Cultivating Awareness

It takes stillness of mind to hear our hearts' desires.

We might have heard it said that to get what we want we have to first know what we want! To do that, we need to create emptiness.

We have to make space in order for our true desires to emerge, and for that we need to find a place where we can be at peace and silent. This should be a place that we can access only when we remove ourselves from our daily activities and sit quietly long enough to be inspired.

To gain control of our own lives, we need to start practices that allow us to observe our own inner processes. Only then can we turn our lives around from the attitude of What can I get? to one of How can I serve? and let our true selves emanate out to the world.

What is awareness?

To me, awareness is being aware that we are aware. Being aware is like observing from a place of stillness. We see movement, chaos, actions, emotions, and feelings without getting involved.

The first step in the practice will teach us how to become more aware. It will help us understand that we are everything and nothing that is manifesting in our lives. In the fourth step of the practice, we will be able to become conscious creators of our mundane world. Awareness will assist us in detaching ourselves from our drama, our problems, our obstacles, and our negativity as well as from the things we were aiming for previously, like recognition or material success. We will not eradicate them, but we will skillfully flow through them without disturbing our inner peace. Our lives will become more malleable and free from drama.

Training ourselves to become aware is very simple yet powerful. One of the most important things keeping us from being totally aware is failure to commit to a regular practice. Once we have tasted the fruit of awareness, we will naturally engage daily in this way of living life. This is because, once we awaken to the higher realms of consciousness, we will not be willing to go back to the deep-sleep state we were in!

The first step is to find that place of stillness and silence within ourselves and to recognize that we are there. It is a state of knowing and observing without judging. After a while, we realize that we are fully alert and seeing ourselves as detached from our thoughts and physical experience.

Therein lies our true power, when we must trust our inner light and let it emanate who we truly are.

Once we start this practice, we will have doubts and fears showing up in many different ways. The best advice we could get is to let go of the mental chatter and connect to our inner light. We will train ourselves to recognize the resistance, the wounds, the pain and suffering, and the judgments, which all come from the ego, the mind. We have to trust that our inner light will always shine on the right answer, the right path, the right thing to do. If we do the work to emanate the life we intend to live every single day, we will become aware of what is being created every minute. We will acquire the wisdom to choose the path of love and surrender even for things that used to bother us a lot.

How do we become aware?

Mindfulness meditation is a wonderful tool to connect within. To become aware, we must be willing to give meditation a good try. Meditation forms the foundation of this approach. It is about becoming fully aware. It is about being able to discipline ourselves to implement the first step: cultivating awareness.

Meditation brings us clarity, purpose, wisdom, and an inner state of calm that allows us to have the maturity to lead our lives from a place of understanding. Meditation can help us become mindful and fully present, because after a while, we no longer react to the agitation of the mind and we become attuned with our inner light, our true selves.

Of course, we can skip this part and use the following steps to manifest a wonderful life. However, manifesting the life that we really desire — the life that is vibrating in every cell of our bodies, the life that will give us a deep sense of purpose, contribution, and meaning — is possible when we are fully aware. We can also identify the purpose that each of us can accomplish in our own unique way.

This is where attraction meets manifestation. We can probably attract anything we want. But this first step will allow us to manifest from a place of knowing what our true desires are and lead us to make the right choices.

There are many meditation techniques that have helped me create a fulfilling life. With these meditation techniques I am able to maintain a level of awareness that helps me peacefully manifest my true desires. To me, mindfulness meditation is one of the easiest ways to start a meditation practice. I have tested it with my students with great results. Very quickly, it helps us understand our place in the world and accept what is. It causes human beings to have more compassion. It trains our physical bodies to not be as reactive. It gives us a new perspective on our thought patterns. It creates a space for forgiveness, acceptance, and freedom.

In part II of the book, we will do twenty-seven days of meditation practice, wherein I will introduce many techniques that will allow us to experiment. There is a meditation practice for all who have a strong commitment to their own transformation. Sometimes we just need to try a few before we find the right one.

What to expect

The practical way of using the first step is to cultivate a daily meditation practice. Five minutes a day is the minimum.

We notice that we are seeing new angles to daily challenges; we notice we no longer react to what used to bother us; and we notice that stress reactions are not happening as often as they used to. These are all benefits from our meditation practice, and they are...