Jake Burhans explains how awareness works: you notice a thought like "I can't do this" and recognize it as separate from who you are. That gap between noticing and reacting is where choice lives. It's a skill anyone can practice daily, not just monks.
You don't have to be a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas 24/7 to have awareness. Awareness is a skill we can practice every single day by being aware of our thoughts, being aware of our emotions, understanding we are not our mental content, right? Like, you understand that you're not this shirt, right? Or I'm not this hat or whatever. But people don't look at their thoughts and their emotions that way. The more you can see a thought as just a thing or an emotion as an experience, the more separation you create and the more opportunity you get to be able to respond instead of react to everything. Every time you can notice a thought, say the thought is, I can't do this, this never works out for me. Instead of that running your life and you thinking that's the truth of the reality, you can say, oh yeah, I'm noticing the thought that I can't do it. Oh yeah, I'm noticing the thought that things never work out for me. And this is training your awareness. This is the same thing you train in meditation, right? Meditation is really to train your awareness so you can have that focus when you go into your day-to-day life.
