Awareness is our ability to know what’s happening in our experience as it’s happening. This includes being aware of sensations, emotions, thoughts, and activities of the mind. The goal for most awareness work is to rest as the observer of your experience, which means stepping back and watching how each moment is unfolding rather than being caught up in it. It’s a process that opens up gradually as we stabilize our attention and look deeper into our mind and body.
When you’re able to remain as an observer of your experience, you begin to see that the things showing up in your mind or body are not you. This is the beginning of a process of releasing identification with various aspects of the mind. For most people, this starts with the realization that they aren’t their thoughts. When you can rest as the observer, you see that thoughts just appear and disappear on their own. As your awareness expands, the same can be seen with emotional reactions to situations. You can see that these are unconscious patterns playing out in reaction to the current situation. It isn’t you choosing to act that way.
We can train our mind to notice these sensations as they show up in daily life. If we can stay as the observer, we can create a gap between our recognition and our reactivity. For example, you can begin to notice anger as it first appears in the body as tension or heat. With that clear recognition you can pause, relax, and respond differently, rather than be consumed by the emotion and act out the same behaviour.
When this work is taken further it starts to include deeper, previously unconscious layers of the mind. These increasingly subtle layers allow us to see clearly how our conditioning plays out in our lives, and how dependent our mental states are on external situations. As our identification with these things loosens, it creates a more spacious, peaceful and flexible mind. You’ll find that you’re less caught up in thoughts or emotions as you move through the world, and difficult external situations don’t have as strong an effect on you as they once did.
We can’t change what we aren’t aware of, so while this work is critical for deeper meditation practice, it’s also very helpful for personal growth or therapy work. We’re able to get a much better understanding of who we are and why we act the way we do in all situations in life. Then, if we choose, we can start to intentionally shift these reactive patterns that were being acted out unconsciously for most of our lives.
The ability to select and pay attention to specific information and ignore other information arising in our experience. When we first start out our attention is constantly pulled in different directions, into thoughts, sounds, or physical sensations. With practice, you can learn to stabilize your attention on an object of your choice for extended periods of time.
Another facet of attention that can be trained is our ability to shrink or expand the scope of our attention. This could mean resting our attention on a small point on our nose, expanding it to include our entire body, or even further to a vast open awareness of all things showing up in our experience.
The aspect of the mind that is continually aware of what’s happening around and within you. Unlike attention which is more focused on a specific object, peripheral awareness is more broad and expansive. This allows you to keep track of your overall experience while simultaneously resting your attention on a chosen object.
Some examples of what your peripheral awareness might notice while you’re focusing on the breath include: The sounds of birds or a passing car, the feeling of wind on your skin, subtle tension in your body, noticing a thought enter your mind.
A panoramic view of the mind where the object of awareness is the mind itself. Unlike peripheral awareness which focuses more on the contents of experience, metacognitive awareness sees the ongoing activities and overall state of mind.
This type of awareness isn’t accessible to everyone at the start. It takes practice and the development of stable attention and peripheral awareness to be able to observe these more subtle activities of the mind.
Some examples include noticing where attention is being directed, watching attention shift between objects, observing how a thought affects your emotional state, or seeing changes in the overall clarity of the mind.
This is a byproduct of developing both our attention and peripheral awareness. It’s a term that describes the balance between the two. Developing continuous mindfulness is a key objective of meditation practice, allowing you to take your practice out into daily life and remain present in all moments.
Whether you’re driving to work, out for a run, or having lunch with friends, mindfulness helps you stay present in your experience, preventing you from getting lost in thoughts, worries, or other creations of the mind.
Awareness Practices & Resources
The Mind Illuminated - Culadasa (John Yates, PhD)
This book is the best I’ve come across for helping understand, identify and develop various aspects of awareness. It approaches the practice in a systematic way by giving you a specific set of instructions, and having you master them before introducing a new layer. The book is fairly dense but the actual stage by stage instructions aren’t too bad.
Amazon Link
The Mind Illuminated Subreddit (A large community of practitioners working with this book)
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