Awareness Training: An Introduction

These remarks are essentially the same ones as on the video, just organized a bit more succinctly. For those of us who are more verbal communicators, the video will be easiest. For those of us more visual, having the remarks written might be handy.

I’m wondering if I might be able to hook you into trying some of these Awareness Training videos. These practices and stories are about bringing heart forward and have been the most powerful tool I have run across in my own process of recovery. So I’m quite anxious to make these palatable for you and intrigue you into persisting with trying several of these.

Awareness training. What is that you might ask. An easier question to ask than answer. And the real answers will lie in the doing of these practices. There is nothing here you need to try to remember. Anything important will get repeated over and over. But I will try to hook you with a few thoughts on the whats and whys of Awareness Training.

What is awareness training first calls us to consider what is awareness itself? Consciousness. What is it? As it turns out, it is a difficult phenomenon to pin down. We are so close to it that it has become ordinary and taken for granted. For our purposes here, I will bring our attention to two aspects of awareness: the contents of awareness and the qualities of awareness. The contents of awareness or consciousness include our sensory experiences, our thoughts, our feelings, our memories. All states of consciousness are not the same. There is sleepy consciousness where it is hard to keep our eyes open to finish the page or finish the program. The thoughts and feelings during sleep itself have a much different quality to them. There is reflective consciousness where something significant (maybe a beautiful sunset, maybe the death of someone significant to us) has led us to pause and notice “I’m here. I’m alive experiencing this. I might not have been.” There is immersive consciousness where we lose track of time in a project or really good movie or book. This is not an exhaustive list. But there are, in particular, states of consciousness that are very difficult to be with. Being conscious in the middle of the night with a torrent of thoughts while you are wanting to sleep and dreading the next day if we don’t find a way to still on these thoughts and get a few hours of sleep is a particular kind of awareness. It’s very much about thoughts, and if you pay attention to them, most of the thoughts are about the past with regrets quite prominent, or thoughts about the future with anxieties about the future being quite prominent. The quality of awareness when we are anxious or depressed has often been described as a “contracted awareness.” My own experience of it is like I have a horse’s blinders on. Mainly what I see on the path of life is all the cow pies I’m about to step in.

So awareness training is about coming to appreciate that we have some control over the quality of awareness and the contents of our awareness. And the why we should bother with this is that it can be like the experience of taking those blinders off and seeing that the path of life has more than cow pies on it, that it runs through an incredible landscape under a big sky. Mind you, the cow pies are there, and we might still step in them. These techniques do not say we do not have insomnia, depression, anxiety. But we can come to dilute these states within a bigger experience of enoughness, and a sense that our lives matter, and compassion. We don’t get there in 10 minutes. It’s a bit like physical exercise: working out once might only yield some sore muscles if we over do it. But persist with some mild-moderate efforts and we notice the results within a few weeks. I’m hoping to help you towards getting results even sooner. At the heart of the practices I will describe is bringing forward qualities of awareness where we spend more time with being in the present, more time with anchoring and balancing our doing with being, more awareness of how we are creatures of habit and conditioning but also able to rise to the top of this, and finding that with our awareness generally expanding and becoming more open that the flip side of the coin of awareness is compassion and connection.

I’m calling this awareness training to try to lose some of the baggage of what you might have had experiences with of mindfulness work. Certainly, awareness training is a kind of mindfulness practice. But currently, I am not much of a meditator (have been and will no doubt go back to this for seasons of my life. Meditation is a powerful tool for awareness training), and for some of us we have equated mindfulness practice with meditation. While I do not meditate every day, I do train my awareness every day in countless ways. I find the ways that are easier for me. Effort is always involved. Generally, one needs to lift the fork to eat the bite of food. But maybe the effort is not too much for us. I’m wondering if practicing with me in some of these videos might be easy for you, too.