Podcast Ep. 4 ~ The Importance of Self-awareness

This podcast episode is taken from Big Shakti’s Light on the Chakras and Kundalinī training masterclass series. This masterclass is taught once every two years and is conducted over nine months. It consists of 20 lessons and 10 classes. In the class, you practice a meditation on the chakras and kundalinī, the serpent power coiled in the base chakra, and have an opportunity to ask questions and review your progress.

In this episode, we discuss self-awareness, which is the central concept in yoga, yoga tantra, and meditative practice. The core aim of all wisdom traditions is self-knowledge. Know thyself, and unto yourself be true, is the ancient dictum passed down through the ages.

As you direct your attention inwards, the ultimate goal of this process is to touch the core of your being, your true and authentic self.

The journey to the self is via the mind and the deep psyche, the unconscious, called the shadow. The authentic self that you are aiming to be aware of is the eternally unchanging principle. It is the ground of being. All life, which includes your body and mind, are eternally changing energy patterns. Birth, life, and death are all under the control of energies that power the world, both the visible and invisible. The best place to be to manage these energies is in the self. We call this the witness position. When you are in the witness, you are in the witness protection program. In this place, you are protected from the dark forces of the mind and psyche, from past undigested emotions and traumas.

When you are identified with the duality of the mind and emotions, you are identified with the eternally changing energies, which can be positive or negative, creative or destructive, pleasant or unpleasant. When you are identified with the self, you are connected to your center, a stable, unchanging, blissful part of you from which you can observe the changes occurring in your mental and emotional energy patterns, for example, and you can do something about them if you need to.

The self is the center. If you are centered in the self, then any perturbations in life can be managed because if you can hold onto your center during the tough times, you are grounded, centered, stable, and not overwhelmed. However, if you are not centered, then any change in the outer world will destabilize you because you don’t have a fixed center. You need the outer world to remain the same to feel safe. Any change is scary if you are not self-aware and you don’t have a center.

The self is the source of all knowledge and who you are. So, the aim of meditation is to know more and more about who you are and expand your sense of self. In meditation, you actively engage in self-reflection, and the result of this is self-discovery. You discover parts of yourself, both your strengths and your weaknesses. As a result, you can begin to do what is required to manage your weaknesses by accessing your hidden strengths.

All of Big Shakti’s meditations and courses teach you how to cultivate and amplify self-awareness.

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Podcast Transcript ~ Episode 4

The foundation concept in yoga tantra is self-awareness. From the yoga tantra point of view, cultivating self-awareness is the most important thing you can do in your life.

Wikipedia defines self-awareness as “the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals.”

Self-awareness arises when consciousness reflects onto itself; that is, you realize that you are conscious of being conscious. This is reflected awareness. For example, you think and know that you are thinking.

Remember that consciousness and awareness are synonymous with the Self, which is pure consciousness, while the mind is a form of subtle energy which is an instrument for consciousness used to navigate through life. Awareness is the light that reveals what is going on in your mind. However, awareness of the self must be stronger than the mind. Otherwise, your mind becomes your master. If your self-awareness is weak or unstable, your thoughts, emotions, desires, and impulses have the power to overwhelm your sense of self, leading to confusion and distress. You become ungrounded and lost in your mind and emotions. This is why we place so much importance on grounding, which involves coming back into the body and the present moment. Self-awareness training is essential if you are to master your mind and remain grounded, centered, mindful, and heart present during your daily activities.

Humans are unique

As far as we know, humans are unique in having the capacity to self-reflect and introspect. We know some animals have a degree of self-awareness and communicate with language and understanding. However, humans are unique because individual consciousness has evolved to the point where we are capable of intuition and are aware of time and space. Therefore, humans who consciously develop their capacity for self-awareness are capable of future planning and creativity. It is individual consciousness and the degree of self-awareness that humans are capable of that differentiates us from animals, who, as far as we know, are not self-aware.

Of course, not all humans are equally self-aware. Many people carry so much difficult karma that they are overwhelmed by the burden of their lives. They live in a constant state of emergency and have little space, either literal or cognitive, to develop self-awareness. Others are more focused on ego-gratification and live in states dominated by narcissism. Thereby, they cause more harm to themselves and others. Their destructive ego prevents them from authentic self-awareness, which is, by its nature, anti-narcissistic. If you are truly aware of yourself, you can easily feel and empathize with others.

To understand self-awareness's importance, contemplate what it would be like to have no self-awareness. You would be in a purely animal state of existence, driven by the forces of nature and with no sense of choice or purpose.

If your self-awareness is weak or unstable, as it is for many people, you will lose yourself in thought, potentially caught up in worry, anxiety, desires, and emotions. Without cultivating self-awareness, you will be in danger of becoming ungrounded and destabilized when negative thoughts and feelings erupt from the unconscious. Without a strong, stable sense of self, you can’t hold your center, which is essential to objectively face and manage what arises in your mind.

Lack of insight leads to confusion, poor decision-making, emotional disturbance, and problems in relating to others. You act instinctively and impulsively, driven by both positive and negative emotions, old habits, and unfulfilled desires and needs.

Many people have low levels of self-awareness. They are unaware of their inner being and the internal forces driving their thoughts, feelings, and actions. They are over-focused on external events and experiences. They are, therefore, driven mainly by programming, social conditioning, social media, and groups that tell them what to think, feel, and do. There is no self-reflection until, hopefully, self-awareness starts to grow and develop with age and life experience. It is then, if you are open and ready, that the psyche begins to call you, and you start to wake up to the possibility of the highest Self. Suppose you are lucky and your karma is good. In that case, you might approach a teacher and ask questions about who you really are and work on yourself through techniques and even through psychotherapy, which is a great way to self-reflect and manage any difficult karmic patterns.

It is a really good idea to hang out with people who are self-aware and who are cultivating self-awareness rather than people who are destroying their self-awareness, for example, by drugs and alcohol. They live in a very animal-like state, one that is more instinctive, impulsive, and selfish. And we can see what has happened to the planet because of this. They are driven by the forces of the psyche, which are both positive and negative.

An unaware life is one in which you will tend to avoid and deny the darkness. But just because you do this does not mean that these dark parts of you will go away. Left in the dark, they run riot in your psyche, causing you and others great distress. And because you are not self-aware, you are likely to blame others for you self-created misfortune. To reduce their pain, they will engage in self-destructive behaviors such as drugs and alcohol, over-eating, sexual addictions, and so on. and this further reduces their self-awareness.

Cultivate self-awareness

Self-awareness is best optimized via the combination of education and meditation. Proper theory and practice cultivate a strong, stable sense of self that can deal with the outer and inner challenges arising from your unconscious.

Meditating on the hierarchy of the chakras is a powerful method of cultivating self-awareness. As you meditate on each chakra, you become more aware of the various elements that make up the bodymind within each chakra. You can start with gross structures in the base chakra, mūlādhāra, where self-awareness is extremely limited. Here, the highest Self is asleep. As you refine your self-awareness, you become more aware of the subtle energies within you. Consciousness then travels up, chakra by chakra, to the highest chakra, where you experience full-blown self-realization and universal consciousness. The highest Self is fully awake. However, you can only ascend the hierarchy of the chakras after refining self-awareness. Otherwise, consciousness remains dull and gross, trapped at the base chakra in material consciousness.

When you develop self-awareness within a structured self-development program, you embody intuitive knowledge that enables a deep understanding your how your mind and emotions work. You can see your attitudes and the motives behind your desires and can better predict the outcomes and repercussions of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. This allows you to take responsibility for your actions and harness the immense power within.

This occurs via the awakening of ājnā chakra, the highest human chakra that enables you to see clearly into the future. When your ājnā chakra is active, you can cognize all of the information coming into you from the outer world, from the external reality, and from your awakened intuition, from the inner guide. You know that if you engage in certain actions and go down a certain path, that will lead to an outcome that must happen because your intuition is clear. If ājnā chakra is not active, then you simply imagine what might happen. However, this is not connected to reality and is often prone to ungrounded fears and phobias.

And most people, and especially most meditators, have that experience of an inner voice guiding them and either encouraging them to go down a path or warning them not to go, to stop. You often feel you have done the right thing when you heed that voice. However, if you have not heeded that voice, then later on, having disregarded your intuition, you say to yourself, “I knew it. I should have listened to myself, to my inner voice.” And you recognize that old conditioning, either in the form of fears or anxieties or desires and ambitions, have overridden your inner wisdom and safety mechanisms. They have drowned out and denied the instructions of the inner voice.

Remember that you can become more conscious and skillful in directing your life toward more positive, healthy, and fulfilling results. You take your own self-development into your own hands. You simply have to engage in practices that promote greater self-awareness, self-reflection, and honest self-inquiry. As you are doing with this course.

Increasing self-awareness enables self-discovery and self-knowledge. As you become established in self-awareness, you can objectify thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories, and desires to recognize your strengths and weaknesses associated with each chakra. It is especially important not to run away from and avoid your weaknesses and vulnerabilities. You can learn and engage in processes that enable you to address your needs and turn them to your advantage. They become the source of your wisdom. This is the foundation of inner psychological stability, peace, and higher awareness. This enables you to cultivate greater clarity of mind, emotional balance, and inner resilience. You are better able to deal with whatever issues arise in your life.

In the yoga-tantra system, once you have learned to manage your mind, increasing self-awareness empowers more self-awareness, enabling consciousness to ascend to higher and higher chakras. Chakra meditations strengthen your ability to recognize that you are an individual consciousness who is more than just the ego-sensory-thinking mind complex. You recognize that you are part of something greater. You become aware of more and more parts of yourself up to the point of total self-awareness, which is called self-realization in many spiritual traditions.

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