The Difference between Awareness and Self Awareness

Mindfulness is a wellness buzzword today, standing in for everything from meditation to medical interventions. In counseling, mindfulness has become the basis for evidence-based interventions in mental health treatment. But while this is a relatively recent development in the West, the concept of mindfulness can be traced to ancient Eastern practices associated with psychological and spiritual health. The vastness of this origin means that in practice, mindfulness can look like a lot of things. So what is it, really?
Well, it’s not really about filling your mind—at least not any more than your mind is at any given moment. Your mind may be full of thoughts and awareness of the world around you, but that doesn’t mean you’re being mindful. In fact, this is often what mindfulness is trying to get you to step away from.
At the same time, your mind doesn’t need to be empty for you to be mindful. In fact, your mind will probably never be fully empty as long as you’re alive. What mindfulness requires is stepping away from the cognitive mind into a metacognitive state, where you are turning your awareness inward to become a witness to your own mind.

Your mind is a powerful machine, constantly taking in information, processing the data and reacting in order to keep you alive. There is much that it does subconsciously and unconsciously, which can make it difficult to access from a conscious state. The goal of mindfulness is to develop the practice of self-awareness by observing your mind as it is, however full or empty that may be.
This requires splitting your attention and focus between the part of your mind that will continue to operate as normal and another part of your mind. Losing focus is natural when you’re spreading it thin between multiple parts of yourself and you’ll likely find your attention shifting back and forth between your thoughts and your awareness of them. One way to understand this is by trying to bring your awareness to your skin: are you sensing the skin itself, an external sensation such as the air around you or an internal sensation such as the nerve endings under the skin barrier?
Ultimately, mindfulness is not a skill you can gain or a state you can attain. It is an ongoing practice of developing your self-awareness through observing the mind. What that looks like or how that can help you, well that’s another article altogether.
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