Self-Awareness Methods.
The basis of The Self-Healing Path, as the foundation of this website, reveals there are seven steps between our current situation and the change we so desperately need. Seven steps before we can change, and it all starts with a requirement to strengthen our self-awareness. Self-awareness is the first step in the healing technique and a powerful chronic pain alternative therapy.
It’s going to take work on our part. If we are incapable of being honest with ourselves, then progress will be difficult. The psychological weight of the fear, shame, and regrets we hold onto and run away from will haunt us until we finally turn and confront our internal demons and quell the battles we fight within our own minds.
Considering that stress-related illnesses are the #1 reason for doctor visits, it’s not difficult to assume a large portion of our population is running on self-awareness fumes. So many people take self-awareness for granted, and either choose to ignore it or neglect it. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to nurture it. This article is about how to nurture our self-awareness with compassion.
Without self-awareness, people will lack compassion, exhibit no self-love, and experience a loss of connection with others. And without self-compassion, there is no path towards self-healing. Therefore, we need to become more conscious by increasing self-awareness.
“Many of us just aren’t inclined to spend much time on self-reflection. Even when personal feedback is presented to us, we’re not always open to it, because honest feedback isn’t always flattering. Consequently, many of us have a pretty low level of self-awareness. Self-awareness can improve our judgment and help us identify opportunities for professional development and personal growth.”
Self-Awareness Methods
Self-awareness is the key to eliminating chronic pain
Self-awareness is the key to eliminating our chronic pain, easing our depression, and curing our mental illnesses. A new theory helps to simplify our understanding of the nature of ourselves without needing to argue about whether consciousness is an accident of astronomical biological processes or intelligent creation.
Mind-body wellness gives us the language to make reference to the nature of our intelligence without offending our political and religious sensibilities. We can even discuss the fabric of our being and the possibility of self-healing without needing to make reference to parts of the brain or use psychological terms.
Mindbody science does not treat the mind as being separate from the body. The new theory holds that “the body is mind.” Our body has a mind of its own, completely separate from our consciousness! On average, 37 trillion cells operate autonomously within an intelligent organic network to keep us alive. When we treat our mindbody as a complete entity, a path towards self-healing becomes straightforward.
Beyond animal instinct
Humans are emerging from the darkness of the animal instincts which helped us survive as a species. We must learn to differentiate our conscious free will from our bodymind and take command over our mindbody so that our animal instincts no longer control us. Without self-awareness, we remain shackled to our pain and suffering, and the idea of recovery seems hopeless. Without self-awareness, we are trapped inside a body which is operating mainly on instinct to keep us alive, with seemingly little control of our own.
An understanding of mind-body wellness will give us the tools we need to take command of our health choices, interrupt our constant stream of negative thoughts, and eventually we learn to love ourselves unconditionally.
This will inevitably result in the healing we so desperately need. We learn to heal ourselves by becoming more self-aware. It’s going to take some work.
“This is something only complex brains can do: not just sense and react, but learn, adapt, and problem solve.”
One mind, two minds
Mounting evidence for the role of the mind in disease and healing is leading to a higher acceptance of mind-body medicine. The connection between body and mind isn’t new and s the basis for many schools of thought, especially outside of the U.S. medical-pharmaceutical industry.
From the dark ages until yesterday, it’s been considered that “unhinged” people have demons. Who is not familiar with a TV show or movie which depicts an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, as a metaphor for the voices in our head?
And who hasn’t had the distinct feeling that our bodies were against us at one point or another? What we know now makes sense of all this: our self is conscious, and the body is subconscious. The conscious mind versus the subconscious mind. It’s not a big mystery anymore.
We’ve all experienced reactive behavior we later regret, telling others, “it wasn’t me!” Without a doubt, we can all agree there’s another factor besides our own free will which affects our moods, thoughts, and behaviors. This “other factor” has been referred to by many names, including the ego, our dark side, our shadow, our pain body, our animal mind, our lizard brain, and our subconscious mind.
Physical & Emotional Trauma
Now we know the body is the subconscious mind. The intelligent organization of 37 trillion cells which work together to keep you alive, whether we’re aware of it or not. That same cellular structure gives rise to our self-awareness; however, there’s a circuit-breaker between our lizard-brain to our frontal lobes which gets tripped during heavy-impact painful emotion or physical pain.
Here’s an observation from numerous personal accounts within books related to trauma: when we experience physical and emotional trauma, the external stimulus is shunted away from our awareness as a protection of the delicate neural circuitry there in our brains. When we’re overwhelmed from the shock of an external stimulus, the tissues of the body receive the brunt of the blow. The impact waves of the trauma, whether physical or emotional, are distributed by the central nervous system to protect the reasoning centers of the brain.
Our stored trauma is reflected in our behaviors
The end result of our brain’s protections from physical or emotional impacts is that the trauma comes to rest in the very cells of our muscles and bones. Over time this builds up and is strengthened by the feedback loops of our darkest thoughts. We then experience chronic tension, stress, and anxiety as our reward. Our disease rates are proportional to the level of unmitigated trauma within the general population. Pain, insomnia, self-medication with drugs and alcohol, and over-indulgent self-hating behaviors are suffered by over 100 million people just in the United States.
This translates to between one out of every three or four people. A significant portion of everyone around us is in some kind of pain, experiencing sleep disturbance, suffering strife of one form or another, and generally miserable while barely keeping the lid on it. These chronic stressors can accumulate within groups and manifest as community protests and social unrest. The pain is reflected in the way people treat each other. We’re all reactive, with short fuses, about ready to blow at any moment, flipping the bird and honking our horns all the way to work.
This pain and the depths of despair and suffering we can experience as humans even precipitate incidents of gun violence.
When a throttled bypass of awareness happens
A full bypass of self-awareness would mean unconsciousness. Everyone who has experienced drug- or impact-induced unconsciousness has had their circuit-breaker tripped! Our body’s cells are recording their experience, even when we’re unconscious. This is the nature of the subconscious mind.
Alternatively, a throttled bypass of awareness is like when someone reports their pain as a 9 out of 10; they are barely holding onto reality because their pain has stolen perhaps as much as 90% of their awareness!
Unfortunately, it’s very likely that a throttled bypass of awareness is happening almost constantly to everyone who experiences stress-related issues. Stress and a lack of awareness are what predisposes us to sickness and accidents; anyone who’s had a serious accident has experiential evidence of this.
Stress is America’s #1 Health Problem. This website contains many possible solutions to America’s stress problem. Alarming healthcare trends and record-breaking drug company profits give rise to the need for there to be an organization of easily available information anyone with chronic illness can use right now to help ease their pain and suffering.
The Self, Body, Mind Relationship
This is the basis of a renewed relationship with our bodymind. Furthermore, the theory holds that emotional and physical trauma are stored in all our body’s cells, not just our brain. Our body remembers. Our 37 trillion cells are continuously recording long-term memory into DNA, and traumas experienced by you can get passed on to your grandchildren (4)(5).
Thirty-seven trillion cells! While you read this, they continue their work within an intelligent electrical-organic network to keep you alive. These cells are doing their job mainly without your conscious awareness. When we become more self-aware through the modalities listed in this guide, we learn to more often assert our conscious awareness and remain stable in less comfortable situations. We are less likely of being controlled by our animal-mind reactions when life puts on the pressure.
Pleasure and pain
Mind-body concepts do not rely upon our belief in a material world or a spiritual world, but do involve having faith both in our own intelligence, as well as faith in the intelligence of our bodymind. Since our desires guide us towards pleasure and away from pain, self-awareness naturally leads us to self-healing activities. These activities have a cumulative effect.
If you believe you can help yourself and your bodymind, then you can.
A two-way relationship
Once we embark upon our journey towards wellness and healing of our pain, the two-way relationship with our bodymind becomes apparent. And while our bodymind may have the ability to temporarily revoke our free will, we also hold the power to override our body’s autonomous systems. A simple example of overriding our bodymind systems, of course, is taking conscious control of our breathing.
Our ultimate wellness goal and the solution to our health problems is to gain ultimate self-awareness.
Into the body through the breath
Like almost anything learned, our self-awareness plus bodymind-awareness comes with practice. You might need to establish some kind of reminder on your mirror or a post-it on your door to help remember to practice whatever you may be working on (breathing?). Decide to regularly think to yourself something like, “be aware of the energy of my body,” or maybe, “I’m listening to every part of my body, from my head to my toes.” We should be asking ourselves, “Am I consciously breathing?”
We need to be open to how our body feels and learn ways to describe it. Think of your bones, your muscles, your blood, your organs, your brain, and put awareness on your insides in general. Try to FEEL all of it. Everything you do with awareness of yourself will help sharpen your sensibility to changes in your mood, your thoughts, your aches and pains. Almost every modality listed in this ultimate directory contributes to your mind and body awareness in some way, but it all starts with a good breathing practice.
Sit up and breathe deeply
Consciously taking every breath is one way to quiet the mind and become more self-aware. Breathing to relax is a foundation of many therapy modalities.
In fact, you could (if you wouldn’t mind feeling how much it helps right now?) sit up straight in your chair right now and take three to five very slow breaths, inhale counting to 5, exhale counting to 5, and pay attention to how you feel and how it changes. You should feel more relaxed and present after just three breaths. Try to sit calmly for five minutes and do nothing but focus on deep breathing and relaxation. Everyone we have seen do this experiences relief from pain, even starting from a 9/10 pain level.
Good and dark forces
There are always the 1-in-10 cases where, for those folks, it seems there is no escape; for them, life is a constant battle between the forces of death and free will. If these words do not apply, you may be excused. No one could guess nor understand the depth of our pain or anyone else’s, except maybe someone else who is suffering at our level. People can’t have empathy for pain they’ve never felt.
You must want to become more aware of yourself. If you aren’t interested in doing that, then almost every other modality for healing yourself will be a useless waste of your time. If we are walking around with significantly diminished environmental awareness, then our bodymind probably has control over repetitive behavior patterns without our awareness… or from behind our awareness. In for a little shadow work, anyone?
Conscious body-mind awareness
Becoming more aware of yourself and more aware of your bodymind takes courage because an inevitable part of the bodymind healing path will require that you face your pain and release it. You must believe this type of self-healing is possible or else you’ll never start working on yourself. It doesn’t need to happen now. The only thing you need now is a desire to exercise your free will over your body’s seeming desire to make you suffer.
How do we find our way back towards health? We begin a relationship with our bodymind. How does that happen? We start paying attention to our breathing, then we start paying attention to how we feel. In other words, we need to develop compassion for ourselves, and we need to learn to listen to our body. Then we need to learn modalities that will assist with a slow, gentle but practiced takeover of our bodymind command centers. We need resilience, determination, patience, acceptance, and persistence, with a whole lot of love.
Self-awareness, becomes self-compassion, becomes self-forgiveness, becomes a life’s journey to end suffering for the self. But life without suffering isn’t realistic, and “a life without love isn’t worth living.” (a Dr. Van Der Kolk reference)
Eliminate the self-hatred
If the idea of learn to love yourself makes you cock an eye, then perhaps, “stop hating on yourself so hard,” is more relatable?
Start to separate yourself from you mind’s hateful thoughts and know they are not you. Once you realize you are separate from the emotions generated by your bodymind, you will start to assume increased conscious control of your organism. And after that happens, the release of our bodymind trauma becomes the ultimate salvation from chronic pain and/or suffering.
Trauma which can be released any number of ways, many of which are researched here on TheBodyIsMind.com.
Everything we do should be done with self-awareness. Self-awareness will help us achieve self-healing. Self-awareness is required to be able to live in the present moment.
Make conscious self-healing No. 1
We’re already paying the price for years of bodymind negligence, but we shouldn’t feel shameful of this; we did not know about this simple bodymind approach before now. Existing health paradigms have done little to encourage whole bodymind healing, and so we end up allowing doctors to fully compromise our bodymind’s ability to heal itself. We hardly get a chance to heal ourselves when we collectively avoid all awareness of the hundreds of healing options available to us which do not involve drugs or surgery.
Healing ourselves will take a lot of hard work. Is it more difficult than hating ourselves and drowning our sorrows with alcohol and regret? No! But learning to love ourselves takes work. It requires a strong decision to be made on your part to make health your number one priority.
We need to learn to forgive, and especially to forgive ourselves. We need to feel gratitude for what we have. Plus, we will not find the answers we need if we are not seeking for them! If you’re reading this, then you’ve already found hope. It’s time to believe in yourself – by working on your self-awareness!
What to do NEXT
Self-awareness, in the paradigm presented on TheBodyIsMind.com, is separate and distinct from mind-awareness and body-awareness. We understand we can view ourselves through a lens of our choosing, and what we perceive is a relationship between ‘self-awareness’ and ‘bodymind-awareness,’ aka the conscious and subconscious minds. It couldn’t be stated more plainly.
From this perspective of the nature of ourselves, the bodymind concepts as researched and outlined here offer a significantly larger number of options when it comes to our health than our insurance coverage allows. A self-directed path is your freedom of choice for wellness. Once you start seeking a way out of the hell you find yourself in with pain and anxiety, there are many doorways which open. Self-awareness is key to finding our way out of misery.
Pursue the discovery of self and begin or renew your self-healing journey. We recommend you start of by finding where you are on The Self-Healing Path, then discover what interests you as listed within the modalities listed above. Explore your options and widen your horizons. Also be sure to check out the Self+BodyMind Relationship section of this website for all the self-care and healing modalities available.
Then work on finding out who you really are. What are you made of? What gets you revved up in a good way? Find it.
Self-awareness is learning from practice you are not your thoughts and you are not your body, and if you so choose to look at yourself that way, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks on a universal scale.
The adoption of a new perspective is required before any change can happen. Self-compassion is a great place to begin.
- MindBody research moves towards the mainstream (2006) – National Institutes of Health
- There are 37.2 Trillion Cells In Your Body – Smithsonian Magazine
- Cell Atlas: 37 trillion cells in the human body will be cataloged in an ambitious effort – Genetic Literacy Project Organization
- Trauma can be inherited by future generations – via The Telegraph
- Can Trauma Experienced by Your Great-Great-Grandparents Be Passed on to You? – Gizmodo
- The Mind Does Not Care What Your Brain Thinks – Psychology Today
Learn more about Self-Awareness
Unlocking the Healing Power of YOU
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/12/healing-science-belief-placebo/
Self-Awareness, One Of Three Essential Elements Of Healing
http://donthateyourguts.com/self-awareness-one-three-essential-elements-healing/
Self-Awareness is Vital to Self-Improvement
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/making-change/201007/self-awareness-is-vital-self-improvement
Self Awareness and the Gift of Chronic Pain
http://nationalpainreport.com/self-awareness-and-the-gift-of-chronic-pain-8827389.html
Conscious of the Unconscious: Work with your unconscious, rather than trying to browbeat it into submission.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/focus-forgiveness/201307/conscious-the-unconscious
What Neuroscience Teaches About Self-Awareness and Trauma
https://www.google.com/search?q=%2Bneuroscience+%2B%22self-awareness%22+%2Btrauma
Better Understanding Memory to Build Self Awareness
https://www.organicnewsroom.com/memory-self-awareness/
A Comprehensive Guide to Cultivating Self-Awareness: A Foundational Skill for Emotional Intelligence
https://scottjeffrey.com/self-awareness-activities-exercises/
How To Develop Self-Awareness With These 27 Exercises
https://betterhumans.coach.me/how-to-develop-self-awareness-with-these-27-exercises-6f5ca8ef7ee4
12 Self-Awareness Exercises: Know Thyself
https://daringtolivefully.com/self-awareness
10 Ways to Become More Conscious, by Steve Pavlina
https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/08/10-ways-to-become-more-conscious/
Mind-Body Medicine: An Overview
https://www.brainline.org/article/mind-body-medicine-overview
Mind-Body Medicine – Brain, Mind & Healing: The Unseen Forces Behind Health & Performance
http://www.brainmindhealing.org/mind-body-medicine/index.html
Mind and Body Approaches for Health Problems in Military Personnel and Veterans – What the Science Says
https://nccih.nih.gov/health/providers/digest/veterans-science
Trauma in the Body: Interview with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
http://stillharbor.org/anchormagazine/2015/11/18/trauma-in-the-body
The Center for Mind-Body Medicine – Teaching Thousands to Heal Millions
https://cmbm.org/
The Awakened Ape: A Biohacker’s Guide To Evolutionary Fitness, Natural Ecstasy, and Stress-Free Living
Paperback – January 24, 2017
by Jevan Pradas (Author)
The Art of Talking to Yourself: Self-Awareness Meets the Inner Conversation
Paperback – June 14, 2017
by Vironika Tugaleva (Author)
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Paperback – September 8, 2015
by Bessel van der Kolk M.D. (Author)
Mind-Body Medicine – Think Away Your Pain
Paperback – November 7, 2014
by David Schechter M.D. (Author)
Mind-Body Medicine | Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS) Pain Relief
Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself
Paperback – December 1, 2014
by Lissa Rankin M.D. (Author)
Secrets of Your Cells: Discovering Your Body’s Inner Intelligence
Paperback 1st Edition – May 1, 2013
by Sondra Barrett, PhD (Author)
Cell-Level Healing: The Bridge from Soul to Cell
Paperback – June 7, 2011
by Joyce Whiteley Hawkes, PhD (Author)
The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain
Paperback – October 1, 1999
by John E. Sarno M.D. (Author)
Molecules Of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine
Paperback – February 17, 1999
by Candace B. Pert, PhD (Author)
Awareness
Paperback – December 5, 1990
by Anthony DeMello (Author)
Science of the Heart: Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance
Free e-Book – 2015
The HeartMath Institute
by Rollin McCraty, Ph.D. (Author)