What Is Awareness and Can It Be Trained?
The word awareness appears everywhere in mindfulness, meditation, and personal development. People speak about “raising awareness” or “living with awareness,” yet the word itself is rarely defined with any precision. Because of that, many people assume awareness refers to something mystical or abstract, perhaps a rare mental state reached only through years of spiritual practice.
In reality, awareness is one of the most practical capacities a human being can develop. It’s a skill that can be trained, and when it develops it changes how we perceive our thoughts, our behaviour, and the world around us.
Understanding awareness begins with a shift in how we look at perception itself.
The Chair Assignment: A Lesson in Perception
During my second year at art college, I reached a point where I felt completely stuck. I was studying sculpture at Bath Academy of Art in the UK, and I had no idea what I should make next. My tutor listened for a moment and then gave me an assignment that sounded deceptively simple.
“Make a sculpture based on a chair.”
That suggestion felt uninspiring to say the least. A chair didn’t seem like a particularly exciting subject. Then he added another instruction that changed everything.
“Forget everything you know about chairs.”
That was where the real challenge began. How on earth do you do that?
Whenever we encounter something familiar, our minds immediately activate a large body of stored information. Looking at a chair, we instantly recognise whether it looks comfortable or uncomfortable, whether it’s too high or too low, and the type of environment where it belongs. A heavy wooden chair suggests a dining room. A metal stool might belong in a workshop or bar. A plastic chair might belong in a garden. Café chairs, office chairs, bar stools, ornate chairs, functional chairs, baby chairs… there are many different types you can sit on.
All of that knowledge appears almost instantly.
My tutor’s instruction required something different. Instead of responding to those accumulated associations, I had to encounter the chair as a structure of shapes, angles, and relationships. I had to look at it as though I’d never seen one before.
At nineteen years old I didn’t yet have the language for what he was asking. Looking back, I often think of that assignment as my first real lesson in awareness.
It required learning how to perceive something directly rather than through the filter of memory and interpretation.
My resultant sculptural piece was, I have to say, less than inspiring.
What Awareness Actually Means
At its simplest, awareness is the ability to recognise what’s happening while it’s happening.
This includes noticing thoughts as they arise, recognising emotional reactions in real time, sensing changes in the body, and observing details in the surrounding environment.
Human perception constantly blends direct experience with interpretation. The brain organises incoming information by comparing it to what it already knows. This process allows us to move through the world efficiently. We don’t need to analyse every object we encounter because our minds recognise patterns and assign meaning automatically.
The same process also means that much of what we perceive is filtered through expectation and habit.
Awareness introduces a different quality of attention. Instead of simply reacting to experience, we begin to observe experience while it’s unfolding.
Thoughts can be recognised as thoughts. Emotions can be recognised as emotional reactions. Bodily sensations can be recognised as signals rather than background noise.
This shift changes our relationship to experience itself.
Awareness and Thinking
Thinking produces mental content. Awareness recognises that content.
For example, the mind may generate the thought, “I’m worried about this situation.” When awareness is present, that thought becomes observable. The person notices the thought appearing and may also notice how the body responds to it, perhaps through tension in the chest or changes in breathing.
The thought still exists, yet the relationship to the thought has changed.
Psychology often describes this ability as meta-cognition, the mind’s capacity to observe its own activity. Once this capacity develops, reactions become easier to recognise as they form rather than only after they’ve already taken over.
In practical terms, awareness creates space within experience. Instead of being carried along automatically by thoughts and emotions, those processes become visible.
Why Awareness Is Difficult
If awareness is such a natural human capacity, an obvious question appears.
Why does it seem so difficult to maintain? The answer lies in how the brain evolved.
Human perception developed primarily for efficiency. The brain constantly searches for patterns that allow it to interpret the world quickly. Labels and assumptions help us navigate complex environments without having to analyse every detail we encounter.
This pattern-recognition ability is extremely useful. Without it, everyday tasks would become exhausting.
The brain also simplifies life by automating repeated behaviours. Actions that we perform regularly gradually move into what feels like autopilot. Driving a familiar route, brushing your teeth, typing on a keyboard, or tying your shoelaces eventually require very little conscious attention. The brain stores the sequence and allows it to run automatically so that attention can be directed elsewhere. This efficiency is extremely useful, yet it also means that large parts of daily life unfold with very little observation. Awareness training reintroduces attention into these automatic patterns, allowing actions that normally happen without notice to become visible again.
At the same time, it means that the brain strongly prefers interpretation over observation.
When we see a chair, we usually don’t see lines, angles, and proportions. We see “a chair”. The label appears instantly along with everything we associate with it.
The same process operates internally.
A sensation in the body becomes labelled as anxiety.
A thought becomes interpreted as truth.
An emotional reaction becomes incorporated into our sense of identity.
Awareness develops when we learn to remain with direct experience before interpretation takes over. This requires slowing down perception just enough to notice what’s actually happening.
That shift can feel unfamiliar at first because the mind is accustomed to moving quickly from perception to explanation.
Awareness, Attention, and Consciousness
Awareness is closely related to two other important concepts: attention and consciousness.
Although the words are often used interchangeably, they describe different aspects of experience.
Consciousness refers to the fact that experience is occurring at all. When we’re awake, conscious experience includes sensations, thoughts, emotions, and perceptions of the environment.
Attention refers to the direction of mental focus within that field of consciousness. At any moment attention may be directed toward a sound, a thought, a visual object, or a bodily sensation.
Awareness involves recognising both the experience itself and the movement of attention within it.
For example, you may be reading a page and suddenly realise that your mind’s wandered into a memory from earlier in the day. The memory appeared, attention moved toward it, and then awareness recognised that shift.
Developing awareness therefore involves learning to observe how attention moves within consciousness.
Meditation practices often train this ability directly by strengthening the capacity to notice when attention drifts and gently return it to the present moment.
Training Perception
Awareness can be trained because perception itself can be trained.
Art education provides one of the clearest demonstrations of this principle.
When beginners learn to draw, they often rely on symbolic memory rather than observation. Instead of studying the structure of what they’re looking at, they draw what they believe an object should look like. A tree becomes a trunk with a rounded shape on top. A face becomes a standard arrangement of features.
Exercises involving negative space interrupt this habit.
Instead of drawing the object itself, the artist studies the shapes created around the object. Attention shifts from the labelled object to the relationships between lines and spaces.
As soon as this shift occurs, perception changes. Details that were previously overlooked become visible.
Another exercise illustrates the same principle through a different sensory channel.
During a recent session in The Abundant Self programme, I asked participants to draw an object that had been placed inside an opaque bag. They were allowed to explore the object with one hand but weren’t allowed to see it.
The drawing had to be created entirely through touch.
At first the task felt unfamiliar. Drawing is usually associated with sight. Gradually, as attention focused on the sensations in the fingers, the structure of the object became clearer. Curves, edges, textures and proportions emerged through tactile exploration.
The exercise revealed something important about awareness.
Vision is only one channel through which perception gathers information. Touch, sound, movement, and spatial awareness also provide detailed sensory data.
Training awareness expands how these channels are used.
Behavioural Awareness
As awareness of internal experience and external perception develops, another layer becomes visible.
Patterns of behaviour become easier to recognise.
Situations that trigger certain emotional responses appear earlier in the process. Habits that once seemed automatic begin to reveal themselves as patterns.
Sometimes these insights emerge gradually through simple observation.
For example, one person I worked with through training her in Reiki, began noticing a connection between recurring physical discomfort and certain foods she regularly ate. As that connection became clearer, her behaviour changed naturally and the discomfort disappeared.
The body had been providing information all along. Awareness allowed the pattern to become visible.
How Awareness Develops
Awareness develops through repeated observation.
Small changes often appear quickly as people begin noticing reactions that previously passed unnoticed. Bodily tension, emotional shifts, and recurring thoughts become easier to recognise.
Deeper changes develop gradually as perception becomes more refined.
Short periods of consistent observation tend to produce stronger results than occasional bursts of effort. With practice, awareness becomes less of a deliberate exercise and more of a natural mode of perception.
The Purpose of Awareness
Awareness brings clarity to experience. Perception becomes more precise. Reactions become easier to recognise. Behaviour becomes more intentional.
Life continues to present complexity and challenge, yet the ability to observe experience clearly provides a stable foundation for responding to those situations.
Practices such as meditation, drawing, contemplative reflection, and energy-sensitivity practices like Reiki all work with the same underlying capacity. In Reiki training, students often notice that this sensitivity becomes clearer after an attunement process that changes how perception functions. Each method trains attention in slightly different ways, yet the goal is similar: to strengthen the ability to perceive experience as it unfolds.
When awareness becomes stable, perception changes in a subtle but profound way. Instead of constantly reacting to interpretations of events, we begin to encounter experience more directly.
Awareness begins as a skill. With practice, it becomes a way of engaging with the world.
Questions People Often Ask About Awareness
Is awareness the same as mindfulness?
Mindfulness is one approach to training awareness. The term is commonly used in meditation traditions to describe sustained attention to present-moment experience. Awareness itself is the broader capacity that mindfulness practices help develop.
Do you need meditation to develop awareness?
Meditation is one effective method, yet awareness can also develop through other forms of attention training. Artistic observation, contemplative inquiry, sensory awareness practices, and reflective exercises all strengthen the same capacity to observe experience clearly.
Is awareness something that only spiritual traditions teach?
Although awareness is often discussed within spiritual traditions, the underlying ability is universal. Psychology studies it through concepts such as meta-cognition and attentional regulation. Artistic disciplines train it through perceptual observation. Many forms of contemplative practice approach the same capacity from different perspectives.
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