awareness

The most effective way to learn is by tuning in to the subtleties of your internal experience during the vicissitudes of daily life. This is especially true when you feel reactive, frustrated, or triggered by something or someone, as these are usually the moments when there is the most to sense, track, and feel.

learn to notice what’s happening with your broad awareness of the space around you. I’ve written before about the idea that awareness—the breadth of things you are able to notice in any given moment—can expand and collapse. Collapsed awareness is like tunnel vision, where there’s a sense that the wider world around you goes away while the thing you... See more

The lowest level of choice is not making a conscious choice at all, which happens when you don’t notice that you even could make a choice. In this case there is effectively no space between stimulus and response, so you just act out your habitual behavior unconsciously. If you ever find yourself skimming the news or looking in the fridge without ha... See more

learn to notice what your awareness is doing, because a collapse in awareness is a clear sign that you are losing the capacity to make a new choice, becoming more like a train that can only run on pre-laid tracks rather than, let’s say, a drone that could go anywhere. If you notice this, first re-expand your awareness by noticing more of the space ... See more