We all have what I like to call a sixth sense, Awareness. This dormant sense of yours is the key to true inner freedom, an eternal peace of mind irrelevant to external circumstances.
This sense has been unknowingly buried away by the majority of people through over-identification with their thoughts and emotions to the point where it is no longer easily accessible to them. These thoughts and emotions pop up every second of the day grabbing your attention thus giving you no time to rest in awareness and as a result, your ability to simply be aware is lost over time.
If you look at a baby while they are just relaxing, sitting in a baby chair or lying in their pram, you will notice a deep sense of content in their eyes. So, what are they actually doing? Nothing, they are just being….being aware. With time they will get hungry and probably cry and when they are fed, they will return to being aware. They are not overly focused on anything, especially not their thoughts or emotions. It is this ability that we were born with, but have lost over time that is the way back to experiencing the contentment of life that we desire.
Your focus/attention takes away from this awareness which is not a problem by itself as we need to focus in order to get things done. Naturally, we should be alternating between focus and awareness throughout the day. If you focus too much on anything over a long period of time, you are essentially training your brain to focus more and be aware less.
For example, the more you focus on your thoughts, the more you are training your mind to keep focusing on them. It could begin as you innocently comparing yourself to someone else or believing a negative comment that someone said about you and if you focused too much on that comment or thought, it would get ingrained (conditioned) in your mind as a belief and you would also be training your brain to focus more and more on your thoughts. Now with false negative beliefs about yourself and an overly focused brain, suffering is inevitable. Whenever a negative belief or thought gets triggered, your attention is going to get pulled straight to it because you have unknowingly trained it to do so and this will cause you to suffer.
The more you focus on undesired thoughts and feelings, the more they are going to arise in your being and the stronger they will be. It’s a deadly cycle that causes huge amounts of stress and leads to depression and anxiety. You are left battling your own habitual attention on undesired thoughts and feelings, digging yourself further and further into a hole.
Behind all of this mind mayhem is your forgotten awareness, lying there dormant. It is present 24 hours a day 7 days a week and always has been. It is pure consciousness. Your mind can be conditioned with deluded beliefs and habitual feelings of ups and downs but your awareness/consciousness is always pure and balanced.
If you want to be truly free of your minds influence and all that goes with it, you must bring this awareness back as your main state of being. As you get back in touch with it, it will arise up and slowly clean you out, similar to a physical detox. All of the lies (deluded beliefs) that you have will be pushed to the surface for you to see through them and let them go and all of your emotional buildup that hasn't been dealt with and released will also surface. Basically all conditioning, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, patterns, cycles and anything else that you have learnt throughout the years that is not aligned with your true being will surface for healing and release. Your job is to ALLOW it to happen, it will happen naturally once you connect to your true self which is this awareness/consciousness.
This can be a challenging and tiring phase so it’s best that you have a good logical understanding of the process, feel free to read my other posts in order to do so. You should also familiarise yourself with YOUR obsessive thoughts and YOUR emotional baggage as these are what will be coming up for release. Be open to what arises and go with the flow. There is an intelligence far greater than your minds narrow perspective at work here so learn to trust it, resistance will only prolong this phase.