Know Thyself

Self Awareness is that huge first step (or rather process) to being in more centered and conscious space....living life from the pilots seat rather than letting others or even your own emotions drive you.

Like Carl Jung says "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate"

In this context, this particular chapter from 'Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman gives good context on how, the seemingly obvious ' I know what I'm feeling',  is not as simple as it seems.

He starts with a little story, and then I've put excerpts:

"A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, "You're nothing but a lout—I can't waste my time with the likes of you!" 

His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled, "I could kill you for your impertinence." 

"That," the monk calmly replied, "is hell." 

Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight. 

"And that," said the monk, "is heaven." 

The sudden awakening of the samurai to his own agitated state illustrates the crucial difference between being caught up in a feeling and becoming aware that you are being swept away by it. 

It might seem at first glance that our feelings are obvious; more thoughtful reflection reminds us of times we have been all too oblivious to what we really felt about something, or awoke to these feelings late in the game. 

Such self-awareness would seem to require an activated neocortex, particularly the language areas, attuned to identify and name the emotions being aroused. 

At its best, self-observation allows just such an equanimous awareness of passionate or turbulent feelings. It manifests itself as a slight stepping-back from experience, a parallel stream of consciousness that is "meta": hovering above or beside the main flow, aware of what is happening rather than being immersed and lost in it. 

This awareness of emotion is the fundamental emotional competence on which others, such as emotional handling, build. Self-awareness, in short, means being "aware of both our mood and our thoughts about that mood," 

Self-awareness can be a nonreactive, nonjudgmental attention to inner states. But Mayer finds that this sensibility also can be less equanimous; typical thoughts bespeaking emotional self-awareness include "I shouldn't feel this way," "I'm thinking good things to cheer up," and, for a more restricted self-awareness, the fleeting thought "Don't think about it" in reaction to something highly upsetting. 

When we say "Stop that!" to a child whose anger has led him to hit a playmate, we may stop the hitting, but the anger still simmers. The child's thoughts are still fixated on the trigger for the anger, and the anger continues unabated. 

Much of emotional life is unconscious; feelings that stir within us do not always cross the threshold into awareness. Empirical verification of this comes, for instance, from experiments on unconscious emotions. 

Any emotion can be—and often is—unconscious. The physiological beginnings of an emotion typically occur before a person is consciously aware of the feeling itself. For example, when people who fear snakes are shown pictures of snakes, sensors on their skin will detect sweat breaking out, a sign of anxiety, though they say they do not feel any fear. The sweat shows up in such people even when the picture of a snake is presented so rapidly that they have no conscious idea of what, exactly, they just saw, let alone that they are beginning to get anxious.

As such preconscious emotional stirrings continue to build, they eventually become strong enough to break into awareness. Thus there are two levels of emotion, conscious and unconscious. Emotions that simmer beneath the threshold of awareness can have a powerful impact on how we perceive and react, even though we have no idea they are at work.

But once that reaction is brought into awareness, we can evaluate things anew.   In this way emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental of emotional intelligence: handling the emotion.

Making the unconscious conscious, identifying and labeling emotions, is that first critical step.