Dr. Richard Davidson

It's making me crazy.

And what we tell them is you're doing exactly the right thing.

You're noticing the chaos in your own mind.

Yeah, exactly.

And we haven't changed the narrative yet about this, but we're trying to where we say, this is great that you're feeling anxious.

It's exactly what you should be feeling.

I think it's contributing to it, yes.

And it's also being aware of the anxiety without being hijacked by the anxiety, without being lost in the anxiety.

So being able to see the anxiety.

as it's arising.

And this is training in meta-awareness.

Meta-awareness is super important.

I actually think meta-awareness is a necessary prerequisite for any kind of human transformation, mental transformation.

Yeah, so I would say meta-awareness is the faculty of knowing what our minds are doing.

And to some listeners, that may sound a little strange, but how many of you have had the experience of reading a book where you might be reading each word on a page, and you read one page, a second page, and after a few minutes, you have no idea what you've just read.

Your mind is lost.

It's somewhere else.

But then you wake up.

The moment you wake up is a moment of meta-awareness.

And it turns out that that's a trainable skill.