Awake or Asleep? The Way We Move Through Emotions
The Patterns That Pull Us
There’s a question most of us never think to ask ourselves: Am I awake right now?
Not physically, but consciously. Are we present in this moment, or are we sleepwalking through our own lives, moved by invisible strings we’ve long forgotten were attached? These strings are the old behavioral and thinking patterns that have been woven into us over time: the way we were nurtured as children, the experiences that shaped us in this life and perhaps even in lives before, the beliefs we absorbed without questioning, the wounds we never fully healed, and the stagnant energy we carry in our bodies. They pull at us quietly, directing our reactions and responses from the shadows of our unconscious mind, and most of the time we don’t even realize we’re being moved.
Emotions are the language of our inner world — they carry wisdom, hold truth, connect us to what matters. Yet most of the time, we don’t speak that language consciously — we react instead of responding. We become the emotion rather than the one experiencing it.
The Sleep We Don’t Recognize
Think of the last time anger flashed through you, or disappointment crashed like a wave, or anxiety gripped your chest before you even understood why. In that moment, where were you? Chances are, you weren’t there at all. The emotion was there, the reaction was there, and the old pattern carved deep by years of repetition was running its familiar program, but your conscious self, your observing awareness, your power to choose was asleep.
This is what it means to be asleep: to be moved by emotion instead of moving with awareness. When we’re caught in the wave of anger, sadness, excitement, disappointment, or fear, the outer world has taken the wheel. Circumstances dictate our state, someone’s words determine our peace, and a situation controls our response. We are no longer authors of our experience but merely characters acting out a script written long ago, not because emotions are wrong (they never are), but because in that moment they are driving us and we have forgotten we even have hands on the wheel.
The Moment Everything Changes
But something profound shifts the moment we notice. The moment we catch ourselves mid-reaction and say, “Wait, this situation is triggering me — what is it here to teach me?” That is the moment we begin to wake up.
It’s the simple, radical act of seeing yourself in the midst of the storm. You may still feel everything — the heat of anger rising in your chest, the sting of sadness behind your eyes, the flutter of excitement in your belly — but something is different now. You’re not drowning in it, you’re not consumed by it, you’re not it. You’re the one witnessing it.
You allow the emotion to move through you consciously. You breathe into it rather than brace against it, observe it rather than become it, and create space, just a breath of space, between the feeling and the reaction. And in that space, however small, awareness is born.
From Reaction to Response: The Birth of Choice
From that awareness, something miraculous happens: a new choice arises.
Not the old choice — the automatic one, the conditioned one, the one that’s been choosing itself for years. But a new choice, born from presence rather than pattern.
You begin to ask different questions:
How can I respond with love instead of fear?
How can I grow through this rather than repeat the same cycle?
What would it look like to meet this moment with consciousness rather than conditioning?
And from these questions, new responses emerge:
You choose empathy for others — even when they’ve hurt you.
You choose care for yourself — even when you’re used to self-criticism.
You choose understanding over irritation.
Presence over impulsiveness.
Grace over reaction.
Curiosity over judgment.
This is the moment you awaken — not because your emotions disappear, but because they no longer rule you. You’ve reclaimed the throne of your own consciousness.
What It Really Means to Be Awake
To be awake is not to suppress emotion. That’s just another form of sleep — numbing rather than reacting, but still unconscious. To be awake is to feel deeply — and yet remain rooted in consciousness.
It’s to honor the emotion while not being imprisoned by it. To let it teach you, move through you, inform you — without letting it hijack your choices, your words, your behavior, your sense of who you are. To be awake is to see that every emotional trigger is actually an invitation — a mirror being held up, calling you home to awareness, to your own growth, to your own power.
The anger is showing you a boundary that needs honoring.
The sadness is revealing what truly matters to you.
The anxiety is illuminating where you’ve abandoned trust.
The disappointment is clarifying your deeper values.
Every single emotion, when met with awareness rather than reaction, becomes a teacher, a guide, a doorway to greater consciousness.
The Practice of Waking Up
This isn’t something you achieve once and keep forever. Awakeness isn’t a destination — it’s a practice, a moment-by-moment choice. You will fall back asleep. We all do. You’ll catch yourself three sentences into an argument, realizing you’ve been on autopilot the whole time. You’ll notice you’ve been anxious for twenty minutes without even knowing why. You’ll react first and remember to respond later.
And that’s okay. That’s the practice. Because the moment you notice you’ve been asleep — that very moment of noticing — you’re already waking up.
Where True Freedom Begins
This is where true freedom lives — not in the absence of emotion, but in the presence of awareness. Not in never being triggered, but in catching yourself when you are. Not in perfection, but in the practice of returning, again and again, to consciousness.
When you live from this place — even imperfectly, even inconsistently — everything changes. You stop being a victim of your circumstances. You stop being a prisoner of your past patterns. You stop giving your peace away to every person and situation that crosses your path.
You become the space in which emotions arise and pass. The awareness that watches thoughts come and go. The consciousness that chooses how to respond to this moment, this person, this life. And in that choosing — in that sacred, powerful space between stimulus and response — you discover who you really are. Not the anger, fear, neither the old story.
That is where true freedom begins.
A Simple Practice: 21 Days of Waking Up
To begin, try this for 21 days: whenever you remember, stop and ask yourself, “Am I awake right now?” It sounds simple, but you’ll quickly discover how often you forget to ask. Set an alarm on your phone at least twice a day as a reminder. The magic isn’t in getting the right answer, it’s in the asking itself, because each time you remember to ask, you’re creating a moment of awareness, and that’s where transformation begins.
So ask yourself now, in this very moment: Am I awake? Not later, not tomorrow, but right now. Because the only moment you can ever truly wake up in is this one, and this one, and this one. And each time you choose awareness over autopilot, you’re not just changing a moment — you’re changing the entire trajectory of your life, one conscious breath at a time