Raising Awareness and the "gap"

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I've been working on raising my awareness for the last couple of months as I see this as one of the pillars of improvement.
A few weeks ago and for a couple hours, I suddenly entered a state of what I'll call heightened awareness. Basically I saw the gap between stimulus and response. Steve talks about this in a couple of his articles.
To give an example, I was shopping, and one item I intended to buy was out of stock. I realized that this was going to affect me before actually feeling the negative emotions associated with the event.
This was extremelly empowering. I was able to cut down on negative thoughts even before they started and it gave me a feeling of great control. I also felt very excited and joyful about the whole thing.
However for some reason I felt that this state might not last, and though it seemed to persist until I went to bed, the following day it was gone. I haven't fully recovered it since.
I believe that if I could be in such a state most of the time, it would ease my development by an order of magnitude.

I'd like to hear from people with similar experiences and ideas on how to recapture this blissful state.