# Self-Awareness > Self-awareness is the practical skill of reading feelings and behaviors as clues to definitions, tracing effects back to beliefs, and distinguishing genuine excitement from anxiety. - Canonical: https://sassani.app/topic/self-awareness # Self-Awareness Self-awareness, in Bashar's teaching, is the willingness to look honestly at the mechanics of your own experience — to read your feelings, behaviors, and the way you phrase your questions as clues to the definitions actually driving you — rather than accepting a label for what you are doing. The sessions gathered here treat self-awareness as a practical skill: a learnable habit of tracing an effect back to the belief that produced it, distinguishing genuine excitement from anxiety dressed as excitement, and owning what you create so it can change. ## Listen to how you frame the question A first move is to pay attention to your own language. The session Letting Go Of Old Ideas And Definitions asks you to listen to how you phrase a question, because the beliefs you are holding — including the ones no longer working — often appear in the framing itself and in the reflections you get back. The same orientation sits inside the longer teaching on core beliefs: definitions give rise to emotions, which give rise to behaviors, so an unwanted feeling or behavior can be followed back to its definition by asking the precise question, "what would I have to believe is true about myself in order to be having this emotional experience and this behavior in this situation?" That question is the operator's manual for self-awareness in this corpus: it treats the surface reaction as data and points the search upstream. Because the chain runs definition → feeling → behavior, the work happens at the definition, not at the feeling. You cannot, in this framing, "get rid of" a feeling directly; you can only identify the belief that the feeling is reporting on, redefine it, and let the feeling follow. ## Honest exploration of motive, especially when it looks like excitement Self-awareness becomes load-bearing when an action looks aligned but isn't. The monologue Knowing The Difference Between Positive And Negative Feelings gives the key test: if you are honest with yourself and an action is "truly being done out of integrity, out of alignment with your true self, then you will know that the feeling you're feeling is not excitement but anxiety," and an action taken to fill a sense of emptiness is being taken for a negative reason. The instruction is to find the negative belief that would generate those feelings, change it, and then notice that both the intention and the feelings go — not to gloss the feeling over or pretend it isn't there. The same session is explicit that there is "nothing to fear about facing those things. You will only discover more of yourself in the exploration," and that pushing a negative belief down only makes it return stronger, whereas conscious recognition is what frees you to change it. A complementary technique appears in Letting Go Of Fear And Embracing Self love: if you are afraid to act on what you say is your excitement, ask what you would have to believe is true about what will happen if you choose it. The belief you uncover will usually turn out to be "something you picked up along the way. It belongs to someone else. You're a belief thief. Drop it." The same session's approach to self-love is to amplify the negative belief — to ask what is the most horrifying thing you believe would happen if you fully loved yourself — so that the hidden definition surfaces and can be seen as illogical. ## Excitement versus anxiety: where the power is placed The discriminating signal between genuine and counterfeit excitement is where the power is being placed. Excitement places the source within you; anxiety projects it outside the self onto a tool, outcome, or another person. This is why a behavior, thought, or emotion is always "the result of something you believe to be true" — read in that direction, the feeling is not a verdict on reality but a readout of the definition beneath it, and checking whether that definition is yours or inherited is the core self-awareness practice. ## Owning a creation before it can transform Self-awareness also means dropping the habit of disowning what you are experiencing. In Feedback, the reply to someone trying to push away a persistent unwanted feeling is that "you cannot get rid of anything; there is nowhere to get rid of it to. First acknowledge it: it is mine, you created it," and only after owning it and asking what you can learn from it will it transform. The same session makes the underlying mechanic literal: "as soon as you are aware of the habit, a habit, you're outside of it. By definition, it's no longer a habit if you're aware of it" — recognition is itself the freedom from it, not a preamble to it. A consequence is that feeling is treated as a reaction to what you believe most likely, not as a separate kind of knowing. "How you feel is a reaction to what you believe to be most likely," so the feeling reports the belief, including the belief about how long a change will take; the threshold of believability (step the timeframe down until you first hesitate) is offered as a diagnostic that exposes the actual belief about timing — and the willingness to acknowledge where that threshold sits can itself reduce the time. ## Fear as alarm bell, not verdict The sessions reframe fear in a way that makes it workable for self-awareness. Fear is "a manifestation of your energy," experienced as fear only because the energy is being run through definitions out of alignment with the true self; the very same energy is experienced as joy when it flows through aligned definitions. Read this way, fear is an alarm bell that "knocks on your door and wakes you up and says, hey ... you have a definition that's out of whack," and the appropriate response is to follow it back to that definition rather than to treat it as proof that the thing feared is real. Anything that comes to you, on this view, is "a messenger with information about more of who you are." ## Practical implications Use your own language as evidence. Listen to how you phrase a question or complaint; the operating belief often shows up in the framing and in the reflections you receive. Ask the operator's question. When a feeling or behavior is unwanted, ask what you would have to believe is true about yourself to be having that experience; that traces the chain back to the definition where change is possible. Test excitement by where the power sits. If the source feels inside you and aligned with your true self, it is excitement; if it is being done to fill an emptiness or projected onto an external outcome, it is anxiety wearing excitement's face. Surface the protective belief rather than pushing it away. Ask what would have to be true for the fear to make sense, or what you believe would happen if you fully allowed what you say you want; the belief that appears is usually inherited and can be dropped once seen. Own a creation before trying to change it. Acknowledgment — "it is mine, I created it" — is the first step of transformation; recognition of a habit is already the exit from it. Read fear and strong feeling as messengers, not verdicts. They report on the definition through which your energy is flowing; locate the definition and the same energy can be experienced as joy rather than fear. None of this is a substitute for qualified care. These are framing tools for self-examination, not clinical or psychiatric direction for conditions involving persistent overwhelming feeling or self-harm. ## Representative passages If you're honest with yourself and it is truly being done out of integrity, out of alignment with your true self, then you will know that the feeling you're feeling is not excitement but anxiety. ... Find out what the negative belief is that would generate those feelings and change it and let go of it. ... There is nothing to fear about facing those things.— Bashar, Knowing The Difference Between Positive And Negative Feelings (knowing-the-difference-between-positive-and-negative-feelings#text) If you are afraid to act on what you say is your excitement, ask what you would have to believe is true about what will happen if you choose it. You will find the fear and the belief. Once you identify it, you will see it has nothing to do with you; it is something you picked up along the way. You are a belief thief. Drop it.— Bashar, Letting Go Of Fear And Embracing Self love (letting-go-of-fear-and-embracing-self-love#qa-1) Without the definition, there is no feeling. Without that feeling, there is no behavior. ... If you're behaving in a way you don't prefer and you're feeling in a way you don't prefer, follow that trail back to the definition by asking yourself the penetrating question, what would I have to believe is true about myself in order to be having this emotional experience and this behavior in this situation.— Bashar, Changing Core Beliefs (changing-core-beliefs#text) You cannot get rid of anything; there is nowhere to get rid of it to. First acknowledge it: it is mine, you created it. Ask why you would create it and what you can learn from it. When you own it and learn from it, it transforms.— Bashar, Feedback (feedback#qa-10) ## Related - [Definitions & Beliefs](https://sassani.app/topic/definitions-and-beliefs) - [Excitement](https://sassani.app/topic/excitement) - [Intention](https://sassani.app/topic/intention) - [Fear](https://sassani.app/topic/fear) - [Authenticity](https://sassani.app/topic/authenticity) - [Discernment](https://sassani.app/topic/discernment) Markdown twin of https://sassani.app/topic/self-awareness. The HTML page is the source of truth.