Aware: the science and practice of presence — a complete guide to the groundbreaking meditation practice

by Daniel J. Siegel

How intention glows determines where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural and interpersonal connection grow.

Forgiveness is not stating that what happened was right or good; forgiveness, as my colleague and friend Jack Kornfield suggests, is giving up all hope for a better past. For the Wheel practice, keeping

The disappointment Jonathan expressed with himself, the feeling that he could not trust even his own mind to function well, and the stormy ways his relationships with peers and family members would naturally unfold with his accelerating emotional upheavals and “breakdowns,” left him feeling quite hostile toward himself, and also toward those close to him. He was at a breaking point when we met.

We can only imagine from a 3-P perspective how these patterns of being out of control and the negative attitude he developed toward himself during those stormy months built a set of plateaus that created a pattern of hostile inner dialogues about himself, internal conversations that likely only worsened his way of dealing with an oncoming emotional storm and increased the intensity of its effects. Reinforcing such filters of consciousness with these repeating experiences of being out of control, Jonathan’s own mind would now have a structure of rigid plateaus from which only negative, helpless, and hopeless peaks of thoughts, feelings, and memories could arise.

With unresolved trauma, a layer of memory called implicit memory may be the primary form in which the terrifying experiences are now being stored in the brain. Implicit memory involves bodily sensations, emotions, images, thoughts, and behavioral impulses. When a cue arises, such as an external signal or internal condition, these elements of implicit memory may be activated as memory retrievals. A key issue in the brain’s memory system is that when retrieved from storage, pure implicit memory is not tagged as being from the past. Instead, it can feel as if it is happening in the present moment. This essentially means that the past is not really the past with unresolved trauma, reflecting the brain’s way of shaping our mental life.

In the case of pure implicit memory, studies reveal that the retrieval process makes the retrieved bit of information enter consciousness, but it is not tagged or labeled as coming from the past. Pure implicit memory when retrieved simply shapes our here-and-now experience—so we get on a bike and ride it without feeling, “Oh, I am remembering how to ride a bike.” With trauma, one proposal suggests, we only encode some aspects of a traumatic experience in its pure implicit form within storage. As a result, the retrieval of pure implicit memory for past trauma can enter awareness in the present and feel like it is happening now, a likely mechanism of a flashback or intrusive emotions and sensations of an unresolved trauma.

Shame is an emotion that can create a feeling of heaviness in the chest, nausea in the belly, and a tendency to avoid gazing into the eyes of others.

While many may feel an initial drive to avoid being aware of the body, the representation of the body in the head brain is an important node in how we know our feelings, how we know ourselves. For this reason alone, difficulties with feeling any part of the rim, especially the second segment, may best be seen as invitations to explore what is going on and heal unresolved memory configurations that may continue to imprison an individual. The urge to flee and never return to these uncomfortable sensations that arise during the Wheel practice can be due to a person’s patterns of adaptation and present skill set, learned mental patterns—ways energy and information flow is shaped—that continue to keep the person in that prison of the past. Rather than fleeing and avoiding the practice, imagine if, with support, a person like Teresa might learn to access that plane of possibility and become open to any plateaus and peaks that might be swept up into her awareness. Instead of becoming those plateaus and peaks—the points on her Wheel’s rim—she now can learn to access the plane, to rest in the hub, so that new ways of being can arise. Such an invitation would reflect a kind of “bring it on” attitude that the resolving of trauma entails. I can sit in the hub of my Wheel and invite any rim element’s knowns into the knowing of awareness. I can rest in the plane of possibility and open my mind to whatever plateaus and peaks of memory might configure themselves into being. These above-pl...

The process of healing may involve the retrieval of any peaks, any rim elements, into awareness in the plane, experienced from the sanctuary of the hub, so that they can be reflected upon and new configurations of memory established. This is how resolution of trauma can involve both the unlearning of the understandable but no longer useful adaptations from a painful past and the new learning of the skill of being receptive and integrating one’s mind.

Making sense of a past that made no sense is opening to the sensations of the past and putting them together now to see how they impacted you then, and how you can free yourself to live the life you want now. That’s why making sense makes so much integrative sense. We cannot change the past, but we can change how we understand the way it has impacted us and how we liberate ourselves in the present to free ourselves for the future.

When we are children we cannot simply say, “Oh, my parents are not available to care for me well because they are distracted or disturbed. I know I have experience-expectant neural connections that are waiting for their love and are frustrated right now. So my parents are not able to keep me safe. No problem, I’ll just find my need for being seen, soothed, safe, and secure elsewhere.” If children could reason like that, they would feel completely at risk of dying without the protection of their parents. That incessant feeling of dread could drive a person insane. So instead of going insane, children tend to go to shame. I can survive if I say to myself as a child, “Oh, I have reliable parents who love me and care for me—I am not receiving what I need because I am defective and actually don’t really deserve to have these needs I feel met.” That is the likely developmental adaptive origin of shame.

“Love is truly caring for an( )other and their well-being while caring for yourself and your own well-being.”

As British novelist Doris Lessing once said, “That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.”

However, the exciting and fortunate reality is that the path to freeing the mind is not in classifying or worrying about all the specific and varied ways predictive plateaus may create impediments that can rigidify your life or make you prone to chaos. The path to living a life more fully aware, a life of presence, is simple though not necessarily easy: accessing the plane of possibility.

Recall that a mind stretched to a new idea does not return to its original shape. For our purposes here, the notion that your hub and rim are distinct from each other is the transformational idea that has guided us on our journey from the beginning. You can learn to harness the hub—to access the plane—through the ideas and practice of the Wheel of Awareness.

“And where am I going when I die?” he inquired. My father was a very strong-willed, self-declared non-spiritual person who was an engineer by training and committed to a materialistic, science-based view of reality—his own words, not mine. He also had a way of having intense negative reactions to anyone in his family who might offer a different viewpoint than his own (my words), the correct view (his words). And so you might imagine how nervous I was as I considered how to respond to his existential question at that moment, a time that might be our last. So I said that I certainly didn’t know what happened to any of us when we die. Then he asked me what I thought might happen. So I told him what I thought. I said that after a quarter of a century of being a psychiatrist, I had never had anyone come to me in therapy saying they were worried about where they were before they were conceived. He looked intrigued, so I continued. If you imagine that there were trillions of sperm and billions of eggs in the world that could have formed you, I told him, but only one egg and one sperm of that vast set of possibilities of gametes actually came together, then you are an actualization emerging from a sea of potential, a plane of all possibilities. Okay, he said, listening intently. And you get about a century to live in this body, this actualization of a form that arose from a formless sea, the source of all that was possible. That’s your life; that’s the opportunity you get to live ...

I once was at a meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who was asked by a participant how he could be so full of laughter and joy when the world is in such turmoil. The Dalai Lama’s response was incisive and insightful. He said that it wasn’t just in spite of the world’s suffering that he laughs and finds joy in each day, but rather because of the suffering. If we don’t cultivate our innate capacity for joy and laughter, then the suffering of the world will have won.