The Five Levels of Awareness

An Excerpt from On the Verge: Wake Up, Show Up, and Shine by Cara Bradley
How you experience this moment is very much like looking through a camera lens. You can look at the world in panorama or zoom in for a close-up. The lens can be focused, showing sharp lines, or unfocused, so that shapes are foggy and blurry. What you see depends on whether your lens is in focus, what type of filter you’re using, and what type of lens you’re using (telephoto, wide angle, or standard).
When you’re upset or pissed off, your experience may be filtered so it feels dull or distorted. If you’re trying to multitask, your experience may feel fragmented. When you are engaged and fully aware, you experience the world in high definition. Your lens is focused and crystal clear. How you experience what you’re feeling and what’s happening around you comes down to whether you are awake and aware or busy and asleep.
Awareness is your perception of this moment. It’s how you experience life right now. When you’re unaware and trapped in busy mind, life appears unfocused and sort of foggy. Being unaware is like trying to take a picture but being unable to focus the lens. On the other hand, when you’re fully aware, your perception is crystal clear. You experience life in high definition. You’re aware of ideas, perceptions, and physical sensations as they arise. Being fully aware is like seeing life through a camera lens that’s clear and focused.
The Five Levels of Awareness
The five levels of awareness help you distinguish when you’re aware and engaged and when you’re not aware or distracted. They are like mile markers or reference points to help you determine your location, or state of mind, in any given moment. Understanding the five levels will help you to uncover where you’re spending most of your time and energy. You may be surprised at what you find. The five levels of awareness are:
Busy Mind
Waking Up
Power Pause
Glimpsing Your Natural State
Living on the Verge
At Level 1, you’re stuck in your Busy Mind, preoccupied with doing, consumed by your overflowing lists and overcrowded schedule. You can feel mentally frazzled, emotionally exhausted, and physically tense. At Level 1, you may not recognize there’s a healthier and more empowering way to live. You are not aware that you are not aware.
At Level 2, Waking Up, you shift beyond busy mind and momentarily wake up out of the dream state of thinking. Your busy mind gets interrupted and you catch yourself in the middle of an angry or anxious moment or fantasizing about where you want to vacation next year. In other words, you catch yourself entrenched in drama and distraction. You are aware that you are not aware.
At Level 3, Power Pause, you experience the space beyond your busy mind long enough to pause and interrupt your habitual tendencies to worry, doubt, fear, or judge. During the pause you recognize that you can choose to either show up and be engaged or slip back into dullness, distraction, or drama. You are aware of the power in pausing.
At Level 4, Glimpsing Your Natural State, you shift into the space beyond your busy mind and glimpse your natural state of clear mind, bright body, and open heart. You feel stable and clear for a few moments. Although it may be short-lived, you recognize your natural state and what it feels like to be fully alive. You are aware that you are aware.
Level 5 is Living on the Verge, a metaphor for being awake. You experience life through the unfiltered lens of your natural state. You feel clear, bright, and open. You show up and shine. You are fully aware.
Cara Bradley is the author of On the Verge. She has taught yoga, meditation, and fitness internationally for more than thirty years and is the founder of Verge Yoga. Visit her online at www.carabradley.net.

Excerpted from the book On the Verge: Wake Up, Show Up, and Shine. Copyright © 2016 by Cara Bradley. Printed with permission from New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com