11 Lesser-Known Practical Benefits of Having Higher Awareness
How your life changes when your awareness rises
“Is there a state of awareness meditators experience that non-meditators don’t have access to?”
As we discussed more on how one can establish a regular meditation practice and the benefits that come along with it, my friend asked me the above question that made me pause for a moment.
In the brief pause, I almost traversed the experiences of my whole life before I learned how to meditate. It’s as if different moments in time came before my eyes all in one flash of light. I remembered how I used to be tired, stressed, distracted, and irritated most times.
And now, after having a regular practice of daily meditation, I can safely say that my life has changed for the better. Yet, like most people, my past self also had no idea of how a higher awareness feels like on a day-to-day basis.
What are the actual benefits of becoming more conscious? Why should I care? And what the heck does raising your consciousness mean anyway? For all I knew, it was only restricted to monks, nuns, saints, and sages. In my mind, any effort to raise my consciousness involved meditating for hours on end and giving up most things in life that I liked at that point.
Yes, raising your consciousness and awareness can do wonders for your spiritual growth. But it has lesser-known mental benefits as well. You can see yourself performing better in whatever it is that you do. You can make better decisions. And most importantly, your perception of reality changes.
While the spiritual changes in your consciousness and life can often be too subtle to point out, these changes are practical and seem more real; for they concern our daily lives.
There are some serious benefits that you can gain in your pursuit to raise your consciousness and awareness. I didn’t start out with a goal to work on consciousness — I didn’t even know what it means. But the changes I’ve gone through can only be explained by a rise in awareness. Here are some of the things that I’ve seen which make higher awareness more attractive.
An Enhanced Sensory Experience
“We have many ways of creating our realities based on the different ways we perceive.” ― Zamm Zamudio
Reality is only what you perceive. The occurrences in your life are objective, it’s only your perception that gives them life and turns them into an experience. Perception is reality.
When your awareness rises, your perception expands. And when your perception expands, your reality changes. That’s one of the key traits of the spiritual path. The path is tough to walk, but every step ahead makes life better in some form or the other.
The colors seem brighter. The stars twinkle more. The sounds seem more melodious. You can start to detach yourself a little from your senses when you want to do so. You’re able to notice the smell of a flower while walking in the forest.
Basically, you get the proverbial spidey sense at all times. In simpler words, you start to notice things you’ve never noticed before. Your senses get a bandwidth boost and make every experience richer. Since you’re able to take more input than before, life starts to seem amusing.
Driving, doing laundry, taking a walk, washing the utensils, entering data into a spreadsheet, drying out clothes, and many other boring tasks are not mundane anymore. You’re able to find joy in just *being *where you are. In an age when most people are hooked to some form of sensory input at all times — music, podcasts, TV, etc. — you can remain at peace within yourself.
An enhanced sensory experience helps you communicate better with others. Most people don’t even take into account the body language and the subtle energy that a person has. Yet, they contain more information than the words coming out of their mouth.
By being aware of my own energy, I can intuit where the energy of the person is. It helps me attune myself to their realities and have a better conversation instead of just going by what they say.
Sharpened Mental Clarity
A higher level of awareness doesn’t come by sitting on the couch and binge-watching Netflix all day. You have to do the work to peel the layers of your false self-definitions. No matter what practice you use to do that (meditation, yoga, etc), it almost definitely has a positive impact on your brain.
This can be also a time of immense confusion. When you start to play with realities your mind doesn’t have a clue about, the world can stop making sense for a while.
Yet, once you pass this stage, there comes a whole new level of clarity. It’s like someone has upgraded your operating system. The applications are not only better but also different. There’s a whole new way to live that you didn’t know existed.
For me, this was one of the few times I had a clear vision of my life — a vision that made me happier than any other I’ve had before. From then on, my priorities changed and my days started looking altogether different.
I wasn’t motivated by the same lifestyles and concepts anymore. It was a change drastic enough to freak some and inspire others around me. All this only happened because I finally got the clarity I desperately hoped for.
Increased Self-Awareness
When your awareness begins to deepen, your sense of self changes altogether. You stop identifying with your ego the way you used to before. By distancing your Self (your Higher Self) from yourself (your ego), you can finally build Self-awareness and also self-awareness. Let me explain.
You build Self-awareness by becoming aware of a higher power within you. It’s the power that guides you on the path of virtue. The power that makes the right choices to support your growth in all aspects. The more aware you are of the Self, or the soul, the happier you’ll be. Most difficulties in life happen because of our egos. If only we can learn to tune down its effect on our lives, we can have a joyful and calmer existence.
You also build self-awareness, i.e. being aware of your egoic decisions, seeing yourself objectively, and finding your strengths and weaknesses. Instead of drowning in the sea of your pride, you recognize your imperfections and work towards building them.
Life can be very confusing for a person who doesn’t understand this distinction. Being trapped in the ego, it’s difficult to see why people (including you) do the kind of things they do. But once you understand your own behavior, the behavior of humans starts to make sense.
Equipped with that understanding, you can choose the right direction for your life — the kind of career, relationships, hobbies, and interests you want to develop. When your outer life is congruent with your inner life, everything else starts falling into place.
Efficient Problem-Solving
Solving problems and making better decisions is the bread-and-butter for humans. Yet, so many of us either suck at it or fear making the wrong decision. Worse, we make a confident decision only to find out it isn’t congruent with what we want in life.
In my experience, this happened because all the aspects of my nature — physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual — were not aligned. Once I started working on all those pillars, every decision started making sense.
Further, the decisions were quicker and clearer than ever before. With the enhanced mental clarity, even big problems ceased to be a life-and-death situation for me. It’s hard to explain this one, but all I can say is my life feels more aligned than ever.
Higher Emotional Intelligence
With awareness, comes emotional mastery. You’re not exactly a master of emotions but a rise in awareness definitely puts you on that path. First, it makes you realize where these emotions are coming from.
“Why am I getting angry? Is it worth getting upset about? So what if they didn’t do things the way I wanted them to? Who am I to control them anyway? This doesn’t affect me, really? Then why be upset by obsessing over it?”
These some of the questions I often ask myself in moments of emotional excitement. It’s not that I have a notebook where I’ve written these questions down. They come to mind when I need them. Now, of course, I still act out on certain occasions that I wish I hadn’t. But those moments also turn into learning lessons instead of guilt-trips.
As I progressed more on the path of emotional intelligence, I came to realize that most of my emotions were in control of my external environment. When I learned to maintain a positive inner environment amidst outer negativity, I started to take that control back.
I no longer got as upset or mentally ruffled as I did before. Life became interesting. Every emotion became just another piece of information that encouraged me to do better next time. Using this constant feedback loop (which is a direct result of being more aware and mindful) I’ve been able to tame down my reactions significantly.
Making Soulful Connections
It doesn’t take a psychic to notice that human connections are much more than words, physical attraction, or mental similarities. Often you just know that you don’t like spending time with a person for no apparent reason.
Perhaps, there is an apparent reason. You don’t like their level of energy or consciousness. Because you’ve worked to increase your own awareness you won’t like to hang out with people who pull you down. Yes, you can do so out of manners or pure compassion. But if given a choice you may prefer not to.
On the other hand, the right kind of people will seem to like and trust you, for no apparent reason. But the reason is the same. They like your energy and feel good in your presence. I’ve had people tell me certain things that they may not tell their closest friends. Perhaps they’ve felt a vibration of trust absent in their interaction with others.
Like most people, I can’t pinpoint the exact reason for this, but I know it has a lot to do with a person’s level of awareness. There are no more fluffy connections in my life — or at least I don’t spend time with them. Whoever’s left resonates with me at a deeper level, thereby making our connection stronger.
Better Relationships
This point is related to a lot of the others I’ve mentioned. Since you’ve become good at relating to others with your compassion, empathy, and self-awareness, they like you more.
It’s been easier for me to communicate naturally with strangers or old friends alike. People feel much less threatened by you and find you a little more approachable. Again, these things are subtle to point out, but surely have a positive effect on your relationship with people.
Automatic Discipline
As a self-help junkie, I tried hard to break bad habits and build good ones. However, success never came as easy as it does now. As a result of a shift in awareness, I just *know *some habits to be bad and others to be good.
The desire to indulge in the bad ones itself is reduced. I no longer feel an urge to binge-watch movies or play video games, for example. It’s not that I’ve gone cold turkey with any of them but I’ve been able to moderate them significantly.
Procrastination, bad eating habits, lack of exercise, and many other things have automatically improved. This leads to good health — both mental and physical — for a large part of being healthy is having the discipline to do so.
A Changed Outlook on Money
This is an esoteric point of view indeed, but I’ll go ahead and say it anyway. When your awareness increases, you start to think of everything in terms of energy. Money, similarly, is energy. The more you give, the more you receive.
The more you try to hoard for yourself, the less you receive. It’s the abundance mindset vs the scarcity mindset. Most of us default to the scarcity mindset. It tells us that the only wisdom is to keep what we have for ourselves.
The abundance mindset, on the other hand, shatters our limiting beliefs. We learn to give more to others and live in harmony. Income is a natural consequence of that.
More Compassion
When we raise our own consciousness, we find it much harder to hate people or think of them as enemies. Rather than criticizing them for their actions, we learn to see the reasons behind their behavior. Often people are not in a position to tell us about the inner demons they’re facing. But that doesn’t mean that they’re absent.
In other words, the more time we spend in higher consciousness, the more we can explain others’ actions by their distress. We stop thinking about how it affects us, and how it made us feel.
The world is full of suffering and people bumping against each other to make their way. But we realize that there’s a universal need for love. There’s a longing to belong in each and every one of us. Only with a higher consciousness can we appreciate that longing.
Dynamic Calmness
Peace and calmness are good traits as soon as someone comes shouting in your face for a mistake you didn’t commit. Dynamic calmness is the ability to be calm in midst of activity.
To be calm when things go wrong is the ultimate strength. Yogananda told his disciples, “You must stand unshaken amidst the crash of breaking worlds.” Think of the powerful word choice and the imagery he used. That’s what we have to aspire towards. The more you raise your consciousness, the more centered you become in yourself to the point where nothing in this world — not even death — can touch you.
Final Thought
Higher awareness is what we’re really after. That alone contains the secret to our happiness. That’s the goal of all spiritual practices indeed — to expand our awareness till infinity — until we find ourselves one with everything that is.
And on your path to reaching that Infinite awareness, you still get a lot of goodies along the way. The path is beautiful if you have the courage to walk it. I hope we all meet on the other side soon.