Dr. Daniel Siegel - Becoming Aware: A 21-Day Mindfulness Program for Reducing Anxiety and Cultivating Calm

introduction

In this hands-on guide to the mindfulness practice I developed called the Wheel of Awareness, I invite you to become a student of the architecture of your own mind. Mindful awareness, as you will see, involves more than just being simply awareit is being aware of the aspects of the mind itself. Mindfulness in its most general sense is about waking up from a life in which we are set on automatic, to becoming more aware of and sensitive to the novelty of our everyday experiences. Moving from automatic enables us to be more present in our lives and for the people we love.

In the pages of this book we will dive deep into three learnable skills that have been shown in carefully conducted scientific studies to support the cultivation of well-being:

• FOCUSED ATTENTION

• OPEN AWARENESS

• KIND INTENTION

When we develop focused attention, open awareness, and kind intention, research reveals that we will be better equipped to weather lifes storms with a stronger sense of overall calm and happiness. Research also reveals that we can impact the health of our bodies in very real and measurable ways including:

1. Improving immune function to help fight infection.

2. Optimizing the level of the enzyme telomerase, which repairs and maintains the ends of your chromosomes, keeping your cellsand therefore youyouthful, functioning well, and healthy.

3. Enhancing the epigenetic regulation of genes to help prevent life-threatening inflammation.

4. Reduce stress and improve cardiovascular functions.

5. Help the brain grow more linkages among separate regionssomething called integration, which is the neural basis for resilience and well-being!

As you move through the 21-day program in this book, you will develop your own personalized Wheel of Awareness practice. It is my hope that, as your practice deepens, you will discover, as I and many others who work with the Wheel have, that you will experience more clarity and peace, a deeper sense of stability and even vitality, not just during the practice itself but during the rest of your day as well.

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 circlea hub, if you willfrom 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 could be placed in the hub.

The central hub of that table, of what we were now calling the Wheel of Awareness, represents the experience of being aware, of knowing that one is surveying the knowns of life. The rim came to represent that which is known; for instance, at this moment, you are aware of the words you are reading on this page, and now perhaps youve become aware of the associations you are having with the wordsthe images or memories that come to mind.

Consciousness involves our subjective sense of knowinglike your awareness now of my writing the word hello. In this book, we will be guided by the perspective that consciousness includes both the knowing and the known. You know I wrote hello. You knowing is awareness; hello is the known. The knowing is in the hub; the knowns are on the rim.

Now imagine what might happen if, from the starting point of the hub, our attention was directed out to any of the various knowns on the rim, focused on one point or anotheron a given thought, a perception, or a feeling, any single one of the wide range of knowns of life that rest on the rim of the Wheel. Extending the metaphor of the wheel, one might envision these moments of focusing attention as a spoke on the wheel. The spoke of attention connects the hub of knowing to the rim of the knowns.

In the practice, I invite my patients or students to 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.