Whether you are just starting out on a journey to more presence or you have been practicing mindfulness in one way or another for a while, one word is bound to come up over and over again: Awareness. Awareness is this big and important part of mindfulness, but what exactly is it? Sure, to be mindful is to be aware of the present moment. And yes, to step out of the autopilot mode of thoughts and feelings is to first be aware of these thoughts and feelings; but, as important as awareness is to the practice of BEing in the moment, it’s also ephemeral.
The ephemeral nature of awareness comes about predominantly because awareness doesn’t necessarily have a form. Like a chameleon, it takes on the color and shape and texture of what is around it. When you breathe with awareness, you are still engaged in the act of breathing. When you think with awareness, you are still engaged in the act of thinking. Awareness exists simultaneously connected to and detached from. This can make awareness a little tricky to apply in an intentional way, because it can be confusing to know what it is you are actually supposed to be feeling to indicate you are actually aware in the first place. The short answer–awareness is the capacity to feel all of it.
Awareness and Feeling Fully
In the context of becoming aware of the present moment in a way that is supportive and offers the capacity for growth, awareness of the present moment is to pay attention to everything that is influencing you in a given moment. This includes that which is comfortable and uncomfortable, pleasant and painful, light and dark. You are, when you are in the thick of your present moment experience, feeling the full spectrum of what it means to be living. Researchers on psychological flexibility call this flexible attention on the present moment whereby awareness of the present allows engagement with the past and future simultaneously.
Awareness vs. Mindful Awareness
The struggle with feeling “all of it” is that you can find yourself bouncing from thought to thought, sensation to sensation, aware of everything in a stormy, obscificated way. The awareness of a mindfulness practice seeks to find the blue sky amidst the storm. It involves a steady observation of thoughts and feelings as they surge in and out of focus. Going back to psychological flexibility, mindful awareness simply means that there is diffusion–a detachment from taking every thought and feeling as absolute truth and that your self is contextualized, which means there is a sense of “I/HERE/NOW” coming together to create a removed observation of what you are experiencing.
Lack of Awareness
As calming as it can be to be mindfully aware of your moment by moment experience, it doesn’t mean you are not feeling. In fact, a lack of mindful awareness is what often causes us to engage in avoidance or controlling tactics. On some level, we do not want to sit with the intricacy of being human, with the stormy atmosphere of reconciling and marrying all these different facets of our lived experience. Instead we micromanage our inner/outer worlds or distract ourselves from the “hard” parts in favor of what is easy. Sometimes, such actions can be helpful coping mechanisms for what feels too much, too soon, too fast, but other times they turn into a habit of relating to the self devoid of an awareness that can enable a more robust and intricate connection to your life.
Feeling to Shift and Change
To sit with the thoughts and feelings that arise at any given moment, is to engage with the past, the present, the future, colliding. We have to allow into our lens of focus the discomfort and sometimes pain of our own story, and actions and world view, to be able to see them, and hold them, and understand them enough to realize they are not the whole of us. Such an awareness offers the ability for beliefs and ideas and self concept to be reevaluated, reconstructed and re-imagined.
Thich Nhat Han speaks of this re-imagining in his published work, Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962–1966, writes: “ Even when your heart is filled with despair, you will find the same grasshopper on the same blade of grass… Some life dilemmas cannot be solved by study or rational thought. We just live with them, struggle with them, and become one with them… To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.”
Awareness is an essential component of a mindfulness practice because it allows in the entirety of your experience. Through mindful awareness you can simultaneously take a step back from being so caught up in your thoughts and feelings, while also seeking to immerse yourself in their tumultuous landscape. The act of being aware of the full spectrum of your lived experience, is to begin to understand yourself with greater depth and nuance, making space to shift and change, growing out of one version of yourself and into another.