Today, I want to talk about awareness…..now if you want some research backed information, look in Julie’s writings. I’m off the cuff. I want to just talk about general awareness. Awareness of your position in time and space. I was at my son’s soccer game on a very wet morning and everyone was avoiding the grass until the last second to put their chair down and sit carefully to avoid getting their shoes soaking wet. I am one of those parents that starts to yell at little kids, so I have to be walking and barely paying attention to the game in order to make it through without being arrested so I walk….a lot. With the amount of water on the grass, I’m walking up and down the sidewalk that borders the field. The first few times I passed the 4 people talking in the middle of the sidewalk, I figured they were catching up and then going to sit down. But as the 6 and 7th pass by happened and the game ran into halfway, I realized that they had no intention of leaving the middle of the only walkway that people had. I watched many families have to detour into the grass to get around these people and I had to step into the grass to get around them every time I came by. And they never had any awareness of their position on the sidelines of a young kids’ soccer match.
Awareness of your position in time and space.
Don’t get me wrong, I too, have lost awareness of the fact that I’m probably hindering someone else’s ability to get past me when I have had to stop and stare at something amazing or just get a rock out of my shoe. But this amazing lack of awareness made me consider being a tourist or a traveler and the etiquette of traveling. I believe that awareness is lacking when we travel. Think of the times that you have had to wait while someone set up the perfect selfie, how the scene you were trying to capture was hindered by the swarming hordes of people just like yourself. How much would awareness make a difference? We practice awareness at home when we are entering a dark area, we sometimes become more aware when we’ve been alerted to the possibility of pickpockets in a particular area, but these things seem to fade when we are faced with the work of art that we have traveled forever to see or the monuments that we have only read about. And it is understandable. There is a reason that people gape at the Eiffel Tower, the Trevi Fountain, or Buckingham Palace. We have worked hard to get here, to see this, to be where we only dreamed about. But does it come at the cost of not being in the moment?
What do you see, hear, smell?
I’m old enough to remember saving every picture for the “one” because there were only 36 pictures on the roll. You weren’t going to waste a picture on something that was not a sure thing. Now, I can take thousands of pictures in a second and scroll through to find the perfect set up later on my computer and delete the others. That’s amazing and I love the memories I come back with because of this awesome technology, but I have a feeling that I’m missing something else now. I feel the urge to put down the camera, to not even try to take a picture of something that I know a professional photographer has nabbed the best picture of and instead take in its position in the universe.
What if that level of awareness is brought to the front of any great experience we want to cherish and fully live?
When we create a safe place in EMDR, we focus on making it as rich a place to experience as possible. What do you see, hear, smell? What’s the temperature? Is there a breeze? There’s a reason that these questions get asked to bring a person deeper into the experience. What if we start focusing on those answers in the moment of being at the Vatican, in front of the Mona Lisa, at a child’s soccer game? What if that level of awareness is brought to the front of any great experience we want to cherish and fully live? Think about you and your interaction with the place you are at any given time and for heaven’s sake, get out of the sidewalk!