Why Awareness Comes First
The Overlooked Foundation of Real Change
This article explores why awareness is not separate from healing or inner work, but the ground from which relationship, integration, and real change become possible.
Most people come to inner work because something isn’t working. They want to heal, improve, resolve, or finally move forward in their mind, body, relationships, or life circumstances. That impulse makes sense. When something hurts, feels stuck or simply has the potential for being better, of course we want change. However, what’s often less obvious is that how we approach change is equally as important as what we do to change things.
In my work, I’ve seen this again and again: when awareness is missing, even the best tools, insights, and intentions struggle to create change that truly holds. When awareness is present, change often begins to happen more naturally, with less force and more clarity.
This is why awareness comes first. Not because it’s more “spiritual”, and not because it’s about becoming calm for its own sake, but because it creates the conditions in which perspective, genuine understanding, healing, and effective action become possible.
Awareness is not a technique
Awareness is often misunderstood. Many people think of it as a meditation skill, a calm state, or simply knowing what they’re thinking or feeling. What I mean here is not limited to these aspects.
When I speak about awareness, I’m pointing to something more fundamental: the aspect of you that is already aware. The quiet, steady presence that notices thoughts, emotions, sensations, and experience as they arise. Awareness, then, isn’t something you have to create or work hard to “do”. It’s something you simply recognise and rest in.
I teach how to ‘discover and stabilise awareness’ in my one-to-one’s, books and community, but as a quick intro, ‘being aware’ starts with shifting your focus from what you are aware of (your thoughts, emotions, etc.) to also notice the still quiet awareness that is aware within you now.
Why is this shift so important and why does awareness matter so much? Instead of relating to life entirely from inside your thinking, emotions, and reactions, awareness allows you to relate from a steadier perspective. Not detached, not distant, but more spacious, grounded and true.
This shift alone changes how everything else unfolds.
Seven Reasons Why Awareness Comes First:
1. Awareness brings clarity before action
When awareness is present, clarity increases. You can see what’s really going on beneath symptoms, stories, and surface struggles. This doesn’t mean answers suddenly appear as clever concepts. It means the internal noise reduces. Patterns become more visible. Contradictions reveal themselves. What’s true begins to stand out from what’s assumed or habitual, and what matters separates itself from what doesn’t.
With awareness present, many problems begin to soften, not because they’ve been fixed, but because the system is no longer reacting to itself. Awareness allows the internal waters to settle, and when they do, you can see more clearly. Without awareness, our choices are often not our wisest, and action is often premature. With awareness, action becomes properly informed.
2. Awareness regulates the nervous system
Awareness has a naturally regulating effect on the body, brain and nervous system. Mental urgency reduces. Emotional charge becomes less intense and more workable. The body has more room to respond rather than brace.
This matters because healing and change don’t happen well in a system that’s constantly under pressure. Studies (and our own lived experience) show that we have more stressful thoughts and feelings when we are operating from the fight-flight response. Meaning, without awareness, we end up compromised - physically, mentally, emotionally, and relationally.
When we try to force change while overwhelmed, we tend to reinforce the very patterns we’re trying to escape. Awareness doesn’t make life instantly easy, but it reduces unnecessary strain. From there, healing becomes more possible, and decisions become more accurate.
3. Awareness often allows problems to settle on their own
One of the most overlooked benefits of awareness is that some problems don’t need fixing once they’re clearly seen. When awareness is present, the mind doesn’t need to keep looping, emotions don’t need to escalate to be heard, and the body doesn’t need to hold tension as a signal of distress.
Awareness allows us to see that, sometimes, the problem is being perpetuated by our own psychology - from being more in our mind than in the moment. We can recognise that we’ve been participating in our unease or upset - by over-thinking, over-judging, and over-dwelling. With awareness, we naturally create space.
Like muddy water left undisturbed, many inner disturbances settle naturally when we stop stirring them with over-thinking, urgency and resistance. This doesn’t mean all problems disappear. But some problems do - when we stop adding fuel to the fire. It also means we stop creating secondary problems on top of the original one(s).
4. Awareness makes ‘relationship’ possible
Without awareness, relating to emotions, trauma, patterns, or the body often feels overwhelming or combative. We tend to avoid or suppress what’s there, or try to control it. Without awareness, we are forced to try to fix problems from inside the problematic thinking, emotion, or pattern. Whereas, with awareness present, we can meet our humanity with honesty and perspective.
Emotions, beliefs, conditioning, and body-held experiences are no longer fought or suppressed. They are recognised, related to, and allowed to release in their own time. This is not passivity. It’s intelligent engagement. And it’s far more effective than force.
5. Awareness improves external change, not just inner peace
A common fear people have is that awareness will make them passive or detached from real life. In practice, the opposite is true. When awareness leads, external change becomes more fully engaged and grounded. Decisions are clearer. Reactions soften. Lethargy is replaced with aliveness. Choices are made from understanding rather than urgency. Confusion steps aside to make way for creativity.
Awareness improves how we think, feel, work, relate, create, communicate, and navigate challenges. It doesn’t replace action. It improves the quality of action, and supports clearer thinking and steadier emotion while doing what needs to be done. This is why awareness isn’t just about inner peace. It’s about creating change, more enjoyably, that hold in everyday life.
6. Awareness restores choice and authorship
Without awareness, much of our life is shaped by habit, conditioning, and unconscious reaction. We think we are choosing, but often we are simply repeating what’s familiar or responding to pressure, fear, or old patterns.
Awareness creates a pause; allowing for a moment of authorship. From that pause, choice becomes possible. Not forced choice, but informed, grounded choice. You begin to sense what’s truly aligned and what isn’t, what’s reactive and what’s genuine.
This is where change stops being something that happens to you or something you endlessly try to manage. Instead, it becomes something you actively participate in. Awareness doesn’t tell you what to do. It gives you back the capacity to decide, with clarity, honesty, and responsibility.
7. Awareness creates a foundation that holds over time
Perhaps most importantly, awareness creates a foundation that doesn’t collapse under pressure. When change is built on insight alone, it often fades. When it’s built on willpower, it exhausts. When it’s built on mental, emotional, spiritual or cultural ideals, it fractures under real-world complexity. When change is rooted in awareness, it withstands and adapts.
Understanding deepens, relationship becomes healthier, and over time inner life and outer life align. Peace and progress no longer compete. They coexist, grow and stand strong together.
In Closing:
Awareness is not the end goal, it is the doorway to more
Awareness is not something to achieve or perfect. It’s something to recognise and return to - whenever you realise it’s been missing. It comes first not because it’s special or the ‘spiritual thing to do’, but because it’s foundational, supportive and necessary.
It’s not instead of challenging conversations, it makes our words more honest, wise and impactful. It is not instead of therapy, it makes therapy more effective and fruitful. It’s not instead of making difficult decisions or changing what we know needs changed. Awareness helps us make better choices and changes. It helps us to see and understand what’s really going on, relate to it more wisely, and create the kind of change that is real, embodied, and beneficial.