Awareness
“What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness”
Albert Camus
Simply awareness? Not so easy. It’s one word with so much heavy lifting to do. Aware of what? Sound, colour, scent, taste, emotion? Aware of change or of a constant? Aware of patterns, purpose and motive? Aware of others and aware of yourself? And that is the big question. When you consider awareness do you look in or look out? Have you ever even addressed any thought to how aware you are - maybe it’s been an unknown unknown for you.
Mary Oliver said “Attention without feeling…is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter.”
I feel that this is where simple attention moves into awareness - just paying attention is a report but living with true awareness, with an openness and empathy - brings you a nourishment, a fulfilment and a harmony.
Becoming more self aware - how you behave, how you act, how you think, how you feel - will allow you to make better choices and improve relationships. Enhancing your awareness generally will enrich your world. Seeing and experiencing things more vividly - or, in fact, more accurately. All of what you experience is your reality - but it’s a subjective representation of what goes on in the outside world. With improved awareness you can bring your subjective, closer to the objective reality. This helps you enjoy shared experiences and gain a more empathetic understanding of family, friends, colleagues, and strangers. You may begin to distinguish between what’s truly important to you and those things that don’t require your time, energy and worry. You can learn to take pleasure and feel gratitude for things that might otherwise be hidden.
It’s not as simple as choosing one day that you’ll turn on ‘awareness’ like a switch - it’s a way of being that needs to be encouraged through practice. A regular Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lesson is exactly what will engender this change in you. During an ATM class you are improving your awareness of how you move, how you sense yourself moving. Fortunately, this skill is transferable into everyday life. You’ll begin to notice more about yourself - how you breath, walk, reach and this develops, overtime, into noticing your reactions to situations, your attentiveness to your relationships, the first new shoots of growth in your garden. One day you’ll realise you did actually wake up and smell the roses!
Self awareness from an anatomical point of view is fundamentally what you are learning in an ATM lesson - you are learning about how you move. You are not being told what is correct movement because how can you correct something if you do not first identify how you are doing it - it is this level of awareness that takes place during an ATM lesson - once you know what you are doing you have the choice to make changes - to try out other options - to find an easier way, with grace and efficiency. This is only possible if you first become aware of what you are doing - or not doing - habitually.
“I believe that knowing oneself is the most important thing a human being can do for himself. How can one know oneself? By learning to act not as one should, but as one does.” Moshe Feldenkrais.
The first step to improving awareness within an ATM lesson is slowing down - and that’s another skill that’s not so easy to learn. Society places a value on being busy and productive. So much so that if we don’t fill every waking moment (which all too often seeps into nocturnal hours) with quantifiable activities, many of us begin to feel guilty or restless. Slowing down, in order to sense yourself, becoming more aware of you, your environment and the people around you, should be considered an essential use of time. A good place to start is a 45-60 minute online class you can do from your own home. Beginners workshops and in person classes are in the pipeline - register your interest or join the online class, head to my website or message me directly.
