Minding awareness is not so much what the mind does, but what it is.

Mindful-awareness training and mindfulness meditation provides us a discipline to come to know our minds directly through immersion into 1st person experience- contemplatively and reflectively. The only way to know the mind is subjectively or introspectively. In our attending practice, we have intended to cultivate a mindful brain through aimed and sustained concentration and focus. We have aspired to stabilize our minds through openness, observation (i.e. “watchful”), objectivity, and self-compassion (i.e. maitri). As a result, aspects of mental functioning have revealed themselves for deeper and more meaningful introspection. The details of our focus on mind have become clearer and more vivid.

A mindful brain has brought a shift in consciousness- an integrated (i.e. linking distinct, differentiated parts) state of awareness with one’s own emerging experience. It is through this introspective insight that our shift in perspective and orientation now illuminates both mind and awareness. It is not so much what mind does, but what mind is. In this process of “minding awareness”, we are not only strengthening our attention, but our mind as well. Direct experience (i.e. 1st person immersion) with a mindful brain brings us the capacity for discernment to objectively sense that the activities of the mind as not the totality of who we are…

In strengthening the middle pre-frontal cortex of our brains through our mindful-awareness training, we are optimizing our “executive attention” in determining where to direct our attention- how we “pause” before we act- i.e. “space” between stimulus & response- and how we regulate our emotions and even our social functioning. The circuitry in this area of the mindful brain is of critical interest to neural scientists studying this interconnection of science and subjectivity.

An embodied (i.e. body) and relational (i.e. between us) awareness becomes finely attuned through our daily practice. Through our 1st person immersion, we come to realize how the brain is designed to constantly evaluate what we experience. It is an “anticipation machine” hard-wired to make judgments and form expectations about our experiences. We receive information from our prior learnings- past conditioning through associations passed down via a “Top-Down” process.  This circuitry of networks is imbedded and hard-wired to influence and enslave the direct input received by our senses (i.e. “Bottom-Up”). Top-down memory influences how we are able to sense and experience our present moments. It is these prior learned and often conditioned experiences that directly shape our present perceptions.

As we have discussed in previous articles, it is mindful awareness that helps to penetrate and dissolve these “top-down” influences. For e.g. the “mindful brain” can influence the secretion of GABA (i.e.  gamma- Aminobutyric acid), an inhibitory neurotransmitter, in the middle pre-frontal cortex to help regulate neuronal excitability throughout the extended nervous system. The secretion of GABA can regulate the amygdala (fear center) during situations riddled with perceived uncertainty and insecurity.

Mindful awareness allows our senses to freely and clearly experience information from the “bottom-up” through a non-clinging intention to our anticipatory judgments and expectations. The reactionary forces of our prior learnings are disengaged via our “mindsight”, a special “state” of “free” attention and open awareness.Through our contemplative and reflective practice of 1st person immersion, we begin to regularly perceive what we experience with an illuminated sentience of clearer input disentangled from prior learning and conditioning.

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