Phase 1: Blissful Unawareness

Continuing on from my last Newsletter in September, I wanted to breakdown this idea of the 

4 Stages of Awareness a little bit more.  

The first stage we will unravel is Blissful Unawareness.  While some people might not feel comfortable with the work “blissful” as an accurate or aligned description of unawareness, I equate it to Blissfully Ignorant.  We don’t know what we don’t know.  Or maybe more accurately, we only know what we know.  

Remember that we are in this first phase when our nervous system has been operating a certain way for a certain amount of time and it has become all we know (fight, flight, fawn, freeze, etc).  Do I feel stressed; yes I’ve always felt this way.  Do I feel tired; yes I’ve always felt this way.  Do I have pain; yes I’ve always had pain.  Do I have digestion issues; yes I’ve always had digestion issues…as so forth and so on.  

I use the word blissful as a way to describe that we are accepting of how we feel because we can’t remember a different way of feeling.  We are unaware that there is another way to live because we are in a constant state of survival.  You might be constantly moving from one task to another, constantly distracting yourself with work, family, exercise, scrolling, media or other self soothing or coping mechanisms that keep you blissfully unaware that there might be other ways of approaching the world and moving from a state of going to a state of arriving and being.  

For many of us this first stage is involuntary.  Something happened to us or many things have impacted us in order for us to be living in this stage.  This is our nervous systems divine intervention when something became too much, too soon, too fast, or not enough for too long.  Stage 1 is our nervous system trying to keep us safe during a specific threatening experience and it never swung itself back out into a more aware and balanced place.  So now, here we are, stressed, tired, in pain and believing that this is the way life is.  

However, when things get so uncomfortable in this stage, and our brain, physical body, and emotional body can’t stay in that stage of bliss any longer, we move onto stage 2, Uncomfortable Awareness…which we will unravel later this month.