The Importance of Awareness

Description

I lost my awareness for a couple of weeks. It sucked. This video is about how I realized the importance of awareness, and gives you some ideas and resources for enhancing your own.

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods

Video Transcription

this video is about awareness and the part that it plays in our life you might be aware of some fun things in this video or at least one thing probably pretty easy to see but let's spot it if you can there are some things in our life that are very easy to take for granted and one of those is our level of awareness when I think of living in in one's body and being able to move around your daily tasks and then all of a sudden you are injured in your back and and you feel the contrast between your regular ability to move through the world and what happens when this injury suddenly changes everything in your movement and you're not able to do basic things we don't put a lot of stock awareness in our culture but to me having awareness versus not having awareness is as graphic as being functional in your body and then suffering an injury where you just can hardly get out of bed and because it's not a culturally emphasized trait most of us we haven't experienced what it's like to be highly aware this brings up the movie Moana which I watched with my two young daughters and the reason it brings up the movie is because there's some great songs in that movie and my daughter's loved the music then rather musically inclined and we're singing the songs and I started singing the songs and what happened is that pretty soon despite how much mental discipline I think I have those songs were running in my head and it was incredible because I was able to see the contrast between my usual level of awareness and I've tried to cultivate this over the years I'm certainly not perfectly aware by any stretch of the imagination but I've developed a fairly high level of awareness over the years when those songs started going in my head my level of awareness dropped dramatically and the life quality change it blew me away was far beyond what I thought

awareness delivered unto one's life in other words without my usual level of awareness

I felt very handicapped I could not think straight I wasn't seeing things in my environment when I walk out to see the forest monks they could sneak up on me really easily I wasn't aware of things in nature but more than that just in my day-to-day quality of life my quality of life was degraded significantly food did not taste as good I wasn't able to appreciate my children my family my surroundings all the gifts I have in my life because they worked on my radar in the same way my awareness wasn't tuned into them and I was in awe reason I want to talk about this is that there is this gift this natural gift of awareness that we have and singing those songs over and over in my head help me to realize that when I consume media it does things to my mind and that affects my emotions that affects my health that affects how accident-prone I am it its effects are so wide-ranging having felt that contrast I cannot now imagine not being in that state of awareness the difference between those two states is so incredible so I had to stop singing those songs and my family was kind enough because my mental state was so weak at that point then I had to ask them to help me to not sing those songs in the car to help me out with getting these out of my head and it took about a week of just reversing that trend that I had cultivated over two weeks of singing the songs and getting myself into a state of autopilot mindlessness and oh what a relief to have that awareness back I'm not kidding this media consumption is so so normal in our world that it seems the on comprehension authen to think of not turning on the radio in the car not having those songs in your head not watching the evening news but having just experienced in the last few weeks the difference between having a brain that's on media and having a brain that's basically on nature meditation and quiet is so startling it makes me want to say that I'm not hesitating to say that your life will transform in ways that you cannot comprehend if you make the shift to getting off of media adding a meditation practice adding a gratitude practice where you stop every time you feel slightly off and feel gratitude for the gifts that you do have taking time to consciously develop more awareness

this can be nature awareness thusly situational awareness in urban situations walking into a room noting where the people are noting exits you know if you're walking into a restaurant noticing exits noticing where the kitchen is coming aware of your surroundings it's it's useful in a in a prep mindset proper mindset it's useful in a warrior mindset this is normal and expected in our soldiers because

they need to be aware of their environment and in the rest of us it adds so much to our life if you want to experiment with adding more awareness to your life I would suggest that meditation gratitude practice and really take a look at your media consumption and try going a month two months three months without it if you've been on media for a long time it's going to take it's going to take some time maybe years to get off of that mental media track even if you stopped cold turkey today it's going to be going and turning in your mind but dedicated meditation and gratitude practice to speed it up it will make you cultivate more mindfulness more awareness so that that three year dedication might turn into two years and one year even just a few months what's waiting on the other side for us is this gift that most of us don't even realize we're missing out on and again if we don't have that awareness it's the equivalent of laying in bed with an aching back and when have that awareness and we cultivated the world opens up in a thousand joyful waves

it's unbelievable I'm very grateful to Moana and the songs because they helped me to experience that contrast and to notice again how important awareness can be if you are interested in developing more awareness tell us about it down in the comments sometimes it helps to make a public announcement that you're going to for instance try going without media for a while remember at the end there's a link to our forest month group and that's a way that you can become a part of a community who now in the forest monk group I'm doing a weekly video where i give challenges out to people in explorations and the subscription for that forest monk group is as little as a dollar a month so of course more is always appreciated because it helps me in my mission and and if you've ever experienced the difference you know if you're already a meditator or someone who cultivates a lot of awareness what's it like going from that heightened state of awareness down to a lower state of awareness if you've ever experienced that shift because you're a meditator and then you gave up meditation or you had an experience like mine your mind became clouded by something soldiers love to hear from you you had to be in heightened state of awareness when you're engaged when you come back into the civilian world here what's it like to make that shift from having to be at that high level of awareness to a culture where that isn't required have you been able to maintain your awareness back in this world if so how thank you all for watching me share your experiences your ideas your thoughts your wisdom in the comments below and I think it was pretty obvious it was probably on the camera but tell me if you saw the little awareness challenge that happened close to the beginning of this video all right thank you all for watching