Awareness is one of the continuous tasks that a warrior commits to. Awareness is to be conscious of a situation or a fact. It is about being perceptive or conscious of how you are, how you feel, how you move; all in the NOW. It is the space of knowing, not necessarily doing.
A lot of times, people commit to being in auto pilot. It’s like taking the same route to work everyday. Once you know the route inside out, the common thing to do is to put the mind into auto pilot. It’s a comfort space.
By being in auto pilot, we also enter the space of complacency because ‘it works’. The space to reflect and improve is no longer an open space. Unless we break out of the auto pilot mode and work on being aware, it may be difficult to get out of the constructs of our own mind. Lack of awareness makes patterns that much more difficult to change later.
Awareness of how you are breathing, how equally your weight is displaced on your feet and how is your spine is, are examples of body awareness or body schema.
Being aware of yourself In a given space is spatial awareness. It is an organised knowledge of objects in relation to yourself in a given space, moving or not.
Being aware of how you are feeling and how it is affecting your muscle movement is body-emotive awareness.
These are a few examples.
Vikram Badhwar, CEO, Syngrity, is a communications coach, an experiential educator, and an artist trying to bridge the gap between the creative and the analytical side of our brain. He consults individuals and teams in the space of learning & development to enable transformations at a personal, professional and organizational level.