7 Simple Techniques to Increase Your Awareness

Let everything arise from your awareness. And the miracle of mindfulness is that without saying anything, without doing anything, it simply dissolves everything that is ugly in you, turning it into beauty.
Bhagwan Rajneesh

A conversation about awareness is a conversation about you, because there is only awareness in the world, and it is at the center of the human being. The rest just obscures our visibility. Therefore, in order to return to the center, to understanding our true essence, some effort will be required in the form of exercises aimed at awakening consciousness.

Square

I suggest starting with this exercise. Do it right now. It will help you understand where you are at the current moment in the context of your entire life.

Draw a square and divide it into 100 parts. Color the top squares according to the number of years you have lived. From below, fill in the squares from 70 to 100. In Russia, these years are called the age of survival; I propose to consider them a time of comprehension and contemplation.

Here's my square.

What remains unpainted is your upcoming life, the remaining active years. How does it feel? What thoughts did it inspire? What feelings did it evoke? The questions are not rhetorical. Answer them to yourself, ideally write down the answers.

Mindfulness techniques and mindfulness practice

There is a whole sea of mindfulness techniques; The main thing is to choose those that suit you best. Most spiritual practices are aimed at developing awareness. It can be said that one of the most important goals of practice is the development of maximum awareness, otherwise no further progress along the path of discipleship seems possible.

An adept of a particular school or teaching must learn to be self-aware. This means awareness of the physical, emotional and mental body, that is, the first 3 out of 7 human bodies, which form the physical-energetic essence of a person. Self-awareness implies the following:

awareness of your body: movements, condition, temperature, bodily sensations, etc.,
awareness of emotions: their source, coloring, development and attenuation, change, etc.),
awareness of thoughts: their origin, development, transformation, transition from one to another.

Yoga provides a wide field for the practice of mindfulness. You can start with any stage of Ashtanga yoga to begin developing awareness. One of the simplest ways for a beginner is to practice yoga asanas. They form awareness not only of their physical body, but also of their psychological state. Every time you perform a set of asanas, your consciousness is focused on those parts of the body that are most occupied in one position or another.

This is essentially one of the mindfulness exercises that psychologists recommend. They say that you need to change your usual rhythm of life or choose other methods of performing those tasks and actions that you usually don’t even pay attention to. Let's say you draw with your right hand, since you are right-handed, but you need to try to perform this action with your left hand. The direction of your consciousness will immediately change.

It's the same in yoga. You usually sit on a chair or armchair. You get used to it and don’t focus on it anymore. In order to become aware of the process, take the Vajrasana pose. It seems like nothing complicated, you sit on the floor and feel good, but it’s unusual. From this, consciousness becomes absorbed in this process. Attention is drawn to the posture itself, the position of the arms, legs, and sensations in the knees.

Awareness of the emotional sphere in yoga practice

Emotional awareness is also practiced most naturally in yoga. In the first stages of practice, you will notice your feelings emerging at the moment of performing asanas, without focusing on them. You simply let them be, arise and fade away just as naturally. Eventually you should come to the point where emotions no longer play a big role. These are just emotions - the psychological response of our body to external stimuli. Yes, these are not even emotional impulses, as people prone to romantic feelings usually characterize an influx of emotions. These are mental changes that are closely related to chemical reactions occurring in the body.

The golden and silver ages of literature have taught us to treat the emotional sphere with special reverence, but for our purposes of achieving awareness, it is better to immediately put things in their place. Let us leave the description of wonderful or terrifying feelings for writers, and we ourselves will turn to their conscious observation. The mere fact that you begin to be aware of the emergence of your feelings and emotions will reduce their uncontrollable flow and stop uncontrollable reactions.

Yoga effectively works with the emotional body. As for the thought process, there is hardly any practice that can compete with pranayama and meditation. In both of them, special attention is paid to the concentration of thought, the direction of the thought flow in the right direction. First, they work to make thoughts fully conscious, clearing this process of the taint of internal criticism, and at the next stage they move on to stopping the thought process through the practice of deep meditation.

Dear Diary

Keep a diary. Describe the events of the day and the feelings and emotions that arose. Do not criticize what is written, do not evaluate it, do not choose words - let it be written as it is written. Be honest, no one will read this.

To make it easier to get started, answer the following questions every day:

What good happened today?
How did I feel about this?
Why am I doing well today?
Who do I want to thank?
The main conclusion of the day.

Complete the list.

How to Develop Mindfulness: Mindfulness Exercises

To give the reader the opportunity to experiment, let's look at a few exercises that can be used daily. They are not directly related to the practices of spiritual teachings, but will nevertheless prepare you for them if you want to do them in the future.

Conscious movement.
Conscious attention when communicating with an interlocutor.
Concentration of attention directed at an object.
Listening to music to distinguish the sounds of different instruments.
Control over habits (gestures, facial expressions, filler words, etc.).
Mindful vision is focused attention to detail.

This list could be expanded, but with practice you will learn how to create exercises to develop awareness in real life. In the next section, we will move on to look in more detail at some of the techniques for developing mindfulness described above.

Breathing practices

In any unclear situation, watch your breathing. What does it mean to observe? Pay attention and look with your inner eye here:

What is the temperature of the inhaled and exhaled air?
Am I breathing from my chest or my stomach? What if we try the other way around?
Does breathing have a sound?
What does it feel like in your nostrils when you inhale and exhale?
What is the length of the inhalation-exhalation?

Concentrating on breathing is not so easy. To master the skill, you can use a smartphone app and breathe with it for at least five minutes a day.

Applications work on approximately the same principle. A pleasant sound is heard - you need to take a breath. Another pleasant sound is heard - you need to exhale. The sounds replace each other, you breathe.

I use the Health Through Breath app from Saagara. Here you can adjust the duration of practice, level of difficulty, length of inhalations and exhalations, and you can adjust breathing with delays.

Health through Breath - Pranayama

Saagara

Price: 449.00 rubles

Download

Price: 449.00 rubles

appbox fallback https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.saagara.health_thru_breath&hl=ru&gl=ru

Mindfulness, or awakening consciousness

Mindfulness, the awakening of consciousness by noticing minimal changes in the physical, emotional and mental planes, is practiced in psychology. But the very concept of mindfulness was not an invention of psychological science at all, but is a borrowed concept that originates from the practices of ancient philosophical teachings.

Psychology skillfully applies this concept to create positive changes in the psycho-emotional state of a person and, therefore, uses it as an applied method for correcting the psyche, forgetting that awareness can and in fact is valuable in itself. It is a thing in itself, but not in the sense of its unknowability, but in the fact that it is valuable in itself, regardless of whether we know about its existence or not. She is.

If we accept awareness as an integral fact of existence, then we let it into our lives, enlivening and filling the world around us with meaning. If we do not recognize the concept of awareness, it nevertheless does not cease to exist in reality, but at the same time our life flows in an unconscious way, by inertia. A person is more than a set of physiological and mental functions. He experiences the world through awareness. The more aware he is, the more everything becomes open to him. It is good that people are increasingly thinking about this and developing their ability to understand through various methods and techniques.

Do familiar things in an unusual way

People who live on autopilot are very distracted. They cannot remember whether they sent the letter or whether they closed the window in the apartment. How to develop awareness? You need to start with the fact that you need to do familiar actions in an unusual way. You can practice this constantly. Let's look at it with an example. If you're in an elevator and can't remember whether you closed the door, try a simple exercise. Close the door not with your right hand, as usual, but with your left. A non-trivial action will engage your brain, and you will know for sure that the door is closed.

You do not need to visit a mindfulness center. You don't even have to take special courses. If you realize that you cannot remember your usual actions, then change your habits. For example, take a different route to work each time. You may have to make a slight detour and walk along a parallel street. But unlike a standard walk, you will remember this route. The same applies to household items. For example, in order not to fall into delirium, you can brush your teeth in the morning not with your usual hand, but with another hand that you usually do not use. A non-standard approach to your usual activities will help you control your actions, and most importantly, remember their results.

How to tune in to the impossible?

Self-remembering is work, not easy work. At first it will seem to you that it is impossible to constantly be aware of yourself or remember yourself. This is exactly what will happen at first.

You will often forget yourself. But it will be better for you to immediately tune in to impossible things... Try to do them, namely, be aware of yourself as soon as you remember it.

These things will not happen on their own. Only with your constant efforts will this be possible. And over time, you will begin to remember yourself more often. And self-observation will help you with this.

Just set the intention - to observe yourself, to be aware of yourself in all of your manifestations.

There is no universal textbook on how to do this. But your intention is to constantly remember yourself, observe yourself, and help you pave your way to Self-Awareness.

Self-awareness can only be achieved with practice. And self-remembering and self-observation and other exercises for developing awareness are these practices. In another way, they can be called alarm clocks that help you wake up from sleep.

Mindfulness in stressful situations

All the above techniques are good, but as soon as you find yourself in a stressful situation, negative emotions come upon us so strongly that we immediately forget about practice, about a conscious state and give in under their onslaught. Emotions consume us. That is why we must train mindfulness in difficult situations, only then will you be able to withstand any stress and not lose your head in any circumstances.

For example, you have an important meeting and you are attacked by fear. The most important thing here, until the moment when the fear is not yet very strong, is to remember that you need to be conscious, that is, apply the formula that I spoke about: stimulus (emotion) - memory - pause - conscious reaction. And to be aware means not to be consumed by fear, but to observe it. It is useless to fight with him; fight is a form of cooperation. By trying to get rid of fear, you will come to even greater tension and only intensify it. You need to try to relax and look at your fear from the outside. You are watching him. That is, when you come to a meeting, you understand that you are afraid, you see how your body is shaking, and you begin to look from the outside at your fear and bodily reactions associated with fear. If you can do this, fear will no longer cloud your head much, and you will behave adequately and will not fail the meeting. It is unlikely that you will be able to completely get rid of it, but sometimes a little awareness is enough to save the situation. Therefore, it’s okay if you are not good at observing emotions at first. The main thing in a stressful situation is not to lose your head, but to remember that you need to be aware. Over time, the power of your awareness will increase and you will be less nervous, gain confidence and stress resistance.

Attention food!

Thinking about how to develop mindfulness? Developing mindfulness can be a hobby. You need to learn not to disconnect from the real world and not wander through the nooks and crannies of your own consciousness.

A simple exercise you can practice three times a day during meals. Think about how you eat. Most people eat while watching a TV series or read a book while eating. By force of will, you should give up such habits. While eating, you should focus on the process. You must learn to understand what you eat and how you eat it. Try to taste the food and separate it into its components. Don't be indulgent when it comes to food. Try to love the process of eating. Eating food can become a kind of meditation when you switch off from extraneous thoughts and absorb the dish consciously, and not on autopilot.

Summarize

How to practice mindfulness Photo: Depositphotos
If for some reason you abandoned the practice and now don’t know where to start, don’t worry. Mindfulness is a very liberal way of living, and there are plenty of ways to get into the groove available.

Haven't meditated for a few weeks? No problem, just add deep breathing exercise to your daily routine. Have you forgotten the last time you wandered through an art gallery or walked through the forest? No problem. If you don't have time for this, take a moment and just watch the clouds.

“We can see the reflection of the moon in the ocean only when it is calm and quiet” (Thich Nhat Hanh)

By living consciously and having a rich arsenal of mindfulness practices, you will always be able to choose the right tool for the job, despite stress, workload and fatigue. And the larger this arsenal, the easier it is to fit mindfulness into your daily life, without considering it just another item on an already too long to-do list.

Material prepared by: Alexander Sergeev Cover photo: Depositphotos

Sources

Live slowly / B. McElree; lane from English L. G. Tretyak. - Minsk: Potpourri, 2022. - 272 p. : ill.

To ask questions

You can do this without an anchor if you are able to remember it. The main list of questions looks like this:

What do I feel and sense? How does my body experience this?
When did it start?
What was happening in my life when this feeling began?
What expectations did I have from this reality and why?
For what reason do I believe that only meeting these expectations will make me happy?
What do I really want from the situation/myself/other?
Can I see something positive in what is happening, what can it teach me?
Why do I need this experience, what should I understand now about myself and others?

All this does not mean that you will “let go” of any situation. Perhaps you will come to the conclusion that your partner is humiliating you, and for a long time and systematically. And what is in your interests is to let him understand this and firmly defend your boundaries.

But if this was preceded by an awareness of everything that happened to you around the situation with your partner, it is unlikely that your words and actions will be chaotic and unconvincing. More often, on the contrary, momentary emotions are unconvincing, seasoned with a lack of understanding of what is really happening.

This is why children’s “insults” are funny to us: from the height of an adult, we can clearly see how a banal conflict of expectations and reality (I wanted a toy, this one now, but my parents didn’t have the money - they didn’t buy it) turns into literally suffering with a roar and screams.

We understand well how much a child still needs to understand in order to be able to balance his “wants” with various processes in the world that he will have to take into account in the future. But at the same time, most adults sometimes behave in exactly the same way. Only the “wants” are more complicated and the suffering is much more acute.

And therefore, often the conflicts of two adult “children” lead nowhere - they only hurt each other, but do not ask themselves questions leading to understanding, do not know what this conflict should teach them and are not able to isolate the essence of their wishes for peace.

The picture changes when at least one of them tries to become conscious.

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Exercises to Awaken Awareness Using Attention

The essence of mindfulness training is to devote all of yourself to what you are doing at a certain moment in time, to avoid switching attention. If it jumps to another object, return it back and calmly continue to study, observing your actions, the sensations and thoughts that arise in the process. This way you will be practicing conscious thinking at the same time.

Awareness can be directed to both thoughts and movements. This even leads to an expansion of awareness, bringing it to a higher level, while switching attention to another activity or object contradicts the practice of awareness, since attention is scattered, and the key to the practice of awareness lies precisely in the direction of attention. In fact, you are taking your first steps in the practice of meditation, perhaps without even knowing it.

Conscious attention when communicating with an interlocutor is expressed in the fact that you do not evaluate him, as we are usually used to doing, but turn off the critic inside and switch your attention to awareness of what your interlocutor is wearing, how he speaks, how he gestures, or what he is holding in his hand. hands, etc. You need to completely capture his image and at the same time become aware of your thoughts and feelings during the process of observing your interlocutor.

Concentration of attention directed at an object greatly develops awareness, but is perhaps difficult at the beginning of practice precisely because of the simplicity of its implementation. You need to pick up a small object - something that is familiar to you well. It could be keys, a watch, a mobile phone, etc. After that, you begin to examine this item, noticing all its smallest details. Some may find this boring, but by being able to focus your attention on an ordinary thing, you will easily develop not only the ability for deep directed concentration, but also lay an excellent foundation for further practice of directed attention, known in the yogic tradition as dharana.

Conscious vision is very close to the technique described above, but the emphasis in this exercise is slightly shifted. You don't look at one object completely, you choose some aspect to focus on only. For example, while walking down the street, mentally set yourself the task of noticing and concentrating only on the faces of passing people for several minutes, or noticing and finding the shade of a certain color. Try to notice and realize as many occurrences of this shade in the world around you as possible.

Developing mindfulness through the practice of mindful movement exercises

By conscious movement we mean a process when your attention is completely focused on performing certain actions in the present. You can walk, fully concentrating on the rhythm of your steps, awareness of the contact of the soles of your shoes with the surface on which you are walking. It's very easy and exciting at the same time. We are usually not aware of this process, so when you direct your attention only to it, you will see how unusual it is.

You can also experiment with becoming aware of the sensations you get from touching objects: how they feel, whether they are warm or cold, how your hand feels; and at the same time observe yourself - how you react to sensations. This practice of training awareness through movement automatically eliminates combining tasks.

If you devote yourself to one thing, then you simply are not able to do one more thing at the same time. Theoretically and even practically this is possible in everyday life. People do this every now and then, but in awareness exercises this would be nonsense, since the very nature of awareness excludes internal rushing and combining things.

State of mindfulness in everyday life

A state of awareness can be cultivated through directing attention to certain aspects of life, as well as through exercises and spiritual practices. In your daily life, practicing mindfulness will help you see things differently and make your life more interesting, not to mention that you may suddenly have talents that you never knew you had.

Often the development of awareness is accompanied by the discovery of creative abilities in a person, and a craving for creative self-realization appears. This is nothing more than a manifestation of the highest spiritual principle of a person on the physical plane. How else can it manifest itself if we live in a three-dimensional reality. We cannot get by with figurative-mental creation alone; we need to transfer images, embody them in the physical world - through art, reading philosophical literature or engaging in spiritual practices.

Get rid of the fairy tale

All people fly away into their fictional worlds from time to time. Some people make plans for the future, while others like to think about how life would have turned out if they had done something or not done something. How to develop awareness? The exercise to develop concentration on reality is very simple. Are thoughts about the past creeping into your head? Put a mental block. Imagine a beautiful landscape that lifts your spirits. The picture can be static, or it can be dynamic. For example, think about a forest in autumn. Leaves with a quiet rustle fall under your feet, and you crunch them as you walk along the overgrown path. Just 10 seconds - and you are in the forest. And then return to reality. Be aware of where you are and what you are doing here. You need to imagine a picture of a landscape whenever you realize that your thoughts are wandering far from reality. You should learn to catch the moment when thoughts from this world fly into the imaginary. A mental block will help you stay in reality. You need to realize that a fairy tale does not bring you pleasure, but only ruins your life.

Who could he play?

Are you walking down the street and have nothing to occupy your mind? How to train mindfulness? To avoid getting lost in your thoughts, you can engage in interesting activities. Study passers-by carefully. Pick one person out of the crowd and think about what role and what movie the person could play. For example, a man with a serious face can become a killer, and a pretty girl can become a professional model. Look for people with unusual appearance in the crowd. They find it much more enjoyable to come up with different roles.

This exercise can be practiced a little differently. Try to guess who the people around you on the bus are. This nice guy is a manager, or maybe he's a stuntman? Try to base your assumptions not just on intuitive messages, but also on the external attributes that you see on a person. For example, a person with an interesting hairstyle can be a designer, and a guy with a diplomat can be not only a businessman, but also an engineer. You can check your guesses. Walk up to the person you've been studying carefully and get to know him. This way you will be able to not only develop your powers of observation, but also overcome shyness, and also expand your circle of acquaintances.

What is the advantage of practicing self-mindfulness?

Self-observation and self-remembering can be called in one word - self-awareness or simply awareness.

None of the people are aware of themselves, but they also do not understand that they are not aware of themselves. You are different from them in that you understand that you are not self-aware.

Observe people in their daily lives and you will see that these words are true. But you, realizing that you are not aware of yourself, knowing this, already have the opportunity to achieve Self-Awareness. Since with such understanding you can already work on yourself... And achieve this possible change - become Self-Aware.

Final Thoughts

Mindfulness and awareness are extremely important in today's world. And the mindfulness techniques presented are powerful tools for improving our lives. They are effective in reducing anxiety and unhappiness. Helping us appreciate every moment of our lives. So make a conscious effort to practice these techniques and change your thinking.

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How to choose a specialist, program, course?

He must have a medical, psychological education, and best of all, an education in the field of clinical psychology.

The program guides should imply that it can be taught by a person without special education, but this is only possible for the general population audience. It is better if these are people who work in one way or another in the field of healthcare and mental health: social workers, nurses.

In Buddhism, when choosing a teacher, it is important to find out who he studied with, whether he applied the practices himself, and what he achieved.

How do I feel now?

How to develop awareness? You need to learn to understand yourself and your conditions very well. Most people have no idea why they experience certain emotions in certain situations. You need to learn to understand your preferences and inclinations. How to do it? Whenever you realize that something has touched your soul, think about what you are experiencing and why. For example, while talking with a friend you will experience a pleasant feeling of joy, but when talking with your boss you will be overwhelmed by fear. You need to understand your conditions in order to change something in your life. For example, when you realize that you are afraid of your boss, you will need to understand why you are doing this. Are you afraid that the person will reprimand you or fire you? This feeling is caused by low self-esteem, which means you need to work on yourself and try to assert yourself. You need to understand your feelings in any stressful situations, so that later you can overcome your fears.

Developing reading awareness

With the correct development of conscious reading, a person receives a complete understanding of the meanings of texts, as well as the most accurate understanding of information, it will be easier for you to filter out necessary and unnecessary information. With proper development, this skill will help to better read, write, retell texts, overcome difficulties in analyzing text, and increase expressiveness and concentration for both children and adults.