PDF Summary:Aware, by Daniel Siegel

In Aware, Dan Siegel writes that by increasing your consciousness—your awareness of your life and your world—you can strengthen your mind, improve your focus, increase your social and emotional health, and boost your general sense of well-being. Siegel has developed a meditation tool he calls the Wheel of Awareness, which allows you to expand your capacity for awareness by visualizing and focusing on the connections between your body, your mind, and life around you. When used regularly, the Wheel meditation can revitalize and fortify your cognitive, mental, and physical health.

In this guide we’ll outline Siegel’s steps for using the Wheel, discuss the benefits of the meditation, and look at how this meditation program compares to other meditation systems. We’ll also explore the origins of some of Seigel’s techniques, and the meditation traditions that precede his program.

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(Shortform note: Developing awareness of your own awareness is one of the four foundational practices in Buddhist Satipatthana. As Buddhist meditation practitioners develop mindfulness, they not only observe thoughts, emotions, and mental states but also become aware of the part of their mind that is doing the observing. By cultivating this awareness of awareness, practitioners can gain deeper insights into the impermanent and non-self nature of all phenomena, including consciousness itself.)

Section #4: Interconnection and Kind Intentions

Again, take a deep breath and imagine moving the Spoke to the fourth section of the rim: your sense of connection to others. Begin by letting yourself become aware of your connection to the people and animals physically closest to you. Then, expand that sense of connection to the friends, family, and animals not physically close to you. Next, move your awareness to the people and animals you spend time with at work, school, and community. Then, expand your relational connection to all the beings in your neighborhood, your town or city, region or state, and then to all the beings living in your country and continent. Lastly, try to reach your sense of connection out to encompass the planet.

Finally, extend kind intentions—loving and kind well-wishes—to all the living beings in your life, especially to other people.

1. Start by saying these simple expressions aloud or silently to yourself: “May all living beings be happy. May all living beings be healthy. May all living beings be safe. May all living beings flourish and thrive.”
2. Next, move on to the following statements, which add more detail to the expressions: “May I be happy and live with meaning, connection, and equanimity, and a playful, grateful, joyful heart. May I be healthy and have a body that gives energy and flexibility, strength and stability. May I be safe and protected from all sorts of inner and outer harm. May I flourish, thrive, and live with ease and well-being.”
3. Lastly, repeat the detailed phrases from the previous step but replace the “I” with “We” to cultivate a sense of interconnection and interrelation with the beings in your life and on the planet. For example, you’ll say, “May we be happy and live with meaning…” etc.

Siegel writes that this step, of extending kind intentions, is another step you can skip when you begin to meditate with the Wheel. Instead, you can focus only on the first aspects of this section—becoming aware of your connection to others. Then, when you’ve gained some mastery of the meditation, you can add this step in.

(Shortform note: This final section of the Wheel aligns with multiple levels of Maslow's hierarchy. The third level of the hierarchy contains needs for love and belonging, just as Siegel’s fourth section cultivates your awareness of your interconnection with other beings. As the fourth section extends to a global perspective, it correlates to the highest level of Maslow's hierarchy, the need for self-actualization, or reaching your full potential as an individual and community member. Just as Maslow proposed that the pinnacle of human development is transcending yourself to connect with something greater, the Wheel meditation expands awareness from the individual to the collective.)

After completing the meditation session, take a few mindful breaths and then slowly open your eyes.

The Compact Wheel Meditation

Siegel says that after you’ve established a regular practice with the Wheel meditation, you can do a quicker version of the practice when you’re short on time. This version only takes about seven minutes. The basic premise of this version is that you use the rhythm and flow of your breath to pace each of the Wheel steps.

For example, in the first section of the wheel, match each of your five senses with a breath cycle: inhale and exhale as you pay attention to what you’re hearing, inhale and exhale as you focus on what you’re smelling, etc. End each Wheel section with an inhale breath and move the Spoke of attention to the next section with your exhale.

In the second section, match each breath cycle with a different body part as you make your way through the different areas and organs. For the third section, spend a few cycles of breath paying attention to your thoughts and a few cycles bending the Spoke back to pay attention to awareness. For the fourth section, expand awareness of your connection to larger circles of other living beings with each breath cycle. If you’re doing the step of offering kind well-wishes, play around with different ways of matching the expression with the rhythm and flow of your breath.

(Shortform note: The compact wheel is similar to vinyasa yoga, which pairs the rhythm and flow of your breath to different movements of your body. One movement in vinyasa, for example, has you lift your hands above your head when you inhale and bring them down to your sides when you exhale. In both the compact wheel and vinyasa, you change your attention and action with each breath cycle, which, according to yoga experts, can create a sense of momentum and harmony in the mind and body.)

Reflect on the Wheel Experience

As you familiarize yourself with the Wheel mediation, Siegel recommends you take time to reflect on your experiences. He recommends you journal after your sessions so that you can return to your reflections and track how things evolve along the way. He suggests the following areas of reflection:

• Notice which Wheel sections were more manageable or challenging to focus on and what feelings or memories arose. When your focus drifted away, how did it feel to gently redirect it back to the Wheel meditation?
• How did it feel to focus on every part of your body? Paying attention to physical sensations may trigger unpleasant or overwhelming feelings for you if you have past trauma. You can adapt the practice by initially spending less time on this section. Over time, you may gain greater insight from tuning into those sensations.
• What happened when you made space for mental activities to arise during the third section? Did you feel bombarded with thoughts? Was your mind quiet and empty?
• How did it feel to turn your awareness onto awareness itself? Siegel says it's common for people to find this practice initially confusing and disorienting. He says not to worry if this is the case for you—becoming aware of awareness itself is typically seen as an advanced practice in other mediation traditions, and it takes time to get used to.
• How did it feel to express a kind intention toward yourself and others? Siegel explains that people often find it awkward or uncomfortable. But with time, you’ll become more comfortable with it and probably come to enjoy it.

The Value of Reflection in the Learning Process

Reflecting on your experiences while learning something new is a powerful tool for personal growth and skill development. Learning experts say that journaling about your progress over time is an effective way to reflect and can provide valuable insights into your learning journey. This practice allows you to identify challenges, such as when your attention drifts from your meditation; to track progress, such as being able to feel more and more of your body; and to recognize patterns in your learning process, such as sections you might get stuck or confused by. By regularly assessing your progress, you can adjust your strategies, set more realistic goals, and maintain motivation. Reflection also deepens your understanding of the subject matter by encouraging you to process and internalize new information.

How The Wheel Meditation Expands Your Awareness

The Wheel meditation helps you expand your awareness and live in the present moment by:

• Developing and strengthening your attention skills.
• Increasing your sense of connection to others.
• Integrating different areas of your brain.

Developing Your Attention Skills

Siegel explains that practicing the first and second sections of the wheel helps you harness and develop two kinds of attention—focused and receptive attention. When you build and strengthen both types of attention, you’ll expand your awareness and become fully aware of yourself, your surroundings, and others. You’ll then be able to live more in the present moment.

Focused attention: Focused attention is the process of directing your awareness consciously and intentionally to specific information inside yourself, such as thoughts and feelings, or in the external world, such as sights, sounds, and other sensory stimuli. Siegel says when you have well-developed focused attention, you can aim your awareness in one direction for a sustained period, ignore distractions, and bring your attention back to your object of focus when it wanders. The Wheel meditation develops focused attention by training you to use the wheel spoke to sustain focus on different sections of the wheel rim.

(Shortform note: The focus abilities Siegel identifies above reflect our capacity to consciously direct attention. He isn’t explicit about what cognitive processes allow for focused attention, but there are two accepted models in science that explain how it works. In both, your brain automatically detects certain features of stimuli, and if they’re important or relevant to you, they get "tagged" as something that needs your attention and deeper cognitive processing. Then, depending on the model, your brain either completely blocks unimportant stimuli or "turns down the volume" on them so that only important stimuli get through to further processing centers.)

According to Siegel, developing stronger focused attention can make living more engaging, rich, and enjoyable. This is because when you spend time focusing on what the sensations in your body are telling you, you can have a heightened experience with more clarity, depth, and detail.

(Shortform note: Siegel extols the virtues of focused attention, but in The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli offers a counterargument. He posits that our capacity to narrow our focus might lead us to overlook crucial details. Dobelli contends that by zeroing in on specific elements, we risk dismissing or ignoring potentially relevant information in our surroundings. The "Invisible Gorilla" experiment vividly demonstrates this phenomenon: Participants tasked with focusing on particular aspects of a basketball game focused so intensely on those aspects that they largely failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit wandering across the court.)

Receptive attention: According to Siegel, receptive attention is an expansive state of awareness where you focus not just on one particular thing (be it the past, the future, or a specific task in front of you). Instead, you’re aware of your present-moment experiences without focusing on anything specific, and you notice and allow what you're experiencing without trying to understand or change it.

(Shortform note: In Focus, Daniel Goleman agrees that receptive attention, what he calls open awareness, is a state of mind where your attention expands, and you are receptive to everything in the present moment. He also contends that open awareness includes a mental state called mind-wandering, where your attention wanders from one internal or external experience to another. He says that the mind-wandering aspect of receptive attention allows you to make creative breakthroughs, sort through personal concerns, ponder the past, and imagine the future. However, in contrast with Siegel, Goleman says a wandering mind can also take us out of the present moment, where we tend to make more errors and mistakes.)

Siegel says it’s important that you practice and strengthen your receptive attention skills because this state of attention creates the mental space for you to tell the difference between your awareness and the contents of your mind—thoughts, feelings, and sensations. He asserts that our mental experiences often feel deeply personal, leading us to strongly identify with them. This tendency to equate our inner mental content with our sense of self can be both automatic and compelling. However, when you can differentiate between the contents of your mind and your awareness, you can better understand that you’re more than your thoughts, feelings, and sensations. This realization can lead to feelings of greater equilibrium and freedom.

(Shortform note: Differentiating between the contents of your mind and your awareness, as Siegel explains the Wheel meditation can help you do, is called vipassana, or insight, meditation In Buddhism. In vipassana meditation, you mindfully observe your own mental processes to develop a detached awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Essentially, you work to become an impartial observer of your own experience. This practice of “observing the observer” helps to create a separation between your awareness and the contents of your mind and encourages you to have a less rigid identification with your inner experiences, potentially leading to reduced suffering and a more expansive sense of self.)

The Wheel meditation develops receptive attention by developing your ability to differentiate between the hub, your awareness, and the contents of the rim—what you’re aware of. When you turn your attention to the hub of awareness itself, it can become a sanctuary of receptive attention, a calm and quiet space separate from the influx of sensations on the wheel's rim. Siegel says you can feel more emotional balance when you recognize, through practice, when you’re entirely preoccupied with the rim and can return to the neutrality of the hub.

The Wheel Meditation and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

The Wheel mediation practice of differentiating between your awareness and what you’re aware of is similar to core elements of an evidence-based approach to managing stress, improving mental health, and coping with chronic pain called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). MBSR practitioners often use concepts similar to the "hub and rim" metaphor of the Wheel meditation in their clinical settings. The approach articulates this idea through the lens of being mode versus doing mode:

Doing mode is akin to being caught up in the rim of the wheel. In doing mode, your mind is occupied by goal-oriented thinking, problem-solving, and ruminating thoughts. This mode can be practically useful in life but can also lead to stress and overwhelm. Being mode is similar to resting in the hub of the wheel. When you’re in being mode, you have a direct, immediate, nonconceptual experience of the present moment. Feelings of acceptance and ease often accompany it. In MBSR programs, participants recognize when they're stuck in doing mode and work to intentionally shift into being mode, similar to moving attention from the rim to the hub of the wheel.

Increasing Your Sense of Connection to Others

Siegel says research consistently shows that having strong social relationships and having a sense of interconnection with all life are the best predictors of mental and physical health. He reasons that this is the case because the self is composed of both our individual bodies and our relationships with others—when we don’t have strong connections with other living beings, our sense of self diminishes, and we become depressed and anxious.

Siegel explains that modern Western society encourages us to see ourselves as individuals cut off from the “outside” world by the boundaries of our physical bodies, solely responsible for our own survival and success. This perspective contributes to people lacking meaning and to feelings of disconnection in life. But Siegel says this view doesn’t accurately reflect reality—human beings are composed of and interdependent with other living beings. While separate entities, we’re also a part of a web of interconnected life.

The Epidemic of Loneliness and Disconnection

The Surgeon General of the United States, Viveck Murthy, concurs with Siegel that strong social and community support is vital for our physical and mental well-being because we are naturally social animals. He explains that prolonged social isolation is a significant risk factor for physical and mental illness, including heart disease, depression, suicide, and other causes of early death. According to Murthy, the US is experiencing what he calls a loneliness epidemic—social isolation and loneliness affect about one in two Americans, regardless of age, income, or personality type.

Murthy proposes a national framework to address loneliness and rebuild social connections, prioritizing human connection as a public health priority. His strategies to combat loneliness include strengthening social infrastructure through programs that promote healthy relationships, reevaluating our relationship with technology to allow for more face-to-face interactions, and taking personal steps to reconnect with others.

Research suggests what ancient wisdom teachings worldwide, like Buddhism, have known for a long time: Cultivating feelings of kindness and compassion toward other beings and yourself can radically change your life. It can generate brain activity patterns that link different regions together, improving coordination of neural activity. Siegel considers this coordinated neural activity to be patterns of kindness in the brain. When we produce these patterns regularly, they strengthen, ultimately becoming habits of compassionate thought and behavior.

(Shortform note: A closer look at the science of kindness and compassion reveals how these practices support health in the body. Studies have revealed that kindness and compassion activate regions of your brain associated with pleasure and reward, emotional regulation, decision-making, and positive emotions, potentially leading to improved emotional resilience, more motivation to care for yourself, and overall well-being. Additionally, hormonal changes in your body accompany these neural activities—they increase oxytocin (often called the "love hormone") in your body, which promotes social bonding and trust, reduces levels of cortisol (the stress hormone), and decreases overall inflammation.)

Integrating Different Areas of Your Brain

According to Siegel, practicing the Wheel meditation supports integration between the different regions of your brain. In general, integration is a process where you distinguish individual elements within a system and then organize and combine them into a cohesive whole. Integration thus balances differentiation with unification. For example, a city planner practices integration by differentiating individual elements of a neighborhood—houses, parks, and so on—while also establishing connections between them with roads and public spaces to create a functional community.

(Shortform note: The term integration is used in many contexts and connotes slightly different things, depending on context. In psychology, integration is used in a similar way to Siegel’s usage, but the American Psychological Association defines integration as a process of coordinating and unifying parts into a whole—it doesn’t include Siegel’s initial step of differentiating parts from a whole to then bring them back together later. In math, integration is when you find the total amount of something that changes over time or space, similar to calculating the total distance traveled on a journey by adding up all the small distances covered at each moment.)

Integration in your brain, called neural integration, happens when different areas of the brain connect and work together efficiently. This allows for coordinated mental processes and balanced functioning. Siegel explains that greater neural integration optimizes the functioning of your nervous system, which allows you to more easily regulate your attention, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. When your nervous system is more regulated, your mind and body can be more flexible, adaptable, and resilient in the face of change, uncertainty, and stress.

(Shortform note: In neuroscience, neural integration is an umbrella term that encompasses many processes in the brain, including sensory history integration (SHI)— where your brain combines past sensory information to predict future sensory information. This predictive processing is key to how organisms adapt to their environments. According to neuroscientists, SHI is when your brain gathers and selects relevant historical data to create a cohesive representation of past experiences and generate expectations about upcoming events. The brain identifies patterns in sensory inputs over time, ultimately enabling adaptive behaviors in response to environmental changes.)

The Wheel meditation facilitates integration in your brain because it helps you distinguish your perceptions from your awareness and to connect to the larger systems of life of which we are all a part. For example, the first, second, and third sections of the Wheel help you notice the difference between your sensations, feelings, thoughts, and the part of yourself that’s observing them. And the fourth section of the Wheel helps you reestablish your sense of connection with others. With consistent practice over time, meditation can help your brain rewire itself so that it’s more integrated, leading to greater physical and mental well-being.

(Shortform note: In a scientific article, Siegel uses the term neural differentiation to describe the process of separating and identifying different aspects of your awareness—the first step in the process of integration. He explains that this is much like untangling intertwined threads, and it allows us to engage or disengage with different aspects of our minds more easily. Once we can distinguish these different elements of our consciousness, we can bring them back together more harmoniously. By learning to both separate and recombine the various aspects of our awareness, we can achieve a more balanced and flexible mental state.)