Awareness

Awareness shapes everything we experience, from who we were when we didn’t yet understand ourselves to the slow unfolding of how we learn to see, feel, and live differently over time.

“Everyone is doing the best they can based on their own level of awareness.”

Naturalist and writer John Muir wrote that "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." Similarly, I believe that everything in our life, from our potential to our ability to connect to our lived experience, hinges on one thing: our level of awareness.

I had no idea what awareness was when I first read this Robert Anthony quote that would change my life. It was the first domino, flicked nearly 20 years ago, that would eventually lead me to where I am now. My entire journey with this idea began with finding his book (The Ultimate Guide to Total Self-Confidence), reading that monumental declaration, and spending the following weeks trying to piece together what that sentence meant.

Thank goodness that book found me, because it was my first awareness of compassion as a high school student riddled with shame and low self-worth. But my sense of life’s brevity and potential outweighed my blindness and led me to seek growth and understanding. Living within me was a great vision for myself and my life. I have had essentially the same dreams since I was a little girl, but the way I wanted to feel was what I coveted most.

In my darkened room at night, I would dream about being this bright and shiny self, imagining how it would feel more than how it would look. I had an awareness of human potential that still drives me now, though I had no awareness that I was living its opposite until later. I lived perpetually out of my body as a coping mechanism for the lack of consciousness around me.

But as I pulled on that invisible thread of potential, I began weaving a tapestry of awareness across health, authenticity, emotional processing, and countless other areas of life. It is still being woven today. That’s all this is: a never-ending evolution of comprehension and understanding.

My life and relationships have benefited from this exploration. I am currently gaining greater awareness around action, excellence, self-worth, and a deeper sense of self that makes others’ opinions matter less. I spent my 20s laying the groundwork for concepts like lightheartedness and respect, often through very difficult lessons, and my 30s exploring how to embody them more fully. I suspect that each decade will bring deeper integration and a lighter way of being.

Awareness makes me empathetic to where others and I may not have it. It makes me realistic: there will be things I see and understand in a year that I cannot understand now. This breeds understanding, a more open mind, and a more open heart. Wherever I am now, I see how I once lived an incredibly blind and unconscious existence.

Flash back to 14 years old. Seething in pain after discovering my best friend’s betrayal, I impulsively wrote her an anonymous “hate letter” for her locker, immediately torn up in guilt and ultimately revealed as mine by the time the school bell rang.

That younger version of me had no concept of emotional awareness or how to express hurt directly and honestly. She had not yet learned respect, boundaries, intimacy, compassion, or forgiveness. She did not yet know she was worthy of love, friendship, or repair—or that she would still be enough when things ended.

With the awareness I have gained of my own lack of understanding, I have no choice but to have grace and compassion for where others and I are now, individually and collectively.

And that brings us back to Anthony’s: “Everyone is doing the best they can based on their own level of awareness.”

Ironically, that painful middle school moment and my inability to meet it consciously filled me with guilt and shame that led me to change schools, isolate, realize I “needed confidence,” and eventually stumble upon Anthony’s compassion-blazing book.

That led me to live in the Colorado mountains, where I met my teacher Judi, who became central to my understanding of emotional awareness and responsibility. She shared words I would say a thousand times more than I first heard them:

“Everything moves like the seasons.”

A little bit of awareness that grew within me over time came from that teaching. As I continually found it to be true, I can see how I may have woken up to something one day, but its deeper understanding came gradually—like the sun rising earlier with the Earth’s shift, the moon moving from new to full, and winter turning into spring.

Just as nature changes each day, so too does the blossoming of our awareness.

“Once you see something, you can’t unsee it—and you will change.”

I often tell friends that any glimpse of awareness is like opening Pandora’s box. A snowball effect takes place where life seems to conspire toward meeting you there. When someone tells me they want something in their life to change, I often find myself saying with a smile: “With the awareness you have, the work is already done.” And I continue: “I don’t know how long it will take, but the fact that you see it means you will change. It’s already happening.”

No one told me this. I saw it through years of pattern recognition in myself and others.

But that’s ultimately how I see awareness: it brings everything into the light rather than leaving it hidden in shadow, where we remain separate and suffering. This illumination brings belonging and aliveness, gratitude and hope, truth and liberation.

“The truth will set you free.”

I understand more deeply that these phrases endure because they point to something real. The more honest and whole I am within myself, the more my life aligns—even if honesty creates chaos before the calm of living from one’s center.

In terms of awareness, I am where I am. I will be in a different place in 10 years, tomorrow, and this evening. And so too are you. And like the sentence that changed my life more than any other, we are all doing the best we can based on where we are now.

Awareness is not measured by what we say to gain approval; it is measured by how we live, no matter who is watching. We can repeat what is socially acceptable, but awareness—shaped through experience—determines how we behave when no one is looking.

Awareness is a whole world I explore each day, but it is the bedrock of truth and a truly fulfilling life. Thich Nhat Hanh said that if a tree stops growing, it dies, and so too do we. This is a life of growth and change—not just biological evolution, but the evolution of consciousness. As the tides move with the moon and the seasons cycle, so too do we grow in awareness with each rising and setting of the sun we are given. The difference is only in how willing we are to look, to see, to understand, and to open - to be free.

I’m right here with you.

There’s nowhere else I’d want to be. <3