Methods, Techniques, and Habits that Promote Mindful Awareness

Hi, I wanted to make a thread where I compile some of my insights toward engaging in mindful awareness and directing, controlling, and maintaining my attention--whether it be in waking life or while lucid dreaming. I was hoping that anybody else that has a different approach or perspective could also share and we could exchange ideas. I know there are already plenty of All Day Awareness technique threads and whatnot, but I hope that this one is a little bit more open forum and that we can get a good discussion going. I'm hoping it'll be a great chance for learning and we might surprise each other with the ingenuity of some of our techniques and habits, or the unique angle some of us might approach this with.

Attention, Awareness, and Mindful Awareness

To begin with, I think I'll make the distinction between attention and awareness as I see it.

Attention specifically refers to the act or process of directing and focusing one's conscious awareness on something.

Awareness is a more nebulous term; at it's core, awareness just refers to a conscious entity/being's ability to recognize and react to a given stimulus or set of stimuli (of course, understanding is a reaction in itself).

The purpose of adding the modifier "mindful" to the concept of awareness is to encapsulate the idea that one is not simply at the base level of awareness to be considered conscious and awake, but also attentive and maintaining a balanced awareness of one's external reality, environment, one's own body, and one's internal reality as well.

In-Depth Perspective on Being Mindfully Aware and its Relation to Dreaming

Most of my habits and techniques revolve around finding ways of almost unconsciously triggering what basically amount to reality checks. The only difference is I'm not actually performing a reality check. Personally, reality checks do almost nothing for me. Any time I get to the point of performing one in a dream, I already know I'm dreaming, and I'm simply performing the RC to verify that I am, knowing full well that the results don't really matter and do little more than make me doubly sure I am in fact dreaming. Reality checks as a practice are only useful, as it pertains to me, for becoming more aware of one's own thought patterns and developing good habits and techniques for maintaining mindful awareness once in a lucid dream.

Think about how often you find yourself spacing out, day dreaming, or otherwise letting yourself run at 50-75% autopilot while going through your daily activities. This tendency to be lost in thought is directly related to the tendency you have to lose awareness and lucidity in a dream. Given you're in an altered state where frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex activity is mostly inhibited (the areas most responsible for or at least heavily implicated in executive functioning, decision making, logical reasoning, and attention/awareness), this tendency to slip into lower states of awareness is going to be exacerbated, even. It's not quite as exacerbated if you've become lucid in a dream, but it's still going to be amplified to a certain degree and means loss of dream control and possibly lucidity altogether.

So, if you develop habits to keep yourself on track for several 20-30 minute spurts several times a day, these will translate somewhat during non-lucids hopefully,
but the greatest impact will be in your ability to maintain the greatest level of lucidity and control once you've already become aware you are dreaming.


My Way of Being Mindfully Aware

One thing I usually have to be mindful of is that practicing any one thing often enough means it will eventually become a routine, mindless habit. Your efforts to remain aware once establishing a routine are going to be very... multi-tiered, let's say. For example, let's go through my own routine now that I've already established some decent groundwork and developed some habits. I catch myself not having really been paying attention to anything in a while, so I continue what I am doing but do a scan of pretty much everything. I think about where I am, what I'm doing, the fact I'm in a building and in a chair, I notice what it looks like from my first person perspective while taking in the whole picture, and start relaxing my body a bit while making my breathing more regular and controlled. I don't actually think especially hard about any of these things, I focus more on the feeling while keeping my thoughts going more or less the same as they already were before I started the check. I pay attention to how exactly someone speaking sounds and the type of motions they're making, etc. All while taking in these little details, I make sure not to actually get lost in any of them. I'm constantly, yet in a very relaxed and natural way alternating my attention to all these different things almost simultaneously.

The process I take itself has become routine enough that I no longer have to think about the process and I am free to focus my attention on not becoming overly aware of any one thing while still being as aware of all that I can as possible in a fluid, passive yet directed manner. It's like I'm looking at and experiencing the small, medium, and large level details of everything while simultaneously keeping the big picture in mind.

I used to attempt awareness at things and it was very mentally exhausting or otherwise too taxing to keep up for more than 5 minutes. It was like I was trying to brute force everything and I kept going down the rabbit holes of paying attention too much to any one or one group of things. Now it's a process that occurs very naturally on its own and only requires small guiding nudges to maintain... just the proper thought here or there of a new way to experience what it is you're already experiencing. It allows me to continue participating in any activity I'm already engaged in, because the process is unintrusive/not mentally taxing.

I need some time to gather some more of my thoughts, but I certainly have more I can expound on (I may edit them in, or I might make it a separate post); I'm too tired after work to keep writing, sorry lol. If anyone has questions for me specifically feel free to ask, and I hope we can get some great ideas shared. Please, if you guys have anything you feel like might be helpful for somebody else that you've found to be helpful for yourself, share!

That makes perfect sense and is almost the same that I'm trying to do.
My problem is that as soon as I have to focus a little more on something,
like reading through this post, I lose a lot of awareness on everything else.

I believe that distinction between awareness and attention is almost
identical to that of LaBerge. I saw an interview where he said the same thing.
(somewhere on YouTube, should be easy to find)

I still do RCs as I turn lucid about once or twice per week only by doing a
spontaneous RC in a dream. Also I feel like in the dream it reminds me on
beeing lucid and stabilizes my lucidity to some degree.

How do you manage to get out of autopilot for 30min?
Personally I geht thrown back on autopilot as soon as someone talks to me
because I have to use all my focus on that.
Is it just practise or do you have any spezial way?

Excellent thread. A very direct way I personally find usefull, is to to locate awareness is within the body first and foremost. One way to locate your awarness could be to close your eyes and focus on your hand. You know that the bodypart that you are paying attention to are there, even though you dont look at it directly, obviously. Once you have one bodypart in awarness. You could add more parts depending on what situation you are in. Since this does take away attention from any mentally demanding task. The mind seem to be capable to keep track of seven things at best. So something in between 1-7 points to hold ones awareness in is probably enough to both get mindful of where you keep your attentive awareness is at work. This is basically meditation, and this is what have given me the best peak experiences of getting some sense out of the meaning of awareness.

Breathing rythm probably key to most mindfulnes related interest as well, I think. If not the most important.

So some thoughts on mindfulness.. We become lucid in relation to the process of seeking. And as the seeking runs out and stops, we inevitably have become lucid to where we are in that process as a no seeker.

What a great way to begin a useful thread.

I immediately reminded to do more 'assertion' into my surroundings. Something that automatically threads into blockage (fear) or lucidity.
I like that you encapsulated internal reality as well

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Originally Posted by snoop

a balanced awareness of one's external reality, environment, one's own body, and one's internal reality as well.

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I'd like to emphasize the practical capability of lucidity/mindfulness in internal thoughtforms/energies with an example: Say someone speaks out a stinging and hurtful word about you. It becomes easy to 'lock in' so to say with ur attention and become aware of it's nagging power. It's very hard to not become hurt. Directing your attention to then zoom out into a more broad perspective. You can see the words relative context of when it is spoken (For instance, someone was mad himself and said a hurtful word that he doesn't mean). In this case the stinging automatically lessens. There are numerous contexts in which to relativize certain thoughts or concepts. It is very useful and practical to do work in this way. And it's immediately rewarding to your survivability so it's quite easy to become a habit.

I hope in some way we inspire you to continue. I for one would love to see more of what you have to give to us. :mwahaha:

Great to see this being widely discussed.
To my mind it's the best lucid induction 'method'! Most of my LDs are spontaneous - I notice I'm dreaming and then sometimes do an RC to confirm.
I rarely do an RC spontaneously. So practicing RCs during the day doesn't (for me) bleed into dreams much. And believe me I've tried - LOTS!!! Post it's inside cupboards, alarms.... My coffee pot has "This is a dream" engraved on the lid. I've worn a moonstone pendant... I even have a tattoo - a Tibetan🕉 - on the back of my hand. But I've never seen any of these in a dream :chuckle: So reminders to do waking RCs doesn't seem to work (for me). Although I suppose it may help to create a habit of mindfulness...
Possibly the best mindfulness-as-habit techniques are simply ways to remove stress and distraction. CBT techniques can be helpful I think. And there's mountaintains of literature on present centred ness written by Zen/ Tantra/ Vipassna practitioners (and many other traditions). It seems to work for me -
Although hard to be scientific and say this or that method works....
Should we try to extract and abridge some of that wisdom for our purposes or simply point people towards these books and teachers?

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Originally Posted by slimslowslider

I rarely do an RC spontaneously. So practicing RCs during the day doesn't (for me) bleed into dreams much. And believe me I've tried - LOTS!!!

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You're not alone. The same seems true for me, and I've seen many experienced LDers here say the same thing. In my LDs, RCs mainly seem to be a convenient tool for me to confirm that I'm indeed dreaming, after I already suspect I could be. (That initial suspicion often comes from happening to recall just enough from my true, waking-life memories to recognize that what I'm experiencing isn't as it should be, or is quite unlikely to be occurring as actual waking reality.) And during waking life, they mainly seem to be tools to help people develop some of the self awareness needed to begin recognizing and remembering their current place in reality rather than taking it for granted and indiscriminately accepting it as “real” all the time. But the tool only works properly if it's done with attention to this mindset and not mindlessly as a habit without any thought.

Developing the ability to be “lucid” during waking life (or self aware, mindful, whatever you call it) definitely seems to be the way to go. This is what should eventually leak into dreams and provide the same lucidity there. I'm also finding evidence through my own practice that there are many benefits to be realized in waking life as well. Developing a continuous awareness and close familiarity of one's own thoughts and feelings as they form appears to significantly help with handling strong negative emotions in a more beneficial way, for instance.

Sorry for the lack of a response guys, the job I just got I wound up losing because the company is moving overseas. People who were in training (me) got let go immediately, so I've been looking for new employment.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rebon

A)My problem is that as soon as I have to focus a little more on something,
like reading through this post, I lose a lot of awareness on everything else.

B)I still do RCs as I turn lucid about once or twice per week only by doing a
spontaneous RC in a dream. Also I feel like in the dream it reminds me on
beeing lucid and stabilizes my lucidity to some degree.

C)How do you manage to get out of autopilot for 30min?
Personally I geht thrown back on autopilot as soon as someone talks to me
because I have to use all my focus on that.
Is it just practise or do you have any spezial way?

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A)I understand, that's usually how attention is supposed to work. It's not necessarily a bad thing per se, but it makes it significantly easier to go into auto-pilot. I'll cover what I do in C).

B) If it helps you, then definitely keep doing it. I still do them myself after gaining lucidity now, but doing them has never actually caused me to become lucid in the first place personally. Therefore I focus more on practicing maintaining mindful awareness.

C)Honestly it's just pure practice and being open to further developing what I've already come up with. The tendency to slip right back into auto-pilot is something that your brain wants to do. It allows you to more efficiently use energy and keeps you doing what's tried and true, which (save for special circumstances) helps you survive. This is why I'm constantly trying to find new ways to perceive and understand what's happening around me and to me.

Since you naturally start to learn things with muscle-memory, regardless of whether it's really using your muscles or not, the process you used to focus and maintain your awareness starts to become more and more automated. This seems like it's a problem, because taking the path of least resistance that way is what leads to mindless auto-pilot mode, and the tendency starts to pervade into your attempts to be more mindfully aware. However, you can use this phenomenon to your advantage. I started realizing I was trying to be mindfully aware but making it a mindless habit, and so I came up with a way to combat that.

Upon realizing I've not been really aware of what's been going on for a while, I start the process of focusing my attention on what's going on and becoming more aware. As this has already become part of standard procedure as a process for my brain, I take advantage of the fact that paying attention to things is something I've learned to do on a fairly unconscious level, and I use my conscious thoughts to gauge my level of mindfulness and guide myself toward the areas of my perception I may be waning in awareness of and allowing my mind to automatically restore my awareness in those areas after becoming cognizant of them. I also allow it to direct my attention to other areas, because I do all this while I'm in the middle of normal day-to-day actions like working or driving.

It sounds complicated I know, but imagine it like this. A company has workers, managers, and CEOs. The CEO does not need to issue directives to the workers themselves, (s)he delegates that to management, and the managers tell the workers what to do. The CEO still guides the company as a whole, but the CEO does not need to micromanage everything. "You" and your conscious language thoughts are the CEO. The processes you establish to focus your awareness that become automatic are the managers, and the workers are neurons and all the invisible interplay you aren't aware of. If you guide one or just a few managers at a time, you can effectively guide your company along the path you want it to go without causing yourself too much strain. At the same time, if you try to micromanage too much, not only is it very strenuous, but it causes the entire company's process to break down.

So, by taking advantage of the mind's proclivity to make certain processes automatic, you can allow it to do certain things on its own while keeping check on and guiding yourself consciously without expending too much mental effort in the process. It's not necessarily the easiest thing to learn how to do, and I'm sure the skill can be quite perishable--at least to a certain degree. I'm usually only capable of sustaining this type of exercise for 10-15 minutes on average. In dreams the process is even more difficult for me, as most of my dreams aren't entirely stable. Whether or not I can recognize I'm starting to get too comfortable believing in what I'm doing and just doing it without consideration spells the difference between the end of the dream or continuing it.

I meant to respond more thoroughly to everybody but this is already a huge post. I'll post back sometime later, hopefully not a week later like this time though.

The awareness ´issue´ is the easiest to tackle for me. Basically a painting has a basic overview and a limited array of details that you can conceive of. Unless you go down to the molecular level of the painting. But in any case it is easy to imagine zooming in on a particular point of view and zooming out to it´s overview. In most cases awareness is locked into some amount of detail. But it´s nice to be aware that it is so. It is frankly impossible to be aware of every process going on everywhere that you can think of both in the outside world and inside in the memory and thought process. Even in sleep the awareness is aware of something. Even though you do not always remember exactly what it was when you woke up there is to me usually a vague awareness of something going on in deep sleep.

Youre CEO example kind of puts things in perspective to me. Especially in conversations you have to think to engage yourself properly. It gets tricky when someone talks in an accent you haven't heared before and you are basically learning in the process of learning a new language when listening and therefore you find it harder to adequately think of responses if ur not used to the kind of language. It's actually easy to find the proper words that you know of because the brain automatically picks those out for you. I used to try and find the words myself but find that the brain actually finds the words better and picks out the words that the other one is able to understand too. Or it results blank and ur stuck to using synonyms.

It probably helps to have new fresh things to focus on to keep things fresh. I can see it become quite dreadful to become aware of the same voice of ur neighbour each day anew. But basically youre allowing yourself to be aware of things and consciously directing the process. And training the brain in the process.

Socially, a auto-pilot response can be sufficient with proper learned faculties. But it serves not as the actual modus of conversation I suppose a well thought-out reponse is worth much more to both parties. But I can see how it functions.

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Originally Posted by Threeofeight

The awareness ´issue´ is the easiest to tackle for me. Basically a painting has a basic overview and a limited array of details that you can conceive of. Unless you go down to the molecular level of the painting. But in any case it is easy to imagine zooming in on a particular point of view and zooming out to it´s overview. In most cases awareness is locked into some amount of detail. But it´s nice to be aware that it is so. It is frankly impossible to be aware of every process going on everywhere that you can think of both in the outside world and inside in the memory and thought process.

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Oh, you've provided an excellent way for me to better frame my process using that example. Focusing attention on any particular section of the painting, no matter how you cordon sections of it off (sections encompassing only a few millimeters, a 10 cm x 24 cm rectangle, a 40 cm x 12 cm rectangle, or the entire painting itself) into what I'll refer to as "chunks", it results in limiting your awareness of the rest of the painting but significantly increasing the level of awareness directed toward that specific chunk Trying to look at just one chunk (again, keep in mind the entire big picture overview qualifies as a chunk) therefore winds up providing no benefit to this exercise and may actually be detrimental to staying mindfully aware.

Since you are reducing your awareness of things like what it feels like to be your body, your posture and position in relation to the things in your environment, where you are and the environment itself, the sounds of things around you, etc. by focusing on that one thing, it makes you prone to returning to auto-pilot. Or, in situations of altered consciousness, like when dreaming, it results in forgetting what you were doing, where you're at, opens up the possibility of the environment suddenly changing on you, makes you prone to false memories, and feelings/sensations of being in the middle of doings things that don't actually pertain to what's going on (these things can be entirely random), and as a result lead you to lose lucidity and go back to having a non-lucid dream experience.

How can we counter this phenomenon? Well, trying to consciously force yourself to be aware of several things at once without any kind of established process is an overwhelming and ultimately futile effort. What I do, if over-simplified, is actually to be aware of several things at once. However, I don't it entirely consciously and there's no brute force involved. What I've done is establish a habit that's resulted in a mostly unconscious, automatic process and I only consciously direct my awareness and focus my attention in a very kind of passive, methodical, "soft" and flowing kind of way. When I try and to visualize the process to give it some form and understand it in a more... well, psuedovisual context (I don't necessarily see anything in particular so much as experience the concept in a way that feels visual but isn't necessarily--what I'm guessing this does is helps give me a more intuitive understanding of the process itself, while sparing the language centers of the brain some cognitive load by offsetting some of that to what I guess would be the secondary visual cortex, the mind's eye), it seems like a multi-tiered or semi-bracketed web of specific things I want to anchor my awareness to that my consciousness sort of flows through and along performing mostly real-time checks without that much cognitive strain.

By things I anchor my awareness to, I mean like trying to keep track of how it feels to be in my body (and from there it's understood I need to be paying attention to my feet, legs, butt, back, shoulders, neck, arms, hands and individual fingers, and pretty much all my facial muscles--I choose to pay attention to my fingers but not necessarily my toes, along with so much of my face because these parts of the body have greater concentrations of sensory neurons), what seeing myself in the first person is like, what certain things in the environment look like, what people are doing, the sounds, etc. The anchors themselves usually encompass broader "chunks" of things because when I first realize I should practice being mindfully aware, I have to perform a conscious scan of what's going on and consciously pick out anchors. The anchors are broad chunks because, as I mentioned with being aware of my body, I can unconsciously/intuitively understand the additional, smaller detail things that broader chunk encompasses.

From there, as things are going, you can easily and quickly identify and monitor newer anchors as needed. Now that we've discussed picking anchors and everything, we need to go over the part you consciously have to do. As I mentioned before, when imagined "visually", these anchors are connected in a sort of tiered/bracketed complex yet naturally intuitively formed web based on the type of sensory organs are involved (vision, hearing, tactile sensation, and proprioception are processed by different parts of the brain and the way the web I visualize connects is different based partly on that), and the levels of detail you're trying to be aware of. All you have to do consciously is monitor the unconscious "managers" of the anchors you've delegated most of the cognitively draining control to and keep them in line and from slacking off. Along with that, just keep an eye out for new things you need to create managers/anchors for, integrate it in (which for me is seamless), and if nothing that new is happening, try and experience some of the perceptions you're experiencing in a different way--this gives the managers some busy work that helps keep things interesting, novel, and helps stave off the propensity to switch to auto-pilot.

I know it sounds terribly convoluted, but so much of what I'm doing is something I'm performing unconsciously that it's actually pretty simple once you work out what to do.

This is a clarifying mechanism. Basically get in touch with each sensory organ and the input coming in from electrical signals to the brain. Which at any given time holds a handful of information that is easily slacked out and filtered due to the focus on one area in particular. Which is detrimental. I suppose there is conscious analyzing of certain information and just letting things come in and softly experience it. I have found this practice very useful tbh. I also ascertain a side effect to be a sense of well-being. So thanks Snoop for that thorough explanation! Heads up! And if there's anything more that pops up in ur head I'll be glad to hear it.

No problem, sorry for how long winded it was, lol. I forgot to sum up what my approach winds up doing, in my opinion. What basically happens is that, rather than be highly aware of one or a few things and lose almost all awareness of everything else (getting absorbed in work, a problem you're working on, getting lost in thought/running thought experiences, etc.), I'm systemically spreading my awareness out to encompass everything it can. At the same time though, merely the act of trying to remain too aware of the big picture causes you to lose awareness of some of the finer subtleties and details of the objects constituting the whole of the big picture. That's why I imagine my process as being tiered, because while paying attention to the big picture, I try to maintain a balance in my awareness of all things on every detail level to the best of my ability.

The result is still having your awareness and the information you can be aware be less dense overall, but I strive to maximize it as best I can without becoming overly attentive to any one thing.

I definitely get what you mean about the sense of well being too. While I'm in a state like this, emotions and feelings have much less impact on how I react to things. I often practice mindful awareness when I'm in a situation where I'm getting exceedingly frustrated with, distracted by, or annoyed because of the situation I'm in or the people around me. The state of mind it puts me in literally makes it impossible to keep feeling overwhelmed, annoyed, angry, or frustrated. My attention is spread to so many other things that are going on around and happening to me (including the gauging of my mental state and the emotions I'm feeling) that I calm down. In a away it's an alternative to the "count to 10" method of overcoming anger. Since I'm paying attention to why I'm where I am and what exactly it is that I'm doing, it makes it easy to ask myself why I'm feeling so negatively, and to know that it doesn't do me any good to feel that way (as a matter of fact it's purely detrimental, because it makes it unpleasant to exist at that point of time while providing no benefits in exchange). I can just passively observe what I feel and let it dissipate.