The root of the word awareness is "aware" - i.e. knowing, which points to the meaning - "know thyself".
What should one know about oneself? It appears that the more we know the better.
Why should we embark on this path of learning? In one of my resource books I found the following passage:
As your self awareness grows and the more you act in harmony with your inner nature, the less effort you would have to invest in your actions and the more successful you would become.
Self Awareness
What is it good for?
Let's imagine ourselves to be highly sophisticated instruments that have arrived in this world without a manual.
Throughout life we learn to function by trial and error.
Numerology and other analytical tools can help us avoid some of the errors.
Knowing ourselves: knowing the facts about who we are, how we look, how we experience life and how we react to it, what patterns of emotions, thoughts and behavior guide us, and whether we are content with the state we are in.
Being aware: Being a person that is aware of the processes he experiences throughout life. Such a person is tuned to his feelings and desires, he confronts his fears, he is attentive to the needs of his body as well as his spirit, and so he experiences life fully at each moment (or at least most of the time).
The more familiar a person is with himself, the more he is attentive and aware of the processes he goes through and those that surround him - the more choices will be available to him. In other words - such a person would be able to choose how to run his life and how to react to different situations.
Subconscious: part of our own data base which is inaccessible to us. One can liken the subconscious to a group of naughty kids locked into a storage room. If we were to add more kids into the room without removing some of them, the room would soon overcrowd and the kids would turn grumpy and angry. We would have to invest more effort in keeping the door of the room closed, but eventually it would be bound to open and the kids would scatter around the house causing as much damage as they could. All they probably ask for is our attention, but if this attention is denied, the damages caused by them would increase to a point where we would lose control over our lives.
Traumatic experiences in our life, like emotions that have not been expressed and recognized, act in a manner similar to the one described in the 'bad kids' analogy.
Feelings like anger, fear, slight and hate accumulate in our subconscious to the point when they start running our lives, without us being aware of it.
We have to learn how to put our storage room of emotions in order and at the same time we should try to avoid accumulating more negative feelings.
Methods for developing awareness
Until recently, the process of self discovery was limited only to men of faith, philosophers, psychologists, and a few nonprofessional eccentrics. The New Age has brought with it a growing interest in self discovery, spiritual healing and self fulfillment. In the past couple of years we have witnessed the increasing publication of books on subjects related to self development techniques, including meditation, dream analysis, self hypnosis, positive thinking, assertiveness, dance therapy, psychodrama, astrology, I Ching and more - the selection seems infinite.
These different methods provide partial answers to general questions. They may assist us in the short term and benefit us when facing specific problems, but they should not be regarded as panacea for all problems, and in particular one should avoid becoming dependent on any one method.
If we approach these different methods with a certain amount of caution, and even humor, we could learn a great deal, but the danger of becoming addicted to a single method amongst them should be recognized. Such an addiction may be expressed by the tendency to see increasingly larger parts of the world through the tunnel vision of the method to which one has become addicted.
One can regard a given self development method as an amusing game, yet at a deeper level one can use it as a guidance tool for motion along the path to self fulfillment. To use Carl Yung's terminology, we are concerned here with aiding a person through the process of individuation, a process that one has to go through in order to reach psychological harmony.