Awareness is knowledge or perception of a situation or fact. If you don’t perceive something, then your are not aware of it. This brings us to the point that if you are not aware of something, then it can’t change your behavior. In other words, if you were to stand on a road and saw a car coming at you, you would quickly get to safety. Perception (seeing the car) led to behavior (seeking safety).
There is an importance to this since it helps to keep you alive and injury free. So it would make sense that the more aware you are of your own body, then you would be more likely to preserve and protect it.
Here is a simple example: Say you’re standing on the same road that has the car on it, coming at you. While running to safety, you felt a snap in the knee. After you get to safety, you realize that you damaged the knee. In that instance, you lost perception of your knee due to a higher urgency to get to safety or risk severe bodily injury. In the process, that loss of perception led to the keen being damaged because your body was no longer able to perceive the joint position. That resulted in some excess of strain the joint and failure of some part.
This happens quite often, but it doesn’t just happen in life and death situations. It can also happen while the body is at no risk at all. For example, it can happen while you’re sitting in a car for a four hour road trip, or while bending to lift something up. But what is common is that the body failed to perceive that something was wrong with the body, and lost awareness of its safety. That led to poor behaviors like not sitting or bending with good posture and form. This resulted in an injury.
You can see that awareness is the first step in changing behaviors. My goal is to help you learn the concepts that lead to improved awareness of your body. If you'd like to learn more, please read my other articles, and feel free to comment on this one. I'm interested in your thoughts and opinions.
