I am reading Dancing with Life for a book club I am in, and with a few short words, the author gave voice to something I have spent a lot of time trying to understand over the years.
“[Awareness provides] deeper context for interpreting your experiences”
I always wondered how it was that I could keep having deeper and deeper understanding of the same exact thing. How could it be that I kept having “aha moments” around similar realizations of self?
To provide a basic example, one thing that I have worked on continuously is my need for acceptance by others. As I did my work of internal inquiry over the years, I am sure that there have been more than 10 times when I came to the conclusion of “Oh, I get it now, I need to feel acceptance by others”.
How can it be that I keep coming around to the same exact lesson on a deep internal level so many times? This is a question I have asked myself so many times with so many different life realizations.
And with his few words, I now have clarity on how this works. You see, every time I gained awareness, the context of my experience changed. And with that change of context, I was now living life at at different internal level – which I had noticed. But this deeper level also provided opportunity to understand the issue at hand in an entirely different light, which the additional awareness months, or years later, provided.
It’s a simple idea, really, but one that eluded me for a long time, so I thought to share it. Perhaps, I will get to learn it again sometime in the future. Ha!