“The truth shall set you free.”
Keys to Awareness
• Feel that your own well-being and functioning matters. Get on your own side; be for yourself.
Question: How many people does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Only one. But the light bulb has to want to change.
• Cultivate wanting to be in reality, to know the facts of the inner and outer worlds. Know and
trust that your greatest safety and hope is in seeing what’s true, no matter what it is. Whenever you
move into awareness/observation mode, you instantly distance yourself from things (inside or
outside yourself) that are painful, and center yourself in a place that is inherently calmer and wiser
than just reacting. And the only way you can intervene in your experience or your environment in
order to make things better is by knowing what the facts are and what has caused them to be.
• Bring compassion and kindness to yourself and to whatever your awareness finds. Hold your
innermost feelings and longings with the sensitivity and concern you should have received as a child.
“Bare Witnessing”
• Be a neutral watcher of your experience and the outer world, an “observing ego.” “No praise, no
blame.” “Just the facts, ma’am.” “Don’t know mind.”
• Your observing awareness is separate from experience and world. You have thoughts, etc., but
you are not the thoughts, etc., themselves. Know your experience without identifying with it. You are
being with your experience, but not caught or hijacked by feelings, wants, etc. Watch the movie
without jumping into the screen.
• We all repeatedly get sucked into our experience and lose the peaceful detachment of observing
it. Don’t worry, don’t scold yourself, just return to an awareness of whatever’s arising.
Awareness Is Never Tainted or Harmed
• Awareness is like a screen on which experience and the outer world register, “like a pond on
which shadows are cast by geese flying overhead,” but it is never sullied or changed by the passing
show. No experience can hurt consciousness itself, the essence of who you are.
• Allow whatever is there in awareness to be present, without resistance. Sincerely and resolutely
push through any reluctance to seeing the truth, both good news about yourself (often the hardest to
let in!) and the world, and painful or dark things. Accept the way it is. Receive it, don’t fight it.
Active Inquiry
• Actively peer into yourself, like a scientist. Inquire, turn over stones, look ever more deeply. The
textures of experience and the landscapes of personality are endlessly interesting.
• Track both the breadth and depth of your experience. “Breadth” means the full spectrum of:
thoughts, feelings, sensations, wants, images, memories. “Depth” means looking down into the
layered mosaic of the self, which includes (A) structure (e.g., traits, sub-personalities, fundamental values), (B) softer, more vulnerable material beneath rigid positions and anger, and (C) material from
childhood beneath here-and-now adult reactions.
• Look for recurring patterns, “psychodynamics,” what leads to what.
• Develop a model of yourself, a growing picture. Be guided by knowing “the usual suspects.”
Awareness and Attention
• Awareness is about attention: a spotlight illuminating objects.
• Attention is knowing: “Breathing in, know that you are breathing in.”
• Concentration is a tight “beam” of attention on something, like the breath or a specific emotion.
Mindfulness is a more diffuse, free-floating attentiveness to the whole of your experience. Getting
better at both through informal and formal practice is the foundation of skillful awareness.
Written by Rick Hanson, Ph.D.
Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist and author of the bestselling Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (in 21 languages) – as well as the forthcoming Just One Thing. Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and Affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, he’s taught at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and in meditation centers in Europe, North America, and Australia. His work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, Consumer Reports Health, and U.S. News and World Report.
