A practice for self-awareness

When practiced for long, it has transformative benefits

Photo by Microsoft Copilot on Unsplash

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

I am a proponent of social well-being, which comes through daily interactions with all kinds of people. It is supportive and satisfying to be among people and have good relationships, but most of us get carried along without realizing that we have lost our individuality and discretion about right and wrong along the way.

Solitude has many negative consequences; it compels a person to segregate themselves from the crowd and remain immersed in independent pursuits rather than being emotionally healthy and expressive. But it helps them to not be influenced by external circumstances and to guide their actions through free will to live unbiased and own it, depending fully on oneself.

It feels splendid to contemplate the lovely friends we have in life, but we shouldn’t lose ourselves in becoming like them. We should respect ourselves and our individuality.

One does not become selfish by ignoring others and diving deep into oneself to understand oneself. Inculcating self-awareness and balancing our social life with individuality is the greatest gift you can give yourself.

Remember that good or bad, you are you. And you know yourself.

Core aspects of Biblical self-awareness:

**Recognition of Sin and Need for Grace: True self-awareness begins by recognizing one’s sinful nature and the desperate need for a Savior, leading to repentance.**

**Understanding Identity in Christ: It involves knowing who you are in Christ, allowing you to align your thoughts and actions with God’s will.**

**Humility and Self-Examination: It involves avoiding pride and accurately assessing one’s strengths and weaknesses, as encouraged in 2 Corinthians 13:5, rather than thinking too highly of oneself.**

**Inviting Divine Scrutiny: As exemplified in Psalm 139:23–24, believers invite God to search their hearts, enabling them to identify and address hidden faults or “offensive ways”.**

Recognizing our flaws requires courage. It enables us to understand what consumes us and what possesses us to instigate a sinful attitude towards ourselves and others.

Self-cleansing is transformative.

Self-awareness helps us to align ourselves better with our goals and actions in life.

Living haphazardly usually leads to dissatisfaction. We require subtle adjustments to our thoughts and actions, balancing them with our needs and adapting them to our external environment. Therefore, the following practice will help us to become more self-aware and less sinful with better relationships with ourselves and others:

1. Place yourself alone for a few hours, absolutely without distractions, and do your work, or clean your room, or read something, or go for a walk. Observe your thoughts while being alone.
2. Carry yourself among people, close ones, colleagues, friends, strangers, or beneficiaries. In every situation, try to observe your thoughts and actions without analyzing their impact or your position among people. You should only observe yourself, and your mind will do self-correction.

The idea is not to indulge yourself in your thoughts. It is important to understand your thoughts and not to be obsessed with yourself. For example, there is a presentation by a colleague, and you want to grasp every bit of it, but you are ruminating about something else, like the dress of your colleague, how he interacted with you yesterday, or why he never affords you the opportunity. A self-aware person will notice this distraction and refocus on the presentation, which will help them learn, analyze, and discuss the content with their colleague later to improve it and make it more productive and workable in the future.

This practice will help them to phenomenally improve themselves, become better people, feel good about themselves, and appreciate others.

The other day, while presenting a research protocol, my mind was running over the expression of colleagues to gauge if they understood what I intended to convey and not about how good I look, how they think I present, or how worthy I am among them. At one point, I was about to think that way, but through observing my thoughts, I was able to correct it. I snapped back to the next slide and corrected the way I was about to go into self-marketing rather than self-awareness.

With years of practicing self-awareness, I am closer to myself, and I know to what extent I can sin and what my shortcomings are. I can navigate my thoughts, ruminate in them, analyze what is possessing me, leave it like that, and eventually forget it to move on with something better to do that will be soul cleansing, spiritual, and effective enough to move on with another intriguing project that helps me improve my professional goals.

It is not fun to constantly outwit others; observe your thoughts and actions. You will be less jealous, condescending, heinous, callous, and clever, but you will become more productive, friendly, and understanding. You will also resolve rivalries ethically without flaring up at every conjecture from others.

Observe yourself in order to fall in love with you. It shouldn’t be an illusion to like yourself no matter what. Self-obsession is different; it forces you to give yourself importance among others. But I am talking of self-awareness, by which you will have a better relationship with yourself. You know where you can go wrong and whether you might become absent-minded or cunning after tiring yourself with unnecessary thoughts, which you need to control to stay focused and make fewer mistakes in pursuing what matters.

I hope this approach benefits my readers, as it has benefited me greatly and has led to a tremendous inner transformation and a better relationship with myself.