Awareness Integration

Have you ever wished you could just wake up one day and hit the Life Reset Button? Do you struggle with old self-sabotaging patterns and limiting beliefs that prevent you from having success at work, financial security or the loving relationship you deeply desire? Having changed my career twice and lived in three different countries, I am too familiar with the desire to reset life. However, I also found that the old saying “wherever you go, there you are” holds true. No matter how much we try to improve our lives through switching out jobs, relationships and zip codes, what stays with us are the unresolved emotional baggage and confidence undermining imprints of the past.

For many years, I held onto the idea that taking a day off during the working week was a no-no. No matter where I worked, whenever I had a day off, I felt often uncomfortable leaving the house because I thought I might be seen by somebody who knew me and who naturally (I assumed) would believe that I had lost my job or that I was slacking off. So instead of doing something fun, I preferred to stay at home and work in my office. While I told myself that this was just a good dose of German work ethic, in actuality, it was a self-limiting belief of the past, which made the opinions of others more important than my joy and personal freedom. It was only after I was able to resolve the deeper root causes of my anxiety, insecurity and self-constraining behaviors, that I felt no longer trapped in outdated patterns of my past.

For more than 15 years I have been helping people to identify and resolve on a conscious and subconscious level the baggage of their past, so that they, with a clean slate, can choose how they want to redefine themselves and their lives. This is why I am so excited about my special guest, Dr. Foojan Zeine, on Empowerment Radio. Dr. Foojan, author of Life Reset, will talk about Awareness Integration, a process she developed for resetting your life. Awareness Integration introduces 12 open-ended questions that can help you to enhance your self-awareness, release emotional blocks, increase your self-esteem and become more positive and proactive in creating a purpose- and joy-filled life.

Dr. Foojan, a therapist, coach, and researcher, based her Awareness Integration process on several important observations on the human psyche:

1. Reality is the experience of the observer.

Human beings are co-creators of reality. Our personal reality is as much a product of emotion as it is of thought and rationality. Our experience will always be a subjective reality. We usually create our own version of reality based on distinctions of pleasure versus pain or comfort versus discomfort and then make up complex formulas around our reality. When we insist that our subjective reality is the one and only reality, we more easily get into fights and power struggles trying to defend it. We don’t see that this reality we cling to is just how we perceive a situation; it’s not absolute. We need to look at our personal reality to discover how it got in our head, as we also ask ourselves the key question: is this reality actually serving me in my life?

2. Every human being has the capability and potential to learn the skills to have an enjoyable, functional, and successful life.

The brain is a living system that is open and dynamic, which means it is forever in a state of change, according to neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel, who has written many books about how our brain functions. It can continue to emerge and reshape itself with the changing environment and the changing state of its own activity.

3. These skills are learned through physical and psychological development, one’s own experiences, and mirroring parents, teachers, peers, media, and culture.

We learn our skills from our surroundings and then turn them into subconscious patterns of living. In that way, we live on automatic pilot from generation to generation. For example, if we grew up in a family system where yelling and screaming was the norm and saw that behavior as a powerful tool to get the result that we want, there’s a pretty good chance we have found ourselves in adult living situations where much of the communication was conducted through yelling and screaming. However, if we felt powerless in that surrounding and experienced it more as a painful and anxiety-producing environment, we avoided it at all cost and tried to create conflict-free interactions. Each of those decisions, whether it is an attachment to a certain behavior or an aversion toward a behavior, limits our way of being. Yet so often we don’t even know where we picked up these patterns; they are simply what we know as a natural way of being and behaving since they are all around us and appear to be the norm.

4. Through self-awareness, integration of one’s experiences, and the creation of conscious choices regarding beliefs, emotions, and actions, one can choose a positive attitude for the creation of a new, positive reality and therefore produce intended results.

As we release the unfinished emotional baggage from the past and integrate all of our unattended emotional parts, we have more accessibility to our subconscious needs, desires, and wants. Now we can make more conscious choices about the way we choose to think, feel, and behave toward people and matters in front of us versus reacting to it from an old, unworkable, and outdated belief.

5. Conscious intentionality and envisioning of the desired result, in combination with effective planning and timely scheduled action plans, raise the probability of achieving the desired results in all areas of life.

This is where fantasy becomes a tangible reality. Ideas are abstract and in our imagination; only when the idea is put into a schedule with tangible action is the desired result created.

Join Dr. Foojan and me on Empowerment Radio and learn more about how 12 simple questions can help you resolve your struggles around money, career, spirituality, relationships, and self-acceptance.  You can also check it out here on my youtube channel.