Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence--The Groundbreaking Meditation Practice Hardcover – August 21, 2018
Aware provides practical instruction for mastering the Wheel of Awareness, a life-changing tool for cultivating more focus, presence, and peace in one's day-to-day life.
An in-depth look at the science that underlies meditation's effectiveness, this book teaches readers how to harness the power of the principle "Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows." Siegel reveals how developing a Wheel of Awareness practice to focus attention, open awareness, and cultivate kind intention can literally help you grow a healthier brain and reduce fear, anxiety, and stress in your life.
Whether you have no experience with a reflective practice or are an experienced practitioner, Aware is a hands-on guide that will enable you to become more focused and present, as well as more energized and emotionally resilient in the face of stress and the everyday challenges life throws your way.
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTarcherPerigee
- Publication dateAugust 21, 2018
- Dimensions6.29 x 1.27 x 9.29 inches
- ISBN-101101993049
- ISBN-13978-1101993040
Books with Buzz
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
Editorial Reviews
Review
—Daniel Goleman, author of Altered Traits and Emotional Intelligence
“An illuminating new view of the nature of the mind and the practices of awareness that lead us to profound wellbeing. Siegel's Wheel of Awareness is an elegant and groundbreaking synthesis of these practices, an accessible tool for inner integration and healing, as well as for realizing the loving awareness that links us to all beings. This brilliant book is poised to transform countless lives.”
—Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge
“This is a Dan Siegel masterpiece. He integrates decades of science and wisdom about the nature of our mind and optimal well-being into an easy-to-read personal journey. At the cornerstone is “The Wheel of Awareness,” a simple yet profound visual map of the mind, which enables people, including children, to experience of presence, self knowledge, and compassion. Aware will awaken and enrich your life immeasurably!”
—Elissa Epel, University of California, San Francisco, professor, member of the National Academy of Medicine, coauthor of New York Times bestseller The Telomere Effect
“Dan Siegel, who gave us a succinct and clear definition of mind, now explores the awareness that knows that mind. Read this book if you want true freedom and spontaneous creativity.”
—Deepak Chopra, MD
“Dan Siegel brings us a precious gift that will transform your mind, life, and relationships in a most wonderful way, using an easy-to-learn and revolutionary new system for meditation—one that beginners and experts alike will cherish!”
-Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, coauthor, The Healing Self
"Dan has produced a masterpiece containing invaluable knowledge in the fields of psychiatry, therapy, interpersonal neurobiology, meditation, and more. Very few people understand the intricacies of the human mind and how it can be channeled to achieve true well-being as Dan does. The Wheel of Awareness is a simple yet profound way for all to learn and advance in their practice of being aware."
—Menas C. Kafatos, Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University, coauthor with Deepak Chopra of The New York Times bestseller You Are the Universe
"A life-changing journey into the deep nature of our consciousness, what it means to be human, and how to truly thrive."
—Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global and founder of The Huffington Post
“Studies reveal what years of practice demonstrate: training our mind in specific ways brings health to our bodies, clarity to our minds, and connection in our relationships. Dan Siegel provides an exciting new reflective practice—the Wheel of Awareness—that offers these research proven ways of cultivating love, kindness, and meaning in our lives.”
—Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Happiness and Real Love
“Dan is a brilliant integrator and Aware is a visionary blend of neuroscience, physics, and cutting-edge psychology combined with creative approaches to mindfulness and compassion. The practice of the Wheel brings together many skillful and wise elements of meditation, all rolled into one.”
—Jack Kornfield author of The Wise Heart
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
There are three learnable skills that have been shown in carefully conducted scientific studies to support the cultivation of well-being. When we develop focused attention, open awareness, and kind intention, research reveals we:
1. Improve immune function to help fight infection;
2. Optimize the level of the enzyme telomerase, which repairs and maintains the ends of your chromosomes, keeping your cells— and therefore you – youthful, functioning well, and healthy;
3. Enhance the “epigenetic” regulation of genes to help prevent life- threatening inflammation;
4. Modify cardiovascular factors, improving cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and heart function; and
5. Increase neural integration in the brain, enabling more coordination and balance in both the functional and structural connectivity within the nervous system that facilitates optimal functioning, including self-regulation, problem solving, and adaptive behavior that is at the heart of well-being.
In short, the scientific findings are now in: your mind can change the health of your body and slow aging.
In addition to these concrete discoveries, we have the additional, more subjective, yet equally powerful findings that cultivating these aspects of mind—how you focus attention, open awareness, and guide intention toward kindness and caring— also increases a sense of well-being, connection to others (in the form of enhanced empathy and compassion), emotional balance, and resilience in the face of challenges. Studies reveal that as a sense of meaning and purpose increase, an overall ease of being— that some call equanimity— is nurtured by these specific practices.
These are all outcomes of strengthening your mind by expanding the container of consciousness.
The word eudaimonia is derived from the Greek term, and it beautifully describes the deep sense of well-being, equanimity, and happiness that comes from experiencing life as having meaning and connection to others and the world around you. Does cultivating eudaimonia seem like something you’d like to place on your to‑do list in life? If you experience this quality of being already in your day‑to‑day living, these practices of training attention, awareness, and intention may enhance and reinforce where you already are in life. Wonderful. And if it feels like these features of eudaimonia are distant or perhaps unfamiliar to you, and you’d like to make these more near and dear to your everyday existence, you’ve come to the right conversation.
The Wheel of Awareness is a useful tool I’ve developed over many years to help expand the container of consciousness.
I’ve offered the Wheel to thousands of individuals around the world, and it’s proven to be a practice that can help people develop more well-being in both their inner and interpersonal lives. The Wheel practice is based on simple steps that are easy to learn and then apply in your everyday experiences.
The Wheel is a very useful visual metaphor for the way the mind works. The concept came to me one day as I stood looking down at a circular table in my office. The tabletop consists of a clear glass center surrounded by a wooden outer rim. It occurred to me that our awareness could be seen as lying at the center of a circle— hub, if you will—from which, at any given moment, we can choose to focus on a wide array of thoughts, images, feelings, and sensations circling us on the rim. In other words, what we could be aware of could be represented on the wooden rim; the experience of being aware we could place in the hub.
If I could teach people how to expand that container of consciousness by more freely and fully accessing the Wheel’s hub of awareness, they’d be able to change the way they experienced life’s tablespoons of salt, and perhaps even learn to savor life’s sweetness in a more balanced and fulfilling way, even if there were a lot of salt present at the time. As I looked down at this table, I saw that the clarity of that glass hub might represent how we become aware of all of these tablespoons of life, each of the varied experiences we could become aware of, from thoughts to sensations, which we might now visualize as being placed on the circle around this hub—the table’s outer wooden rim.
The Wheel was designed as a practice that could balance our lives by integrating the experience of consciousness. How? By distinguishing the wide array of knowns on the rim from each other and from the knowing of awareness in the hub itself, we could differentiate the components of consciousness. Then, by systematically connecting these knowns of the rim to the knowing of the hub with the movement of the spoke of attention, it became possible to link the differentiated parts of consciousness. This is how by differentiating and linking, the Wheel of Awareness practice integrates consciousness.
The essential idea behind the Wheel was to expand the container of consciousness and, in effect, balance the experience of consciousness itself. Balance is a common term that we can understand scientifically as coming from a process that can be called integration—the allowing of things to be different or distinct from each other on the one hand, and then connecting them to each other on the other. When we differentiate and link, we integrate. We become balanced and coordinated in life when we create integration. Various scientific disciplines may use other terminology, but the concept is the same. Integration—the balancing of differentiation and linkage—is the basis for optimal regulation that enables us to flow between chaos and rigidity, the core process that helps us flourish and thrive. Health comes from integration. It’s that simple, and that important.
A system that is integrated is in a flow of harmony. Just as in a choir, with each singer’s voice both differentiated from the other singers’ voices but also linked, harmony emerges with integration. What is important to note is that this linkage does not remove the differences, as in the notion of blending; instead it maintains these unique contributions as it links them together. Integration is more like a fruit salad than a smoothie. This is how integration creates the synergy of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Likewise, this synergy of integration means that the many aspects of our lives, like the many points on the rim, can each be honored for their differences but then brought together in harmony.
In my own journey as a clinician, working within the framework of a multidisciplinary field called interpersonal neurobiology, reflecting on our mind as a self-organizing way we regulate energy and information flow inspired me to try and find strategies to create more integration in my patients’ lives in order to create more well-being in their bodies and in their relationships. When we integrated consciousness with the Wheel of Awareness, people’s lives improved. Many individuals have found the Wheel of Awareness a skill-building practice that empowers them in quite profound ways. It transformed how they came to experience their inner, mental lives— their emotions, thoughts, and memories—opened new ways of interacting with others, and even expanded a sense of connection and meaning in their lives.
Product details
- Publisher : TarcherPerigee (August 21, 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1101993049
- ISBN-13 : 978-1101993040
- Item Weight : 0.035 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.29 x 1.27 x 9.29 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #53,371 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #297 in Behavioral Sciences (Books)
- #394 in Meditation (Books)
- #1,609 in Personal Transformation Self-Help
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry. He is currently a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, founding co-director of UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, founding co-investigator at the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain and Development, and executive director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational center devoted to promoting insight, compassion, and empathy in individuals, families, institutions, and communities.
Dr. Siegel’s psychotherapy practice spans thirty years, and he has published extensively for the professional audience. He serves as the Founding Editor for the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology which includes over 70 textbooks. Dr. Siegel’s books include his five New York Times bestsellers: Aware: The science and practice of presence, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, and two books with Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D.: The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline. His other books include: The Power of Showing Up and The Yes Brain (also with Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D.), The Developing Mind, The Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, Mindsight, The Mindful Brain, The Mindful Therapist, and Parenting from the Inside Out (with Mary Hartzell, M.Ed.). He has been invited to lecture for the King of Thailand, Pope John Paul II, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Google University, and TEDx.
For more information about his educational programs and resources, please visit: www.DrDanSiegel.com and www.mindsightinstitute.com.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
And now there is an incredibly well written book devoted to this topic and explaining how to harness the power of awareness. It is actually for anyone who is curious about how to live a better life, curious about what their mind is, what consciousness is and how to use all this information to expand what it means to be human and how we can be better at it.
Dan Siegel is an incredible teacher and takes you through what awareness is and the steps to develop the skills to enhance your awareness and increase your ability to focus attention. He explores the science of attention, focus and intention and explains how developing these skills can actually change the structure of your brain and the overall functioning of your body and slow aging.
This is both a useful and practical guidebook for anyone who wants to learn skills to increase their awareness and it is an exciting exploration into an understanding of consciousness itself. He explains how our mind/body/brain work together creating who we are and how we can use the power of awareness to live with greater intention and attention to create greater resilience and wellbeing.
He explores mindfulness meditation making it even more accessible to beginners and deepening it for seasoned meditators and he presents a practical tool (the Wheel of Awareness) that is both an incredibly useful tool and a model of the mind to help you understand and begin to master the mysteries of consciousness.
Dan Siegel writes as if he is having a conversation with the reader as he tells the story of what it means to be aware and how to deepen this capacity. He skillfully integrates his vast knowledge of the latest neuroscience, cognitive psychology, neurobiology of interpersonal relationship discoveries into clear concepts that are at the heart of how our minds work and what we can do with this to enhance our lives and the lives of all who we connect with.
This book is for a wide audience. On one level it is for beginners who are curious about what it means to be aware and want tools to expand their minds such as meditation and the Wheel of Awareness. And this book is also an incredible rich resource for seasoned students of the mind who want to deepen their understanding and explore our potential as more fully conscious and aware human beings.
This book belongs on the shelf of anyone who wants to be more aware and to enrich their life and the lives of all they encounter
Larry Drell, M.D.
Anxiety and Depression Therapy Services
Washington DC
What's surprising is that I was mostly aware of the things discussed in the book, but the way Mr. Dan Siegal brings it all together is phenomenal (with a caveat that he goes off on tangents, sometimes writes in a circular way and demands multiple readings). This book can change lives if truly absorbed.
This book has grabbed/consumed me solid for the past 2 months – as I had to watch a lot of Dan’s videos to literally absorb his takeaways. The book is a paradox in the sense is that it gives you the ammunition to solve all your deepest human problems but the ways to go about is simple and mostly experiential.
The visuals in the book – 3P framework, wheel of awareness, pillars of mind training, hand model of brain, diagram which brings it all together from neural, wheel, 3P, common vernacular are simple, elegant and makes the learning go deeper.
Even though I rate the book very highly it’s only because I invested a lot of time in it to truly experience it. I will be hesitant to recommend it to a casual reader. This book can be a big bore of tedium or its weight in gold – depending on the audience consuming it.
Three core aspects of the Wheel of Awareness meditation that move us towards a greater sense of well-being are:
1) Focused Attention: the capacity to sustain one’s concentration, ignore distractions or let go of them when they arise, and refocus attention on the intended object of attention.
2) Open Awareness: the experience of presence of mind in which a state of being receptive to objects within awareness but not getting attached to them or lost in them is sustained.
3) Kind Intention: the ability to have a state of mind with positive regard, compassion, and love internally (what is sometimes called “self” compassion), and interpersonally (what is sometimes termed “other”-directed compassion).
I highly recommend both reading the book and practicing the Wheel of Awareness meditation as a way to stabilize your attention and train your mind to be strong, flexible, and compassionate.