Why self-awareness?

With my workshop on self-awareness approaching, a friend asked me, why self-awareness, and what have you done to learn about this?

I think that self-knowledge is at the last frontier. On this planet, anyway. Well, and not including the bottom of the ocean. But you know what I mean.

We often are quite happy living alongside our own lives. I also think we are often quite happy concerning ourselves with other peoples’ lives, because it gives us an excuse not to have to look too deeply into our own.

The three tools I am teaching in this workshop - journaling, living one’s values, and prayer - are things I have spent years with.

I remember my first journal. I was in fifth grade, it was not much bigger than my hands, and had a lock I simultaneously loved and feared because I was pretty sure I would lose the key, and therefore access to the record of my inmost thoughts. I suspect I wrote a lot about my family and my pet gerbils.

Now, many years later, I have stacks of worn-out journals, and I know the distinct craving of needing to open my journal to work through something on my mind. Or, to return to something to understand where I was then. I have a lot of empathy for all the stages of my life.

As for values, several years ago a very wise person made me list those out and even put them in order of importance. And now I know when I am straying from them and acting out of accord with the person I am, and who I want to be.

As for prayer, that changed for me when I learned about Ignatian contemplative prayer. The act of self-questioning, of identifying my own attachments, and desiring to be rid of them to be closer to God, has reset the way I think. Thankfully, it has also shown me how close God is, at all times.

When we’re self aware, we are more likely to act in a way that is true. I could make a decision at work because I want to humiliate the competition, or because I want to act in the interest of my client (clearly, there is a right answer as to how to act there). But if I am not aware of my own motivations, I will act immaturely. You could think of one million examples of this.

So that is a snapshot. Be self-aware, and therefore be transparent. Not see-through, but real. Sweep away the cobwebs of self-disillusion. That is why I think it is important.

That workshop is February 8 - sign up today!

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Actually, I do have a resolution

I take back what I said about one year not necessarily being different from the next, because I have been thinking something specific as it relates to this year, and, I plan, future years.

That is the motto and energy with which I approach this year. I am an energetic, apparently yellow aura kind of person already. What I need to recall to mind is this: that I have enough.

I mean this in every sense: physical belongings, cute outfits, space in my home, time in my day, food in the fridge, ability to get what I need to live, intelligence. I have enough. Thanks be to God, I have never truly experienced want. Why on earth would I ever be ungrateful for what I have?

I call this to mind because, especially around the holidays, it is easy to get sucked up into what we don’t have. A gift as good as someone else’s, a family as nice as someone else’s, enough of a bonus to take a big trip. Whatever it is.

Instead, I want to re-position this thinking in my own life entirely. While I have not truly gone without, there is no doubt that as humans we will, for example, experience loneliness. Or, a lack of love from the people who should love us most. Or, a sense of injustice for being passed over for something that ought to have been ours. You know what I mean.

Even then, the response is to say, I have enough, because you do. What I mean by that is: you have God. You have hope. You have tomorrow (unless, God willing, you lose your life, in which case, God, today is enough, because You say so). To say you have enough is to say you trust God. Not only that, but that you are grateful.

It is a freeing thought: I have enough. Try it.

Epiphany: The Gift of the Magi

Friends, it is Epiphany, and I am re-sharing something I recorded a couple years ago, which is O. Henry’s short story, The Gift of the Magi. I recorded this using a Blue Yeti microphone in my apartment in one take, and it is still one of my favorite things I have done.

Anyway, without further ado:

The Gift of the Magi