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

by Daniel J. Siegel

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...