Ep. 22: Aware but not transformed (part 2)

Episode Transcript

Four Pillars to Self-Awareness

Welcome back to the Wisdom Practice Podcast. Last week we talked about struggling to create the life you want, even though you have the awareness of what's holding you back - you understand the beliefs and thoughts in the way of the life you want to live, the person you want to become. You sit down, you journal, you understand the thoughts and beliefs, you give them space. These are all great techniques, but after months of doing that, you feel just as far from your goal as you did before you started.

It can even feel worse, because you're acutely aware of what's in your way. Whenever you try to achieve something or visualize it, the thought that keeps coming up is: why is it in my way? Why can't I get rid of it? At least when you were ignorant of it, you could blame fate and keep working. When you're aware of it, it's easy to feel powerless, even though you know exactly what's in your way.

So in today's episode I want to go over some more practical techniques to help you get there, and explain my framework. I've been practicing self-awareness since I was 15 or 16, and I can't even remember how I started - I was doing whatever I thought would work, very much going with the journey. Very recently this year, I realized there was a pattern to what I was doing that actually worked. There were also plenty of things I tried that didn't work, or took so long I'd just have to accept the way things were and keep going, hoping things would change, or ignore it completely and embrace the present moment.

I went into it and found there are four pillars to self-awareness, as I see it. I haven't seen it presented this way anywhere else, so this is now the method I use for clients, and more consciously for myself. I want to go over each one, because it will give you more structure. Self-awareness can feel very wishy-washy - you deal with whatever comes up, write about whatever you feel like, let go of whatever you feel like - but it doesn't feel like you're following a path. That's one of the reasons it can feel never-ending, or like progress is so little: to some degree you haven't been conscious of the steps you've taken or the progress you've made. This structure will give you a framework and a foundation for what you're doing.

Timeless Awareness

The first pillar is something I call timeless awareness, and it's by far the most important pillar in this journey - it's kind of in the name. Timeless awareness is being able to see yourself from a different perspective, outside the lens of your personality.

You may have had times when you were so enveloped by an emotion or a thought that there was no space - no you - there. You were entirely that emotion, that thought. You may have woken up three, four hours or days later and gone, where did I go? Or you're scrolling social media and suddenly two hours fly by and you have no idea where you went.

This is the most important foundation, because without it we haven't got the ability to even understand or observe ourselves - there's no person observing. We are what we're doing, rather than being aware of what we're doing. It's a common mistake to think this is self-awareness in its entirety, just having that space. Yes, it's the most important foundation, but it isn't the entirety of self-awareness.

Energy Alchemy

That brings me to the next pillar, which I call energy alchemy. Now that you have that space and can see yourself from a different perspective, observing yourself, this pillar is about observing and understanding what's happening in your body - what emotions and feelings you're going through or experiencing - and learning how to process them in a healthy way.

Like we said in the previous episode, you can sit and meditate on something that's been bothering you, have the space, the understanding, and be aware of the emotion - it's come up and you're giving it space. That's timeless awareness, having the ability to do that. But then what happens? I know from personal experience you can sit and meditate and be aware of the emotion, but nothing changes - you're just being aware of it. Unless you can truly accept it in that moment, it will stay there.

So energy alchemy is understanding: now that I have that awareness, how can I apply it to help me let go of the energy and patterns I'm holding onto in my body, because all of that energy and conditioning is stored there. Something comes up - some anger, some frustration, some irritation - and energy alchemy is understanding that mostly I don't have to identify with that emotion (which is mostly timeless awareness) but also that I don't have to act through it. I can process this in a way where I let it go instead of holding onto it and causing more issues in the future.

So energy alchemy is building up tools, techniques, and even more awareness to help you deal with being triggered - which is so important for growth, because by definition, if we're growing outside our comfort zone, we're going to experience new things that make us uncomfortable, frustrated, irritable. Without techniques to deal with that in the moment, it can really stunt our growth.

This is also where the observer syndrome can come in - we understand our emotions, we're aware of them, we give them space, but we're not doing anything to resolve them, to let them go. You end up in a limbo: an emotion comes up, you're aware of it, and that's it, until it goes away because you're out of the situation or doing something else. It's a repeating loop of trying to be aware of what comes up - a perfectly great technique, but practically there are better ways of processing that emotion, which we'll get to in the last pillar.

Reflective Perception

The second-to-last pillar is something I call reflective perception, or mirror work - the ability to see the world as a mirror for yourself and understand conceptually why you react the way you react, behave the way you behave, even see things the way you see them. Your unconscious beliefs literally drive your perception, literally affect the way you perceive reality, so you don't see reality as fact, you see it through yourself.

That's a powerful phrase: you don't see the world as it is, you see the world as you are. We've gone into this in previous episodes, so I won't go too deep today, but reflective perception is about understanding how that affects you, so you can make conscious choices about where you want your life to go. A lot of it is taking responsibility for the way you are, recognizing it's because of the way you see the world or act or react - which isn't your fault, because it's all conditioning - but when you're able to take that power back and reclaim some of it, it has a massive impact on what you see as possible in your life.

Expansive Expression

All of these pillars come together nicely, but the last one, which I find gets missed a lot in the self-awareness space, is what I call expansive expression.

The thing with the first three pillars - timeless awareness, energy alchemy, and reflective perception - is that they're about understanding and recognizing your inner world, and then having that create change in your outer world, because it will. When you become aware of how you react and think, and make a conscious choice to change it, you will see differences in your outer world. But when you don't match that internal work with external work, you'll see a plateau in your growth and your understanding of yourself.

This goes against a lot of teachings, because people think all they have to do to manifest something or have the life they want is sit down, meditate, be aware of everything that comes up, deal with it, let it go, and they'll have mastered themselves - and then they can manifest and do whatever they want. I think there's some truth to that, because to some degree everything is internal work. But the purpose of this world is to help us see ourselves.

The Monk Who Went to New York

There's a story - I'm not sure if it's true, but I'm guessing it is - of a monk born and raised in a monastery. He spent his entire life there, meditating ten hours a day. By the time he was 20, using all the teachings and techniques his masters gave him, he had fully mastered himself. He was at peace every second of the day, no thoughts came up, he didn't get triggered by anything. By all means, if you want to call it this, he was enlightened.

Then one day this monk decided to go to New York with a few other monks - who knows why - and you can probably see where this is going. You'd think, because he's mastered himself in his current situation, fully realized, fully enlightened, he'd act the same way wherever he was, not get triggered, not have thoughts come up. But as soon as he got there, with so much stimulus, so much noise, so much going on, all of that peace, all of that cultivated awareness, all of that non-reactiveness flew out the window, and he was like any other person who'd never even heard of self-awareness.

My point is: you can master yourself internally - your thoughts, your emotions, your awareness - in your current situation, and that's a really important and amazing thing to do. But if you're not testing that in new environments, new situations, new experiences, you're not actually growing. You become the biggest fish in the pond, but there's still stuff inside you - conditioning, reactiveness - that's just so far below your awareness that even in your deepest meditation you can't see it. It's life's job to bring that out as time progresses.

Imagine if we sat down and meditated and all of our conditioning from our entire life came up at once - it would drive you crazy. So you get spoon-fed new stuff as you experience new things, new triggers, new thoughts, and that's completely normal.

This is why the fourth pillar, expansive expression, is so crucial. In the spiritual community it's easy to say "the outside world isn't real, I'm going to sit down and meditate," and that's fine, but you'll only get so far. Expansive expression is learning to master yourself in new situations. Doing this can actually help with pillar two as well, energy alchemy, because that movement, that experience, can help release old energy.

The Loop

That's why I've created this framework as a loop. If this were a video I could show it, but since it's a podcast, I'll describe it: you have timeless awareness in the background, because that's the most important thing. Then, in a loop, you have energy alchemy, then reflective perception, then expansive expression, and back to energy alchemy again, and so on.

We go into this in a lot more detail in my method, but I wanted to share it so it can give you some understanding of what you may need to focus on. The observer syndrome we discussed in the last episode mostly comes from the first two pillars - energy alchemy and reflective perception, alongside timeless awareness - while ignoring expansive expression, which is a very common thing. If you feel stuck in that problem, it's because you're missing that last pillar.

If you feel really aware of your emotions and thoughts, you've worked hard to calm your mind and understand what's going on there and work on the triggers that come up - even though you still get triggered, because it's hard not to sometimes - you see yourself as a very peaceful person, but the triggers are still there no matter how much you observe them, and it may have been three months or more. You get stuck in a loop of focusing only on the inner world, hoping that if you become aware of it enough, understand it conceptually enough, it'll go away and you can move on with your life.

Perspective-Shifting Action

I was stuck in that exact same position. I was so convinced the internal work was all I needed - be aware of it, try to understand it, try to reframe it so it didn't feel as powerful. It helps a little, but it's very slow and, in my experience, doesn't really feel like it works.

When I found that missing piece - and it sounds like such an obvious piece - the issue is that when you start to use and apply expansive expression, it makes you feel worse, because it brings up that trigger so much more. You're in the situation that triggers it, rather than just reflecting on it or visualizing it to get the same reaction. It's so much more intense, and so much of you wants this to stay away. It's too much. Then your mind says: okay, let's avoid this for now, you have more work to do, that trigger was so intense, go back and meditate, go back and do all these internal things, come back at some point and you'll be better. So you do it, you journal, you do all these things, and you come back, and it's exactly the same.

But when I learned to use the external work as internal work - and I don't know why we think of them as separate, but we do - we go out there and trigger ourselves consciously. I found it was so much faster to make progress, because you're dealing with the energy head on. By overcoming it in the external world, you could let go of it in the internal world, because before you didn't have the perspective to just accept it, and the key to letting go of conditioning is accepting it - which is very difficult to do when it's causing us pain.

But when you use the external work to deal with that, and you do it enough times, consciously, recognizing that if you fail, it's okay - it doesn't fuel the belief that you're not good enough, it's just conditioning, you can get through this, it's not you - when you do that again and again to a point where it's now neutral for you, you can let go of it. It's the same as any new skill: the first time you have to do something stressful, it can get really worrying and overwhelming. You can take a step back and say, okay, I'm aware of these emotions coming up, let me deal with them on an energetic level - but I don't think anything actually beats facing it head on, consciously, and letting that practice neutralize the emotions.

I realized I was meant to go into some exact techniques, but I went into the framework instead, because I think having some structure to apply those techniques gives it more purpose and gives you more sense of progress, rather than just throwing a technique against the wall and seeing if it works.

If you feel stuck specifically in observer syndrome - and there are a few more issues that come up on this journey, which I've also put into the framework - your best course of action is action, and conscious action, specifically perspective-shifting action. Action that will change your perspective of your problem or challenge, get you to see things from a different personality, which goes back to timeless awareness - the ability to see yourself, not through yourself. If you're taking action that could literally change you and give you a new perspective, to some degree you are already doing that.