TRY: Asking yourself in this moment, "Am I awake?," "Where is my mind right now?

It is a hard message to swallow at first blush because it brings into question everything that we think we are, which for the most part seems to come from what we identify with, our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, our relationships, our values, our work, our expectations of what is "supposed" to happen and how things are "supposed" to work out for me in order for me to be happy, our stories of where we came from and where we are going and of who we are.

the true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self." Einstein

Even the tiniest manifestation of mindfulness in any moment might give rise to an intuition or insight that could be hugely transforming.

There is really only one way to do this. It takes a ruthless and, at the same time, kind and self-compassionate commitment to seeing your own impulses to go for the familiar, to fall into habitual patterns and confining mind-sets, and a willingness to let go of them in the very moments when they arise.

This is the case because, as we noted earlier, it is not the breath that is most important here, but the awareness itself. And the awareness can be of any aspect of your experience, not just your breathing—because it is always the same awareness, whatever the chosen object or objects of attention.

that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already.

It is remarkable how liberating it feels to be able to see that your thoughts are just thoughts and that they are not "you" or "reality." For instance, if you have the thought that you have to get a certain number of things done today and you don't recognize it as a thought but act as if it's "the truth," then you have created a reality in that moment in which you really believe that those things must all be done today.

health is a dynamical process. It is not a fixed state that you "get" and then hold on to.

We see that thoughts, when brought into and held in awareness in this way, readily lose their power to dominate and dictate our responses to life, no matter what their content and emotional charge. They then become workable rather than imprisoning. And thus, we become a bit freer in the knowing and the recognizing of them as events in the field of awareness.

even and especially as we are being confronted with the law of impermanence and the inevitability of change, conditions we are subject to as individuals regardless of how much we resist or protest or try to control outcomes. If we wish to make a quantum leap to greater awareness, there is no getting around the need for us to be willing to wake up, and to care deeply about waking up.

Dr. Lown's story graphically illustrates the enormous power that strongly held beliefs, which are in actuality just thoughts, can have on our health.