My meditations are my teacher. Through my meditations, I slowly learn more about myself. The lesson I learned recently is awareness. I have only must started to become aware of how unaware I really am. It has been a long hard road to this point. If you are unaware of something… it is the same as being lost and thinking you are not lost. It’s a hopeless case. Only by looking back on my past again and again and again, deeper and deeper and deeper, have I finally come to realize how much I was missing.
I noticed there are things that are going on right under my nose that I am not aware of. It reminds me of a time when I lived under the flight path of jets from a local airport. For the first month or two we heard every airplane. Then slowly we became accustomed to them and started to not notice them. That is how some awareness is.
One way that I noticed it was one day I suddenly became aware of a song in my head. I realized I had been replaying the song for quite some time, quite unaware of it. I began to look for other instances of this. I realized there were times when I felt a rather uncomfortable feeling in a situation, yet I had become so accustomed to it that I failed to notice it 99% of the time. This was like the scales falling from my eyes. I could not go back to so many situations and ‘clean’ them up by getting rid of that feeling. But I had to first become aware of it. That was critical.
I am now on the hunt for other feelings that I have failed to notice yet are there inside me. Meditation is a kind of sensitization to these things. It is a heightening of awareness.