ego as to not know what it means to be self-aware to begin with. One either knows there’s more to life and the self, or isn’t thinking about it at all. There’s no right or wrong about this, either; we’re all on separate patterns of growth, and acceptance of this fact can make accepting the self, as well as others, much easier. It also helps us make better choices in life, and learn more from them, too.
