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

by Daniel J. Siegel

When we develop focused attention, open awareness, and kind intention, research reveals we:

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.

Consciousness can be simply defined as our subjective sense of knowing—like your awareness now of my writing the word hello. In this book, we’ll use a perspective that consciousness includes both the knowing and the known.

In the practice, I have my patients or students get centered and imagine their minds to be like the Wheel. We envision next how the rim could be divided into four parts or segments, each of which contains a certain category of knowns. The first segment contains the category of knowns of our first five senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch; the second segment represents another category of knowns, one that includes the interior signals of the body, such as sensations from our muscles or from our lungs. The third segment contains the mental activities of feelings, thoughts, and memories, while the fourth holds our sense of connection to other people and to nature, our relational sense.

When it’s not optimizing, it moves toward chaos or toward rigidity. When it is optimizing, it moves toward harmony and is flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable.

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.

What is practiced repeatedly strengthens brain firing clusters or patterns. With repetition, neural structure is literally altered. This is how repeated states become enduring traits.

Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows.

Having an awakened mind means using the mental processes of attention, awareness, and intention to activate new states of mind that, with repeated practice, can become intentionally sculpted traits in a person’s life.

Being open to whatever arises means letting go of expectations and being more receptive to and accepting of what is actually occurring at the moment. Since perception is shaped by expectation, being more open and letting go of judgment and anticipation expands our awareness of all the vicissitudes of life.

Observation is the capacity to distance ourselves a bit from an experience, to take note of the contours of all that is unfolding without becoming flooded by it. This is a more constructed form of perception than the conduit function of pure sensation. With observation we can avoid being on automatic pilot when we become lost in a thought or feeling or sensation. Sometimes letting go of observation is important so we can feel the flow of sensation, but other times we gain a broader perspective with the wider view of observation. Both are good; they are simply different from each other. Observation encourages us to become widely aware and active observers of our lives—it enables us to be more centered in our knowing in the hub without being swept away by the knowns of the rim that may at times overwhelm our capacity for a more integrated experience of being aware.

Objectivity takes this capacity of observation one step further, as we sense that the knowns of our experience are objects of the mind, not the totality of our identity or equivalent to absolute reality. We maintain an objective stance as we sense and perceive the knowns as simply elements of experience that arise and fall, ...

Broadly speaking, a relationship can be seen as the sharing of energy and information flow. For an anthropologist or sociologist or linguist, our mental lives are happening between us. The brain can be seen as an embodied mechanism of energy and information flow. And so we have a within-mind, within the skin-encased body including the skull-encased brain—what we can simply call our “embodied brain.” And we have between-minds that happen in our relationships. These can also be called our inner and our inter minds, the within and between origins of our self, of who we are. The mind happens within and between.

Focused attention: the capacity to sustain one’s concentration, ignore distractions or let go of them when they arise, and refocus attention on the intended object of attention 2. Open awareness: the experience of presence of mind in which a state of being receptive to objects within awareness but not getting attached to them or lost in them is sustained 3. Kind intention: the ability to have a state of mind with positive regard, compassion, and love internally (what is sometimes called “self” compassion, which we are calling “inner compassion”) and interpersonally (what is sometimes termed “other”-directed compassion, which we are calling “inter compassion”)

Curiosity, Openness, Acceptance, and Love. In a COAL state of mind, we are present for life.

Mindsight enables us to have insight, empathy, and integration.

Attention, whether focal or non-focal—with or without awareness—helps you navigate through a world of energy.

Consciousness gives us the opportunity for choice and change.

THE FULL WHEEL PRACTICE

Who we are is bigger than the body and broader than the brain.

What you create in the moment can become strengthened in the long run with practice.

integrative states become healthy traits.

A repeated state of integration can become an enduring trait of health.

our self is in fact both inner and inter,

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

a sense of a more open mind comes along with an ease of well-being as clinging is naturally diminished.

Attention and awareness are mental processes that enable the mind to shape the brain in integrative ways that strengthen the mind itself.

We’re not saying mind is independent of the brain or the body; we’re merely pointing out that the mind is not a passive rider on the brain’s firing patterns. The mind’s subjective experience is simply not the same as neural firing, even if it turns out to be completely dependent upon it. Mind can direct that firing of its own accord.

insight and understanding move forward only when we have the courage to be wrong.

energy is the movement from possibility to actuality.

To create an actuality from the sea of potential, energy must flow from the quantum vacuum.

Since the reality of our world appears to be more about interactions than about fixed entities, the universe being more like a verb than a noun, this energy and information flows—it changes ceaselessly; it unfolds; it moves; it is an ever-evolving set of interacting energy fields that comprise the emerging world we call reality.

That movement in our universe from possibility to actuality is called energy.

energy is the movement into form that arises from a formless pool of potentialities, of possibilities, from which all forms emerge—

The potentiality of possibility is real; it is simply formless.

probability of neural firing at some future time.

Filters shape what emerges as contents of our awareness,

In the usual state of consciousness in our everyday adult lives, most of us have learned to live in world as best we can by having the five aspects of a FACES flow as a part of how our minds work. To stay in the central flow of harmony within the river of integration allows us to be flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable. To achieve this way of being, we need to attain knowledge, learn skills, and then apply that knowledge and those skills to everyday experience. If we don’t acquire these energy patterns and the symbolic forms of information they create as concepts and categories, and instead live as if we have perpetually just arrived anew, everything will be fresh and novel, yes, but we will be extremely inefficient and ineffective in getting things done. We will stop to smell every rose as if it is the first time we’ve seen and inhaled that magnificent flower—but we will never make it to work or the gym.

The ABCDE’s of meaning include: 1. Associations: Sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts that emerge in tandem with each other, both spatially and temporally in the brain. This shapes what arises as we SIFT through the mind (an acronym within a mnemonic!) and reflect on what has meaning for us. 2. Beliefs: Our mental modes and perspectives on the world that shape what we see, as in “You need to believe it to see it.” 3. Cognitions: The flow of associated information processing as it unfolds in cascades of concepts and categories with their avalanches of facts, ideas, and patterns of perceiving, thinking, and reasoning that shape our view of reality and our ways of problem solving. 4. Developmental period: The time in our life in which events have occurred, such as our early childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood, that shape the top-down influences happening in the moment. 5. Emotions: Feelings arising from the body, shaped by relationships, and spread through the head-brain, instantiating significance and value in our lives, and often involving a shift in our state of integration in any given moment, whether subtle or intense.

When we are living from the plane, we are present for life.

If now is all that exists, I said to my new patient, then there are neural connections shaping his mind and relationships, now, that are shadows of a prior now, and he might want to live a freer now by making sense of those now-experiences, now.

Presence frees our minds and brings health to our relationships and our embodied brains.