What is “Subversive Awareness”?

I had been recommending mindfulness meditation to my clients for about 2-3 years by the time I seriously put in the effort to try it on my own. Up to that point, something inside me viewed it as a practice that only therapy clients needed to make the time and space for. Not me, I wasn’t in therapy (anymore).

But I decided it was finally time for me to try it out for myself.

I hopped on my train to work, pulled out my phone, and opened my free trial of Headspace. Andy led me through some “mindful breathing,” and after the 10-minute practice was done, I did notice that my body and mind felt a bit more tuned in. It’s hard to describe it in words, really. It wasn’t earth-shattering, but it wasn’t nothing either.

So I tried it off and on for the next few months, and then eventually it became a part of my daily ritual: hop on the train or shuttle to work, pull open my app of choice (I’ve tried them all), and practice some form of mindfulness meditation.

That train ride experiment/concession was almost a decade ago, at the time that I’m writing this.

And just a quick note for those unfamiliar with the concept of mindfulness meditation or mindful breathing: essentially it’s the simple practice of bringing all of your attention/awareness to the sensations of breathing, and whenever you notice that your mind has wandered into thinking about anything, you “simply” notice that wandering off, and then shift your attention back to the sensations of breathing. 

Sounds easy, right?

Well, only if you’ve never tried it. If you’ve ever attempted mindful breathing for any length of time at all, you know from experience that whereas it may sound simple enough, it is actually quite a different thing in practice. Some would say difficult. I just say that it’s not easy, because it’s not that it’s such difficult work, but rather it simply seems that our minds want to do anything other than pay attention to something as seemingly mundane as our breathing.

And yet doing just that–focusing on nothing but the physical sensations of the breath, or to expand to more of the physical senses, something like hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling other sensations in the body–is something that science has proven over and over again can, with practice over time, reduce stress, help with chronic pain, make one less irritable, and instill a greater sense of calm, joy, balance, and contentment.

So why is something that has so much potential to be good for us so hard to do? 

To me, it’s become a waste of time to ask that unanswerable question, or at least to get hung up on it. I can think of very few things at all that are both easy and “good for us.” We seem wired to enjoy most the things that are simultaneously some of the most harmful to us, if not in the short term then in the long term.

We could sit around and wonder why this seems to be the case, but I’m personally more interested in the “what then?” part of the discussion, because answering the “why?” won’t change any of the facts of the matter, as my clients eventually, if begrudgingly, come to see and begin the process of accepting.

So if we just take this dilemma to be the reality that we have to face, is there any hope for us to overcome this inborn default mode?

I propose that Yes, there is…

In short, it involves becoming more familiar with our resistance/aversion to discomfort and unpleasant sensations/emotions, as well as our corresponding desires for comfort/ease and pleasant sensations/emotions.

But becoming aware of these pleasant and unpleasant experiences and how they operate within us and motivate our actions is not something that typically comes naturally to us. Most of the time we operate a bit on autopilot, typically gravitating toward pleasant experiences, and moving away from unpleasant ones. 

This may not initially sound like such a groundbreaking observation–You may be thinking “Of course I like pleasant things and dislike unpleasant things.” But have you ever wondered how your life might be different if the way you subjectively evaluate pleasant vs. unpleasant became a non-issue in terms of the kinds of behaviors you choose to enact?

Imagine how easy it would be to give up smoking if the fact that it’s generally experienced by the seasoned smoker as pleasant had no bearing on whether or not they ever reached for another cigarette. I have never met a smoker who honestly believes that smoking is good for their physical health. And yet despite the cognitive knowledge of predictable future health problems (and sometimes even current health problems), many still find it hard to quit cold turkey.

Maybe a more relatable example: just think back to the last time you called some errant driver on the freeway a few names that you would never say in front of a 3yo child or your sweet little old grandma. Remember how suddenly those words flew out of your mouth, and the automatic surge of anger and frustration behind those words?

Now I’m not trying to give health, relationship, or road rage advice here. But what I am trying to do is point out that cognitively knowing what might be a healthy, life-giving action to take is often overshadowed by the ways our instinctive attraction to comfort and aversion to discomfort, particularly on the emotional level, influence our actions before our more values-based beliefs or decision-making come online. In the situations above many people often feel like they didn’t really have a choice but to take the unhelpful or unhealthy action.

But we all know that in reality we always have a choice. We can always exert a greater amount of control over our actions. Or at least we aspire to, anyway.

And here is where mindfulness of the complex web of our instinctual thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations comes into play. (Substitute the word awareness for mindfulness in the sentence above, and see how that may enhance your understanding of the role and function of mindfulness.)

I want to highlight my very intentional use of the word instinctual in the above paragraph. The definition of the word instinct is “an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli” (Oxford Languages).

When a dog sees meat, it does whatever it can to gain access and eat it. When a cat sees a mouse, it chases it. When I see chocolate, I eat it. When I smell something rotting, I try to eliminate that experience, either by leaving the source, or trying to cover it up. These are all examples of animal instincts.

But the part of the equation that I’ve left out, and that is often out of clear awareness (unless it goes unfulfilled), even though it sounds absurdly obvious when I say it, is that in between each instance of seeing and acting, operating behind the scenes is the “complex web of…instinctual thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations” I mentioned above, namely the complex web(s) related to desire and aversion.

So what I’m suggesting here is that all animals, including we homo sapiens, are operating primarily out of drives related to desire and aversion, but that in our normal waking consciousness we are typically only aware of the source or object or our desire or aversion, rather than the experience of desire or aversion itself.

What if we were able to begin noticing, becoming more intimately aware of our physical and emotional experiences of desire and aversion? What could happen if instead of blindly acting out of automatic desire or aversion, we could actually notice these instinctual, automatic reactions happening inside our bodies and minds, and make conscious, intentional, and personally meaningful decisions about our actions based less on these inborn, animal instincts, and more on our core values and a sense of the type of person we want to be in the world? Would it not, in a sense, “undermine the power and authority” that these instinctual drives typically exert upon us? (subvert, Oxford Languages).

This “undermining” is exactly how I see and experience the practice of mindfulness (clear, unobstructed seeing or awareness), why I consider it to be so incredibly subversive, and henceforth why I often refer to mindfulness as “subversive awareness.” Because in my mind, there is nothing so subversive in the world than to see into an innate, automatic process, and by doing so to rob it of its power, and in many cases, engage in behavior that contrasts how this automatic process seemingly “wanted” me to act.

What might this look like in practice?

Well, to take the example of my chocolate-loving instinct, in addition to practicing regularly to just become more attuned to my bodily reactions in general, I could take a moment to notice the sensations of desire that arise upon seeing the chocolate. I could really let myself become deeply attuned to this experience of desire as a growing sense of emptiness in my belly, a corresponding activation of salivation in my mouth, and sometimes a bit of tension in my head and restlessness in my body, all signaling that my body wants and believes it needs me to eat that chocolate.

The next step is immensely important, and it is to become curious about this visceral experience of desire, and the thoughts that begin to whirl around, such as self-justification (“I haven’t had any chocolate yet today, so this is totally fine–I should definitely eat it”) or any other rationalization that may pop up, many of which we also don’t often become aware of when we just give into the desire and act on it immediately.

One way to exercise this curiosity and growing awareness of the experience of desire is to simply begin describing it to myself, such as I have done by noting to myself the sensations in my belly, the salivation in my mouth, and the thoughts. It can also be helpful to simply note to myself “This is what desire feels like.”

You cannot possibly understand the power of taking this moment to notice and describe the visceral experience of desire until you try it out for yourself–not just once, but many, many times, over the course of time.

In fact, this moment of becoming aware and curious is precisely the “space”-that-leads-to-freedom that Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl is describing when he says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

What I have come to realize from my own experience, which correlates precisely to the experience of innumerable others who engage in mindfulness practice in some capacity, is that this pause to examine the “space” in which I can more clearly see my experience of desire essentially robs desire of its full potential to dictate my behavior without my consent.

This is the space of potential growth and freedom within what could otherwise remain a prison of our own animality. 

It's like flipping on the lights on your front porch to reveal that the source of commotion that you heard from inside was not someone trying to break into your house, but rather a raccoon looking for something to eat. Once the lights reveal the culprit, sometimes the raccoon will freeze, and sometimes it will run away. And whether it freezes or runs away, it typically won’t just ignore the lights and continue wreaking havoc in quite the same carefree way. It prefers to do its deeds undisturbed, in the darkness. The darkness is an invitation to such nocturnal creatures.

And the same is true of our instincts, regardless of where on the continuum of desire and aversion they may be located.

Once we shine the spotlight of awareness onto our visceral experience of desire or aversion, we will typically notice that the experience is 1) more tolerable than we initially thought, giving us more ability to withstand and choose actions that are more meaningful to us, and 2) may even dissipate more quickly than we had imagined, which is a powerful insight. 

One of the reasons un-noticed desire/aversion can be so powerful is that one of the built-in mechanisms of these impulses is the sense that the need to obey them–to either move toward or away from the “stimulus”–is felt to be unquestionably urgent and necessary in order to bring us back to homeostasis, or a sense of balance and satisfaction, or to put it another way, relief from the sense of need.

So yes, being human means that we are animals that have innate likes and dislikes and instinctive needs. And at the same time, to fully embrace our humanity means to exercise our seemingly unique capacity to live beyond simple animal programming, and engage that part of us that can observe these likes and dislikes from an understanding and compassionate perspective in order to make conscious decision about our actions based on something more deeply human–our sense of purpose and meaningfulness.

And I can think of nothing more subversive than practicing this kind of self-awareness.