Five Consciousness Raising Practices

We all feel fully aware, except perhaps when we have not had a good night's sleep or we are physically ill. This is not about physical or medical level consciousness. That is, in a coma or barely lucid. This discussion is about our psychological awareness.

Some say that our psychological consciousness or awareness is only functioning at around 10%.

It is difficult to know how aware we are, when we do not know that we do not know.

The starting point would be to make the intention to become more aware of our thoughts and feelings.

There is a cautionary note: our inner defence mechanisms will resist this. 'Why? If I want to change and become aware, why would my own ego not want me to?" asked one client. Good question. The answer is that our primitive brain works with our ego to protect us from anxiety. Therefore, if there are negative memories, fears, and feelings, we do not necessarily know about them. Not only that, but our primitive brain and ego has worked hard to keep us alive and therefore sees 'facing our truth' or 'raising awareness' as too threatening.

This means we have to encourage ourselves gently and regularly over time to increase awareness without fear. If fear and memories arise, we need to feel the feelings and perhaps get help to process our issues.

But becoming aware is the starting point. There are many techniques and we all have to find the ones that suit us best and suit us at a particular time. I have listed five of the best techniques that can be practiced at home on one's own, without necessarily attending self- help workshops or going for therapy or coaching.

One. Meditation

If you follow a particular religion, you can find information or attend religious meditation groups. But mediation in essence is a way of calming the brain. Anxiety and all negative emotions trigger the fear-based neurons and hormonal system in the brain and body. This automatically lowers the activity in our higher brain - the prefrontal cortex, which handles our most complex, subtle and mature thinking and solution focussing capacity. A calm brain balances the brain nerve connections and helps to build the neuronal connections in the higher brain. The more practiced we become with formal and informal meditation, the more aware we become. This is because we reduce triggers to the primitive fear based brain connections and while we are doing that, we are building the positive, calm ones. This becomes increasingly easier to do over time.

If you have extremely high anxiety, or ADHD and some other condition, sitting still might be impossible. Rather choose a calm place to walk, or go for a run in a quiet, safe area etc. Find a physical activity that you can at least keep your mind occupied with calmer thoughts.

We do not have to do a one hour meditation per day or follow any guru or religion. We can even start with 3 minutes of repeating a soothing phrase, or sitting quietly listening to calm music. Some people find walking their dog very meditative. There is much available now online to help with beginning meditators. The aim is to incorporate increased calmness in our lives to access our higher brain more frequently. As you grow, you can increase meditation time and therefore increase the benefits.

Two. Keeping a record

Awareness and memory work together. If you are struggling to recall what you ate for breakfast three days ago, you might have great difficulty remembering the slightly scary insight you recalled about your childhood one day ago. Our insights seem powerful sometimes but if we do nothing about them, we forget and cannot utilize them to help us construct healthier thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

Keeping a written record is best because it is easier to glance at a written record as a reminder than take the time to re-listen to an audio or video recording. But some people enjoy sharing their insights with audio and videos. By all means try that. But keep the records safe and confidential, otherwise we risk our very personal information being seen or heard by others and this will certainly block our journey into self-awareness.

Some people like writing things down just before bed. Others just after supper. You need to find the 5, 10 or 20 minutes to do so - preferably per day. Some people gain insight and process emotions and even find clarity about issues just while they are writing. Others look back after several days or weeks to see how they have changed, or grown awareness over time.

Three. Ongoing Psycho-social Learning

This is self- evident. If we want to learn more about how better to manage our thoughts, feelings and behaviour, then we must realise that our past level of knowledge no longer helps us so we need to learn more. There are many YouTube videos, blogs etc. with straight forward information. Do not start with long lectures or heavy academic articles unless you are well read in the field already. The principle is that the more you understand about your psycho-social functioning and mechanisms, the more you can manage yourself better over time.

Four. Speaking Out Aloud

Most of us have heard that the definition of craziness is speaking to ourselves. This is actually partly true. People who hear voices and see hallucinations tend to sometimes not resist the impulse to respond out loud regardless of where they are. To expressing ourselves out loud as a self-awareness technique, we need to do it with the specific intention to 'hear what we really think and feel'. Even if we whisper it, hearing ourselves helps us realise more feelings and thoughts and facilitates the release of frustration, hurt etc. out of our system. This is really important if we have no-one to talk to. The ‘out loud self-talk’ is a method that works very well for many people. Just be sure to do it when not overheard or seen. It has a similar value to point number two; it validates and honours our inner life and helps us to become more aware so we are more able to take remedial action.

Five. Practicing Appreciation

This might seem like quite a silly technique in comparison to the others, but it surprisingly has enormous value especially when utilized with the other techniques. The purpose is to further contribute growing the positive neuronal connections in the brain. To focus on good thoughts and feelings and reduce the addiction, or the compulsion to negative ones. If you are very negative at present, only focus on the smallest thing you can find to appreciate. For example, for people very debilitated by chronic illness and pain, appreciating the warmth, silkiness, comfort of the sheet or blanket might be the only positive thing they can think of at that time. Appreciation of positive things can grow over time.

There are a myriad of techniques and methods for enhancing our self-awareness and learning more effective psycho-social skills. While it can be challenging at times, it becomes increasingly liberating.

Do You Train at a Psycho-social 'Gym'?

You have probably never heard of a 'psycho-social 'gym'. That is because I made that term up. I find it very sad that in most of our societies, we promote and provide services for physical health ranging from gyms to sports clubs and so on, but the only health services are for illness and injury or severe mental illnesses.

Why do we not teach psycho-social skills at schools and universities and provide training centres or gyms and fitness centres like we do for physical health? I do not know the answer but I can speculate that it is because as a species we have focussed on physical survival. It is only relatively recently, perhaps in the last 100 years, that we have become more aware of emotional, mental and psycho-social issues.

Most people I know in my community area, social and acquaintance networks think that 'going for counselling' whether one consults a psychiatrist, psychologist or religious counsellor, means that one is somehow weak or just a bad, evil person, or one possesses a genetic structure causing madness. Many of these people are themselves taking medications for diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, anxiety and depression. Yet they do not see themselves as 'needing counselling' or self development of any kind because from their perspective, they have a medical condition that the doctor can treat with a pill.

From my perspective, as a Transformation Coach, I see the links between our childhood struggles and psychodynamic environment and how this created the unconscious programming for our psyche for the rest of our lives. The brain mechanism is set up to learn unconsciously when we are children and we then enter adulthood without understanding that some of these unconscious programmes kept us alive when were children but are either unhelpful or destructive in adulthood.

Once we have reached adulthood, we have accumulated these patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving - our psycho-social coping programmes, that are so automatic, that it feels like it is simply our personality. Or that we are 'born like that'.

Much of our unconscious reactions, these automatic programmes, are learnt. We can retrain our brains to create more healthy patterns. It does take discipline, and daily attention.

I once knew a man, let us call him joe junior, who entered a cycle marathon. He did not train at all and was not terribly fit. He thought he was handsome, had a good body, and he was super determined. He was convinced that he had all that was needed to complete the marathon. He lasted about one quarter of the way and needed medical attention for weeks thereafter. He thought he was brave and showing what a virile man he was. This was in fact a destructive pattern of his - engaging in high risk, daring behaviours to show his pals and I presume, whoever else he could boast to. He definitely thought that he was a desirable, admirable man.

People did admire his 'crazyness' and bravery. He had a father like that who died of a heart attack aged 45. Joe Senior had gone swimming in rough seas to show how strong he was after a day of heavy drinking. He had a heart attack in the water, managed to be rescued and died on the shore. He was seen as a brave man by his social circle. His children were proud of the way he died. If Joe Senior was aware of his own programme he might have explained it like this: "Always do crazy things to show how brave your are no matter what the risk. Women will love you, men will envy and admire you. If you are injured at least you will wear it as a badge of honour and if you die, at least you will be a hero".

It seemed many people around him believed that. When we look at Joe Senior's psycho-social programming we would see that his father, Joe Very Senior was extremely critical and that Joe Senior grew up never feeling good enough. He and his siblings constantly strove to do more excessive things to gain their father's praise. They would get some attention, but were always belittled at not being quite brave enough, manly enough etc. Joe Very Senior had programmed his son to copy his own desire for physical bravery glory. Joe Senior then programmed Joe Junior in the same way, although not quite as severely as he had experienced in his own childhood. Death and injury was the price they paid for trying to make up for a lifetime of feeling inadequate.

Viewing our psycho-social skills through the analogy of a fitness programme helps us see that we can analyse where our automatic skills are not helping us lead healthy lives. Once we can see the script, or the programming with clear eyes,we can create a training programme to cultivate healthy patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. If Joe Junior had said, while lying in hospital after his failed cycling episode; "I do not want to die as young as my father did. I agree with the doctors - I am behaving foolishly". Then he might be a candidate for psycho-social fitness training. But he was so indoctrinated by his father's programme that he remained blind to the damage he was causing to himself, his wife and children. He continued his self destructive behaviour.

Like training for a cycling or running marathon, psycho-social training takes regular 'workouts' and a training programme. Starting to learn these skills at a young age really helps. But I have worked with senior citizens including one who was in her mid eighties who believed that it is never too late to cultivate healthy psycho-social patterns. Now that, is brave!