I'm right at my 4-yr recovery anniversary this week & I've been going through a HUGE shift in my consciousness over the last 4 months.
What started as a random comment to my Doc about my weight loss struggles has opened a Pandora's Box of stuff related to my eating habits & my experience as an ACoA, but surprisingly I'm uncovering all kinds of stuff related to my sober/otherwise damaged mom as my biggest sources of damage.
My morning walks take approx. an hour so I've incorporated some of my daily meditation time in during that too, which is entirely different than the more passive, traditional method.
What is walking meditation? | Wildmind Buddhist Meditation
I'm finding that it is helping to shift my awareness from hindsight to a real-time action. I'm aware of the tiny differences in my body from day-to-day, I am aware of the increasing length of my stride, the endurance I am building, the longer distances I can handle, etc. I'm paying attention to the things I must have been overlooking all. the. time. (I didn't know I had a blind neighbor, or that he has a group of friends that meet him every morning at the end of his block & accompany him for his daily exercise. I never noticed a gorgeous circular house tucked into the woods just 5 blocks away! I can tell you what paths my alcoholic neighbor drives by following his empty-beer-can-trails along the side of the road. I can attest that while the sun rise/set times changing slightly day-to-day is not a biggie, it is a huge thing to work around over the course of a few weeks when you need to time your walks around it. Just a few very basic examples - it affects my mental processes in a lot of other ways that are so difficult to put into words.)
It sounds silly but it's like seeing in color again & not realizing I've been looking at everything through a black & white viewer. I can see how most all of my breakthroughs in recovery have happened in hindsight, and while that's perfectly fine, there's something completely different about having those awarenesses in real-time instead.
And it's made me think more & more about what exactly awareness IS, and whether we have different definitions for it. It's part of the most basic steps in Al-Anon (my understanding - Awareness, Acceptance, Action - right?) yet I don't find anything that addresses WHAT it is or how to know if you're really accomplishing it.
I've read tons of stuff about the topic over the last month - such a variety of sources from all kinds of spiritual perspectives - but I had to ask the question here too, since it comes up in recovery so much:
What exactly does having awareness mean TO YOU?
