One of the most important steps to living a more fulfilling and happy life is the practice of Awareness. Awareness leads to control and control leads to happiness. Here are a few ideas that you can install in your daily routine to increase your awareness:
1. When you walk down the street, open your eyes wide and see what you see and hear what you hear. Turn up the level of your understanding. Bring yourself fully to all your experiences.
2. If you find your job repetitive, pay great attention to what you are doing. Notice how you use your hands, how your fingers move. Pretend that it is a massively important task you are doing and do it with crazy enthusiasm.
3. Focus your awareness inwards as well as outwards. Pay attention to the inside of your body; get to know how you really are feeling inside. Bring your full attention to your body.
4. Pay attention to your emotions. Notice the feelings you entertain in your mind at any given moment, joy, peace, love, anger, fear, self-doubt, and sadness. Pay attention to the occupants of your mental space.
5. Become more aware of how you relate to your loved ones. Take nothing for granted. Bring more awareness to every conversation, every disagreement. Listen with acute awareness to how you talk to them, not only to your words but your tone, inflection, pitch, the emotion in your voice etc. Know how you communicate.
6. Take this heightened awareness to your communication with others. Listen opportunistically not only to them but to yourself to raise the level of understanding, kindness, encouragement and love that you give to others.
7. Be aware of how your appearance affects other. Embrace curiosity. Be conscious of your facial expression even in the ordinary moments of life.
8. Look for any hatred or hostility or ambiguity in your attitudes – know yourself so you can change and be more successful in all encounters.
9. Be more aware of your finances. Bring a new sense of attention to what money you have, what you earn and how you use money.
10. If you have children, heighten your awareness of each one of them so that you can be sure of who each one really is and you will better be able to influence them. Be aware of how they feel about any issue. Pay attention to their words and reactions to certain situations and notice more things about each one in a new way.
11. Build up your awareness by changing things around. Change your furniture around even for a day and this tends to stimulate awareness. Change the order in which you dress. If you put your shirt on by first putting your left hand through the left sleeve, try putting your right hand first. Notice which sock you tend to put on first. If it is the right one, try putting on the left first.
12. If you usually add sugar to your coffee and then cream, for example, try adding the cream first then the sugar. This will force you to use your awareness.
13. If you usually drive to work, take the bus one day and notice, simply notice.
14. Use a different route to work, even if it is a few minutes longer, and pay attention. This technique will help to raise the level of your awareness and awareness leads to control. 15. When you have passed someone on the street, see if you can recall what they were wearing, colors, facial expression, if they were using a cell phone and so on. Raise the level of your awareness of people and this will increase your capacity to live a fuller and better life.