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

Our mindfulness practice is a form of “attention training”. We are using our intention to focus our attention in very purposeful and focused ways. The power of our mindful awareness can transform our subjective experience using primal circuitry to create an internal form of resonance whereby we manifest an open resonating process of our observing self with our experiencing self. This same social circuitry for attunement (i.e. tuning into another) is inwardly focused for internal reflection.

A mindfully attuned brain with the intentional reflection and fortitude of its subject can become expansively coherent and integrated. With integration, the unique aspects of our system are preserved while linking them synergistically into the “whole” of our awareness. It is in this “space” where energy and information can be harmoniously brought together- where the “whole” is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Openness, receptivity, stability, flexibility, and adaptability are the results of integrated functionality of the mind, brain, body, and awareness.

If we were to suggest that subjective experience lies on a continuum between extreme measures of utter chaos (confusion) and complete rigidity (closed/shut-down), then the profound significance of manifesting an integrated consciousness lies in its capacity for the subject to manifest emotional balance and equanimity- an ability to touch and move away from the fringes of experience without getting carried away by them- to come back to a “baseline”- and to restore a sense of internal measure.

The self-regulation we develop in our mindful-awareness training is intricately connected to the neural circuitry of our brains from the cortex & limbic areas- to the brainstem- to the body complex. Through regimented contemplation and reflection, internal attunement and interoception (i.e. perceiving internal bodily states), we may be reshaping the architecture and functioning of our brains as well as the regulatory process of our minds. Subjectively, perceiving within is the only way to gain access to the body’s inherent wisdom. With interoceptive awareness, we cultivate the capacity to sense and perceive the neural signals from our body’s visceral organs such as heart (e.g. “heartfelt feeling”) or intestines (e.g. “gut feeling”), etc.

The middle pre-frontal cortex is where we map our interior landscapes. It is the “control center” for how we come to know the interiority of ourselves, and how we consciously discern the mental activities of our minds. It is through the discipline of science that we are drawing a clearer understanding of the relationship between the architecture and functioning of our brains, with the deeply interconnected process of our minds and awareness. The “executive”– higher order functioning of our middle pre-frontal cortex as activated through our mindfulness practice is stimulating the neural gateway to our mindful intelligence- to our clear sanity of seeing, sensing, and knowing an integrated & coherent mind – and to more sustained states of physiological and psychological well-being.

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