Part One Feeling Overwhelmed Series: Awareness
When we first become aware of a problem, a situation, or a feeling, we may react with anxiety or fear. There is no need to fear awareness. No need.
Awareness is the first step toward positive change and growth. It’s the first step toward solving the problem, or getting the need met, the first step toward the future. It’s how we focus on the next lesson.
Awareness is how life, the Universe and our higher power or God, gets our attention and prepares us for change. The process of becoming changed begins with awareness. Awareness, acceptance and change-that’s the cycle. We can accept the temporary discomfort from awareness because that’s how we’re moved to a better place. We can accept the temporary discomfort because we can trust God, and ourselves.
– excerpt from Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go
That being said, I would like to start with awareness of our own unhealthy behavior and/or thinking. I spoke of this in my book but there was a situation early in my life where my boyfriend, who later became my husband, had given me a key to his apartment early in our relationship. He went to see family in N.Y. and I was left in Texas. Well, I went over to check things out and saw a nightmare in his apt, primarily in the bathroom and kitchen. Instead of running from it, I decided to stay and be the dutiful girlfriend and clean it. I am now aware of just how unhealthy this was, always fixing others and never myself, focusing on them and never on me and my needs.
The truth is that we cannot change anything about ourselves if we are not aware of it first. I would like for you to take a few minutes each day this week and try to think about situations in your own life that you may want to change, situations that may have happened in the past where you can now honestly admit you may have not made a good decision for your self.
Awareness really is the first step to a better, more secure and confident you, through the change that will come later.
Have a blessed week,
FRAN
