Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence--The Groundbreaking Meditation Practice
400Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence--The Groundbreaking Meditation Practice
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Overview
Aware provides practical instruction for mastering the Wheel of Awareness, a life-changing tool for cultivating more focus, presence, and peace in one's day-to-day life.
An in-depth look at the science that underlies meditation's effectiveness, this book teaches readers how to harness the power of the principle "Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows." Siegel reveals how developing a Wheel of Awareness practice to focus attention, open awareness, and cultivate kind intention can literally help you grow a healthier brain and reduce fear, anxiety, and stress in your life.
Whether you have no experience with a reflective practice or are an experienced practitioner, Aware is a hands-on guide that will enable you to become more focused and present, as well as more energized and emotionally resilient in the face of stress and the everyday challenges life throws your way.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780143111795 |
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Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 09/01/2020 |
Pages: | 400 |
Sales rank: | 116,383 |
Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
There are three learnable skills that have been shown in carefully conducted scientific studies to support the cultivation of well-being. When we develop focused attention, open awareness, and kind intention, research reveals we:
1. Improve immune function to help fight infection;
2. Optimize the level of the enzyme telomerase, which repairs and maintains the ends of your chromosomes, keeping your cells— and therefore you – youthful, functioning well, and healthy;
3. Enhance the “epigenetic” regulation of genes to help prevent life- threatening inflammation;
4. Modify cardiovascular factors, improving cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and heart function; and
5. Increase neural integration in the brain, enabling more coordination and balance in both the functional and structural connectivity within the nervous system that facilitates optimal functioning, including self-regulation, problem solving, and adaptive behavior that is at the heart of well-being.
In short, the scientific findings are now in: your mind can change the health of your body and slow aging.
In addition to these concrete discoveries, we have the additional, more subjective, yet equally powerful findings that cultivating these aspects of mind—how you focus attention, open awareness, and guide intention toward kindness and caring— also increases a sense of well-being, connection to others (in the form of enhanced empathy and compassion), emotional balance, and resilience in the face of challenges. Studies reveal that as a sense of meaning and purpose increase, an overall ease of being— that some call equanimity— is nurtured by these specific practices.
These are all outcomes of strengthening your mind by expanding the container of consciousness.
The word eudaimonia is derived from the Greek term, and it beautifully describes the deep sense of well-being, equanimity, and happiness that comes from experiencing life as having meaning and connection to others and the world around you. Does cultivating eudaimonia seem like something you’d like to place on your to‑do list in life? If you experience this quality of being already in your day‑to‑day living, these practices of training attention, awareness, and intention may enhance and reinforce where you already are in life. Wonderful. And if it feels like these features of eudaimonia are distant or perhaps unfamiliar to you, and you’d like to make these more near and dear to your everyday existence, you’ve come to the right conversation.
The Wheel of Awareness is a useful tool I’ve developed over many years to help expand the container of consciousness.
I’ve offered the Wheel to thousands of individuals around the world, and it’s proven to be a practice that can help people develop more well-being in both their inner and interpersonal lives. The Wheel practice is based on simple steps that are easy to learn and then apply in your everyday experiences.
The Wheel is a very useful visual metaphor for the way the mind works. The concept came to me one day as I stood looking down at a circular table in my office. The tabletop consists of a clear glass center surrounded by a wooden outer rim. It occurred to me that our awareness could be seen as lying at the center of a circle— hub, if you will—from which, at any given moment, we can choose to focus on a wide array of thoughts, images, feelings, and sensations circling us on the rim. In other words, what we could be aware of could be represented on the wooden rim; the experience of being aware we could place in the hub.
If I could teach people how to expand that container of consciousness by more freely and fully accessing the Wheel’s hub of awareness, they’d be able to change the way they experienced life’s tablespoons of salt, and perhaps even learn to savor life’s sweetness in a more balanced and fulfilling way, even if there were a lot of salt present at the time. As I looked down at this table, I saw that the clarity of that glass hub might represent how we become aware of all of these tablespoons of life, each of the varied experiences we could become aware of, from thoughts to sensations, which we might now visualize as being placed on the circle around this hub—the table’s outer wooden rim.
The Wheel was designed as a practice that could balance our lives by integrating the experience of consciousness. How? By distinguishing the wide array of knowns on the rim from each other and from the knowing of awareness in the hub itself, we could differentiate the components of consciousness. Then, by systematically connecting these knowns of the rim to the knowing of the hub with the movement of the spoke of attention, it became possible to link the differentiated parts of consciousness. This is how by differentiating and linking, the Wheel of Awareness practice integrates consciousness.
The essential idea behind the Wheel was to expand the container of consciousness and, in effect, balance the experience of consciousness itself. Balance is a common term that we can understand scientifically as coming from a process that can be called integration—the allowing of things to be different or distinct from each other on the one hand, and then connecting them to each other on the other. When we differentiate and link, we integrate. We become balanced and coordinated in life when we create integration. Various scientific disciplines may use other terminology, but the concept is the same. Integration—the balancing of differentiation and linkage—is the basis for optimal regulation that enables us to flow between chaos and rigidity, the core process that helps us flourish and thrive. Health comes from integration. It’s that simple, and that important.
A system that is integrated is in a flow of harmony. Just as in a choir, with each singer’s voice both differentiated from the other singers’ voices but also linked, harmony emerges with integration. What is important to note is that this linkage does not remove the differences, as in the notion of blending; instead it maintains these unique contributions as it links them together. Integration is more like a fruit salad than a smoothie. This is how integration creates the synergy of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Likewise, this synergy of integration means that the many aspects of our lives, like the many points on the rim, can each be honored for their differences but then brought together in harmony.
In my own journey as a clinician, working within the framework of a multidisciplinary field called interpersonal neurobiology, reflecting on our mind as a self-organizing way we regulate energy and information flow inspired me to try and find strategies to create more integration in my patients’ lives in order to create more well-being in their bodies and in their relationships. When we integrated consciousness with the Wheel of Awareness, people’s lives improved. Many individuals have found the Wheel of Awareness a skill-building practice that empowers them in quite profound ways. It transformed how they came to experience their inner, mental lives— their emotions, thoughts, and memories—opened new ways of interacting with others, and even expanded a sense of connection and meaning in their lives.
Table of Contents
Part I The Wheel of Awareness: Idea and Practice
An Invitation 3
Cultivating Well-Being by Developing Attention, Awareness, and Intention 4
A Practical Tool 6
A Travel Guide to the Mind 12
Stories of Using the Wheel of Awareness: Harnessing the Power of Presence 15
Billy and His Return to the Hub 16
Jonathan's Respite from His Emotional Roller Coaster 16
Mona and the Sanctuary of the Hub 17
Teresa, Trauma, and Healing with the Integration of the Wheel 18
Zachary: Finding Meaning, Connection, and Relief from Pain 22
Preparing Your Mind for the Wheel of Awareness: Focused Attention 25
Building the Regulatory Aspect of the Mind 25
Some Starting Tips 27
A Mindsight Lens 32
Breath Awareness to Stabilize Attention 34
What Is the Mind? 40
Three Pillars of Mind Training 46
Focal and Non-Focal Attention 50
Monitoring Attention and Awareness 53
The Basic Wheel of Awareness 59
Maps, Metaphors, and Mechanisms 59
The Basic and the Full Wheel of Awareness 61
A Map of the Basic Wheel of Awareness 65
Practicing the Basic Wheel of Awareness 68
Reflecting on Mind: Your Experience of the Basic Wheel 72
Kind Intention 78
Weaving Kindness, Empathy, and Compassion into Your Life 79
Integration, Spirituality, Health 91
Our Inner and Inter Selves 93
Building Compassion with Statements of Intention 95
Reflecting on Kind and Compassionate Intention 102
Deepening the Wheel Practice 105
Open Awareness 107
Exploring the Hub 107
Reflecting on Knowing 111
Energy Around the Wheel 112
Consolidated Wheel Practice 117
Part II The Wheel of Awareness and Mechanisms of Mind 121
Mind and the Energy Flow of the Body 123
Minding Your Brain 128
Your Head Brain in a Hand Model 130
The Default Mode Network 135
How to Integrate the DMN 138
Loosening the Grip of a Separate Self 143
Clinging Versus Attachment 146
The Fourth Segment of the Rim and the Relational Mind 151
Growing an Integrated Brain with Mind Training 156
Integration in the Brain and the Spoke of Focal Attention 160
How and Where Does Awareness Arise? 160
Awareness and the Integration of Information 166
Attention, Consciousness, and the Social Brain 169
The Hub of Knowing and Possible Mechanisms of the Brain Beneath Pure Awareness 174
The Nature of Energy, the Energy of Mind 183
Science, Energy, and Experience 183
The Energy of Nature 186
Energy as Probability 202
A 3-P Diagram of Energy Flow 214
Mapping the Mind as Peaks, Plateaus, and a Plane of Possibility 218
Awareness, the Hub, and a Plane of Possibility 231
Awareness and the Plane of Possibility 231
Brain Correlates of Pure Consciousness 234
Filters of Consciousness 238
Filters of Consciousness and the Organization of Experience 238
How Top-Down and Bottom-Up Shape Our Sense of Reality 243
Plateaus, "Self," and the Default Mode Network 248
One Personal Set of Filters 253
Pure Awareness and the Filters of Consciousness 256
The Oscillatory Sweep of Attention: A 3-P Loop, a Spoke of the Wheel 258
Sweep Ratios, States of Mind 264
Awe and Joy 274
A Table of Correlations Among Mental Experience, Metaphor, and Mechanism 276
Part III Stories of Transformation in Applying the Wheel: Harnessing the Hub and Living from the Plane of Possibility 279
Offering the Wheel as an Idea to Children: Billy and the Freedom of the Hub, the Spaciousness of the Plane 282
Teaching the Wheel to Adolescents: Jonathan and Calming the Roller Coaster of Plateaus and Peaks 288
The Wheel for Parents and Other Care Providers: Mona and the Freedom from Recurrent Plateaus and Peaks of Chaos and Rigidity 295
The Wheel in Healing Trauma: Teresa and the Transformation of Traumatic Filters of Consciousness 301
The Wheel, Professional Life, and an Awakened Mind: Zachary and Accessing the Plane 320
Part IV The Power of Presence 331
Challenges and Opportunities of Living with Presence and Being Aware 336
Freedom: Transforming into Possibility 344
Presence Beyond Methods 347
Mindful Awareness and Integration 350
Linking from the Plane 352
Laughing, Living, and Dying from the Plane 354
Leading and Loving from the Plane 359
Acknowledgments 363
Selected References and Reading 367
Index 369