'Knowing' Your Experience

To know your experience….does it even make sense as a sentence? We’d obviously know our experience, right.

But when you look a little closer, you realize it's not all that obvious. It's about the varying levels of awareness with which you know or feel something.

                     

One thing that is fundamentally distinctive to man, is the ability to be aware.... self aware. It's such an intrinsic and deep ability, yet one that gets taken for granted, used mostly at subliminal levels. It's like someone said, "you always have awareness, but you need to be aware that you have the awareness"

Events and experiences happen to all of us......life in its details, its routine, its excitements, it's sorrows, its beauty, it's pain, it's joys........the entire spectrum. We can either just be in it as participant....or we can become aware of it beyond......not just as a participant, but as observer, as spectator.... we can connect to a particular experience at a deeper level, capture it's subtler facets, feel it in an added dimension.

This by choice. Simply by switching on a higher level of awareness. At first maybe for specific and intense experiences, but I think it can slowly become a way of life.

Let’s take an example: Say Raagini who did her first stage performance last month. 

She comes out feeling good, but also worried about that one step that might have gone wrong, or the time when both her anklets got stuck together and she almost lost balance, and how someone told her she could smile more. The next layer could be to connect into how it’s eight years of relentless effort that has culminated in that dance….. how she went all those days when she didn’t feel like it….. how her long hair which she always wanted cut, was so admired that day….how graceful and pretty she looked... how she was not just water, or a tree or a deer but had a significant amount of stage time and lots of dance….and with that her whole experience of the evening is so enhanced. 

And awareness not just into other facets of the experience but also into feelings, thoughts, behavior......as every experience has more layers than apparent.

Such experiences also get to sit in your memory in a manner that lends itself beautifully to recall. Super useful for learning and growth, in fact critical I'd think.....and bonus, the ones that matter become 'forever moments' by choice. 

It's a hugely enriching process.