The practice

What is Radical Awareness?

Radical Awareness, as The Way of the Alchemist teaches it, is the practice of seeing a feeling, acknowledging it and labelling it, then staying with it until it dissolves. You don't fight the feeling, fix it or cover it with something positive. It's how I help people dissolve the energetic blockages that keep manifestation from happening.

In my own words

Most of us don't really look at what we feel. We react to it, push it down, or try to think something nicer on top of it. Radical Awareness asks you to just see it.

The moment you genuinely see it, acknowledge it and then label the state that arises, something in the system shifts. Not dramatically. Not instantly. But something loosens.

From my video on visualising.

When I say states, I mean things like fear, frustration, needing it to happen, trying to control it, or not trusting life. In one of my recorded talks I put it this way: states are conditions that arise as emotions in the mind. The circumstances in your life are where they show up. The states are the thing to work on.

Why it matters for manifesting

You can say all the right words and still be putting out fear underneath them. In my video on prayer I said it's never the words. It's the energy beneath them. Radical Awareness works on that energy directly, instead of piling more techniques on top of it.

You're working with energy, so you can't just think your way out of it. You have to feel it. When a state has been felt and let go, you stop needing the outcome so badly. You can still want it. That's usually when things start to move, and it's why I say you don't manifest by adding.

What it isn't

It isn't positive thinking or forcing yourself to feel good.
It isn't suppressing feelings or pretending they're gone.
It isn't a promise that you'll get a particular thing by a particular date. Nobody can honestly promise that.

Where it comes from

I didn't invent this. People in the East have practised it for thousands of years, and you'll find other teachers who use the name Radical Awareness as well. I spent years learning from monks, yogis and shamans before any of this made sense to me, and Radical Awareness is the part I kept.

What the research says

There's research suggesting that putting a feeling into words can calm the brain's reaction to it. In one well-known study, labelling an emotion was linked to reduced activity in the amygdala (Lieberman and colleagues, 2007). That supports the labelling part of the practice for calming emotion. It doesn't prove anything about manifesting, and I won't pretend it does.

How to start

Sit down for ten minutes, think of what you want and notice what you feel. The steps are on how to practise Radical Awareness.

Questions people ask me

Did The Way of the Alchemist invent Radical Awareness?

No. This isn't something I invented. People in the East have practised it for thousands of years, and other teachers use the name Radical Awareness too. What I do is teach it plainly and apply it to manifesting and to the moments when life doesn't go to plan.

Is Radical Awareness the same as positive thinking?

No. Positive thinking tries to replace a feeling with a better one. Radical Awareness leaves the feeling alone and looks at it. You don't fight it or fix it. You let it be there until it loses its grip.

Is it the same as meditation?

It overlaps. You sit quietly and pay attention, like many kinds of meditation. The difference is the starting point. You start from the thing you want and watch what comes up when you think about it.

What's an energetic blockage?

It's how I describe a state that keeps running underneath you, like fear of losing something, needing it too much, or not trusting life. It usually came from things you went through, and it wasn't your fault. You can't think your way out of it. You have to feel it.

Is Radical Awareness therapy?

No. It's a spiritual practice I teach. If you're dealing with trauma or your mental health, please work with a qualified professional. You can do both.

Source

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., and Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428. PubMed