Lektion 1
An Overview of Mind, Integration and Well-Being
In our introductory blast, we will dive into a view of mind as emerging from embodied and relational energy and information flow. This flow is part of a complex system which has self-organization in which the linking of differentiated parts—what we can call “integration”—gives rise to optimal functioning that is flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized and stable. Presence is an open awareness that enables integration to naturally arise in our lives. How can we cultivate presence?
Lektion 2
Integrating Consciousness and the Wheel of Awareness
Combining the notions that integration is the basis of health and consciousness is needed for intentional growth inspires us to consider how we might integrate consciousness. A Wheel of Awareness enables us to differentiate the knowns of consciousness on the rim from the knowing of being aware in the hub, then connecting these with a spoke of attention. How can you learn to use the Wheel as a metaphor and a meditation practice to help integrate consciousness and cultivate presence in your life?
Lektion 3
Stories of Transformation with the Wheel as Image and Practice: Billy and the Pause, Jonathan and Equanimity
Children and adolescents can utilize the Wheel of Awareness as both a visual metaphor and a meditation practice to help integrate consciousness and access the presence enabling them to pause before an impulse is enacted or an emotion places them on automatic pilot. How does simply visualizing the knowing as placed in metaphoric hub of a wheel empower youth to learn to become more prosocial in their behavior and achieve a state of equanimity in the emotional lives?
Lektion 4
Stories of Transformation: Mona and Making Sense of When We Flip our Lids and Lose Our Minds
When our minds become agitated, we can “flip our lids” and enter a reactive state of fight, flight, freeze, or faint. Challenges such as raising children can push our vulnerable “hot buttons” and we stop being in an integrated state, becoming frightening to those around us and to ourselves. How might the Wheel of Awareness meditation help reduce such disruptive inner states and their terrifying relational behaviors to help achieve a more balanced and flexible trait of resilience?
Lektion 5
Stories of Transformation: Teresa and Resolving Trauma, Shame, and Dissociation
Who we are is a combination of what is happening now and what we’ve been through in the past. States of integration are challenged when suboptimal attachment, including developmental trauma, are part of our history. Understanding that shame and dissociation arise with such attachment experiences in our selves or those we love is a first step in trying to grow integration in our adult lives. How can the Wheel of Awareness be carefully applied when addressing states of unresolved trauma?
Lektion 6
Stories of Transformation: Zachary and Finding Meaning Through Presence
We live our lives doing the best we can and faced with the requirements of survival and adapting to the culture in which we live. Yet many find lives shaped around survival and adaptation to lack a deeper sense of purpose. Without meaning in our lives, a dull, sometimes quiet but persistent sense of “something is missing” pervades the background of a person’s life. How does accessing open awareness, cultivating presence, become a portal through which meaning in life can arise?
Lektion 7
Mechanisms of Mind, Presence, & A Plane of Possibility
By exploring the physics notion that energy is the movement from possibility to actuality, a diagram with “3-P’s” can be proposed in which peaks of actuality, plateaus of enhanced probability, and a plane of possibility define the positions along a probability distribution axis. Correlating your direct immersion in mental life with this 3-P perspective enables us to see how the Wheel of Awareness practice integrates our lives. Where might awareness correlate with this diagram?
Lektion 8
Awareness & The Realms of Reality
Energy can exist in our universe in at least two “realms.” One is as microstates that have quantum properties in which an arrow of time, a directionality of change, does not exist and the world is more like a verb-like set of interconnected emerging events. Another level or realm is that of macrostates, the large accumulations of clusters of energy such as matter that follow the properties of classical or Newtonian physics and have an arrow of time and a more noun-like appearance of entities that interact distinctly with one another. How does presence permit access to one realm over another?
Lektion 9
Uncertainty, Freedom & Presence
Seeing the mind as emerging from energy flow within the 3-P perspective permits us to envision how peaks of thought, memory, and emotion may be constrained by particular plateaus we’ve learned to construct to adapt to life. While sometimes restricting, these plateaus and their specific peaks may give a sense of certainty that comforts while it simultaneously constrains our experience. How does cultivating presence invite us to become freer by embracing the uncertainty of the Plane of Possibility?
Lektion 10
Cultivating Well-Being & Meaning
While integration may be at the heart of both how we cultivate well-being and develop meaning in our lives, what is an integrated self? Much of what we are taught in contemporary culture reinforces an isolated, separate self. A notion shared by many wisdom teachings is that a life well lived is accompanied by what some call “self-transcendence.” With an expanded sense of self that gives rise to meaning, how does presence permit us to discover such meaningful ways of being interconnected in the world?
