AN INVITATION

There is an old saying that consciousness is like a container of water. If you take a tablespoon of salt and place it in a small container, say, the size of an espresso cup, the water most certainly will be too salty to drink. But if your container is much larger—say it is capable of holding many, many gallons of water—that same tablespoon of salt, now placed into this vast amount of liquid, will taste fresh. Same water, same salt; simply a different ratio, and the experience of drinking is totally different.

Consciousness is like that. When we learn to cultivate our capacity for being aware, the quality of our life and the strength of our mind are enhanced.

The skills you’ll learn in this book are really quite simple: You will learn to increase the mind’s capacity for being aware so that you will be able to adjust the ratio of the experience of awareness itself (the water) to the object of your awareness (the salt). You might call this cultivating consciousness; you might call it strengthening your mind. Research reveals that you would be correct in even calling this integrating your brain—growing the linkages among its different regions, strengthening the brain’s ability to regulate things such as emotion, attention, thought, and behavior, learning to live a life with more flexibility and freedom.

Learning this skill of distinguishing awareness from that which you are aware of will enable you to expand the container of consciousness and empower you to “taste” so much more than just a salty glass of water. You will be able to immerse yourself fully in whatever experiences arise, regardless of how many tablespoons of salt life throws your way.

To enable these abilities to become a part of your life, this book will teach you a practice I developed called the Wheel of Awareness. As you become adept at using this tool, you may come to find that you’ll be able to weather life’s storms more easily and live life more fully, opening to whatever experiences arise, be they positive or negative. This skill of cultivating consciousness by expanding awareness, like transforming the small espresso cup into a vast container of water, will not only help you enjoy life more, it can also bring a deeper sense of connection and meaning to everyday experience, and even make you healthier.

CULTIVATING WELL-BEING BY DEVELOPING ATTENTION, AWARENESS, AND INTENTION

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

1. Improve immune function to help fight infection.

2. Optimize the level of the enzyme telomerase, which repairs and maintains the ends of your chromosomes, keeping your cells—and therefore you—youthful, functioning well, and healthy.

3. Enhance the “epigenetic” regulation of genes to help prevent life-threatening inflammation.

4. Modify cardiovascular factors, improving cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and heart function.

5. Increase neural integration in the brain, enabling more coordination and balance in both the functional and structural connectivity within the nervous system that facilitates optimal functioning, including self-regulation, problem solving, and adaptive behavior that is at the heart of well-being.

In short, the scientific findings are now in: your mind can change the health of your body and slow aging.

In addition to these concrete discoveries, we have the more subjective yet equally powerful findings that cultivating these aspects of mind—how you focus attention, open awareness, and guide intention toward kindness and caring—also increases a sense of well-being, connection to others (in the form of enhanced empathy and compassion), emotional balance, and resilience in the face of challenges. Studies reveal that as a sense of meaning and purpose increase, an overall ease of being—what some call equanimity—is nurtured by these specific practices.

These are all outcomes of strengthening your mind by expanding the container of consciousness.

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. Does cultivating eudaimonia seem like something you’d like to place on your to-do list in life? If you experience this quality of being already in your day-to-day living, these practices of training attention, awareness, and intention may enhance and reinforce where you already are in life. Wonderful. And if it feels like these features of eudaimonia are distant or perhaps unfamiliar to you, and you’d like to make these more near and dear to your everyday existence, you’ve come to the right conversation, here in this book.

A PRACTICAL TOOL

The Wheel of Awareness is a useful tool I’ve developed over many years to help expand the container of consciousness.

I’ve offered the Wheel to thousands of individuals around the world, and it’s proven to be a practice that can help people develop more well-being in both their inner and interpersonal lives. The Wheel practice is based on simple steps that are easy to learn and then apply in your everyday experiences.

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 circle—a hub, if you will—from 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 we could place in the hub.

If I could teach people how to expand that container of consciousness by more freely and fully accessing the Wheel’s hub of awareness, they’d be able to change the way they experienced life’s tablespoons of salt, and perhaps even learn to savor life’s sweetness in a more balanced and fulfilling way, even if there were a lot of salt present at the time. As I looked down at this table, I saw that the clarity of that glass hub might represent how we become aware of all of these tablespoons of life, each of the varied experiences we could become aware of, from thoughts to sensations, which we might now visualize as being placed on the circle around this hub—the table’s outer wooden rim.

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 you’ve become aware of the associations you are having with the words—the images or memories that come to mind.

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. 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. When we speak of expanding the container of consciousness, we are then strengthening the experience of knowing—strengthening and opening our capacity to be aware.

Now imagine what might happen if, from the starting point of the hub, our attention were directed out to any of the various knowns on the rim, focused on one point or another—on 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 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.

We slowly move that singular spoke of attention around the rim, bringing into focus, one by one, each of the elements of that segment, and then move the spoke of attention to the next segment, and review those points as well. Systematically we take in rim element by rim element, moving the spoke of attention around the rim of knowns. As the practice unfolds in a given session, and as individuals continue to practice on a regular basis, there is a common description of feeling more clarity and calm, a deeper sense of stability and even vitality, not just during the practice itself, but during the rest of the day.

The Wheel practice is a way to open awareness and cultivate a larger, more expansive container of consciousness. People who participate in the practice seem to be strengthening their minds.

The Wheel was designed as a practice that could balance our lives by integrating the experience of consciousness. How? By distinguishing the wide array of knowns on the rim from each other and from the knowing of awareness in the hub itself, we can differentiate the components of consciousness. Then, by systematically connecting these knowns of the rim to the knowing of the hub with the movement of the spoke of attention, it becomes possible to link the differentiated parts of consciousness. This is how by differentiating and linking, the Wheel of Awareness practice integrates consciousness.

One of the fundamental emergent properties of complex systems in this reality of ours is called self-organization. That’s a term you might think someone in psychology or even business might have created—but it is a mathematical term. The form or shape of the unfolding of a complex system is determined by this emergent property of self-organization. This unfolding can be optimized, or it can be constrained. 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.

Given the experience of the chaos and rigidity I had been observing in my patients (and my friends and myself when things weren’t going so well), I began to wonder if the mind might be some kind of self-organizing process. A strong mind might optimize self-organization and create an experience of harmony in life; a compromised mind might lean away from that harmony and toward chaos or rigidity. If this were true, then cultivating a strong mind might be aided by asking how optimal self-organization occurs. There is an answer to that question.

The linking of differentiated parts of a complex system is how the emergent self-organizing property that regulates how that system unfolds over time—how it self-organizes—moves toward optimal functioning. In other words, integration (as we are defining it with the balancing of differentiation and linkage) creates optimal self-organization with its flexible and adaptive functioning.

The essential idea behind the Wheel was to expand the container of consciousness and, in effect, balance the experience of consciousness itself. Balance is a common term that we can understand scientifically as coming from this process that we are calling integration—the allowing of things to be different or distinct from each other on the one hand, and then connecting them to each other on the other. When we differentiate and link, we integrate. We become balanced and coordinated in life when we create integration. Various scientific disciplines may use other terminology, but the concept is the same. 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.

A system that is integrated is in a flow of harmony. Just as in a choir, with each singer’s voice both differentiated from the other singers’ voices but also linked, harmony emerges with integration. What is important to note is that this linkage does not remove the differences, as in the notion of blending; instead it maintains these unique contributions as it links them together. Integration is more like a fruit salad than a smoothie. This is how integration creates the synergy of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Likewise, this synergy of integration means that the many aspects of our lives, like the many points on the rim, can each be honored for their differences but then brought together in harmony.

In my own journey as a clinician, working within the framework of a multidisciplinary field called interpersonal neurobiology, reflecting on our mind as a self-organizing way we regulate energy and information flow inspired me to try and find strategies to create more integration in my patients’ lives in order to create more well-being in their bodies and in their relationships. The many books I’ve written or cowritten have integration at their core.

When we integrated consciousness with the Wheel of Awareness, people’s lives improved.

Many individuals have found the Wheel of Awareness a skill-building practice that empowers them in quite profound ways. It transformed how they came to experience their inner, mental lives—their emotions, thoughts, and memories—opened new ways of interacting with others, and even expanded a sense of connection and meaning in their lives.

A TRAVEL GUIDE TO THE MIND

My hope for our conversation in this book is that the Wheel of Awareness will become a part of your life, as both an idea and a practice, and that it will enhance well-being in your body, mind, and relationships. While this practice is inspired by science and bolstered by feedback from thousands of individuals who have explored it, you and I need to keep in mind that you are a particular individual with your own history, proclivities, and ways of being in the world. We are each unique. So while there are generalizations we will be discussing, your own experience of this material will be a one-of-a-kind unfolding.

Like others in the health-care profession, I try my best to build on scientific data and general findings and then apply them carefully and openly to a particular person. I aim to remain open—seeking, receiving, and responding to feedback from those who are taking in these ideas and trying out these practices. We as clinicians cannot guarantee an outcome for any specific patient or client; we can simply build on science and prior experience to offer steps that have a high likelihood of helping. With this perspective, our approach can be to offer the best we can and remain open to the wide ways in which any given person may in fact respond.

This is a book, not psychotherapy or even an educational workshop. Our connection here with this set of words is not a live, in-the-moment, give-and-take relationship, and so direct, real-time, ongoing feedback and exchange between you and me is naturally not possible. But as a reader you are invited to have an ongoing moment-to-moment dialogue with yourself. You as the reader can take in these ideas and try out the practices and see how they work for you. I, as the author, can simply share my experiences and perspectives, offering you words that cannot lead to direct feedback from you but can hopefully offer something that is helpful. In this sense, the book can be seen as a travel guide, discussing the details of a possible journey that only you can take. The author of the guide has the responsibility to make suggestions; the travelers’ role is to take these in, consider what is being offered, and then responsibly create their own journey. I can act in the role of a Sherpa, someone who supports your travels, but as the traveler, you need to take the steps and modify them as necessary along the way.

I have kept the importance of your subjective experience in the front of my mind both in creating the Wheel of Awareness itself, as well as in constructing this book that explores its conceptual ideas and its practical potentials. No offering can guarantee benefits. But please use this as, hopefully, a useful and accessible travel guide to the ideas and practices that are of potentially powerful benefit to your life.

This will not be a detailed, research-project-summarizing accounting of all of the fascinating and relevant fields’ discoveries, but it will be a scientifically inspired, practical travel guide to the mind and mental health that offers ideas and practices as a structured framework for your specific journey ahead.

Helpful reviews of the scientific studies affirming the kinds of practices that cultivate well-being can be found in a number of publications, including a very accessible exploration of the science of meditation by Daniel Goleman and Richie Davidson, called Altered Traits. Another example of rigorous researchers who’ve taken scientific findings and carefully outlined their practical use is The Telomere Effect by the Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn and her scientific colleague Elissa Epel. Since I’ve previously published references relevant to this science in a number of books, such as The Developing Mind and Mind, here in Aware we will get right to the ideas and practices that are supported by that science to offer a potential path for cultivating more resilience and well-being in your life. A listing of general references and suggested reading can be found on my website, DrDanSiegel.com, as introduced at the end of this book.

In the pages that follow, we’ll be dipping into the waters and having some deep dives and fun hikes along a range of trails that explore and strengthen your mind. I’ll be there with you for every step on the path ahead.