Awareness is mindfulness interlaced with insight and understanding. Mindfulness casts you as the observer of the present moment, like watching a movie and trying to absorb everything fully. You’re appreciating the acting, the soundtrack, the colors, the writing, the wardrobes, and the overall sensation. Awareness is like playing a video game. You’re still trying to fully absorb everything like with the movie, but you’re also an active part of how things are playing out. There are things you can change by deciding your inputs during the process. Thus you're observing how your inputs and the inputs of others are affecting reality. You're still very much in, and mindful of, the present moment. The difference is the added layer of connecting the dots between events and actions. By being mindful we've taken in all the data, the actual reality of the present moment and avoided warping that with our minds. So how can we then use our minds to understand it and derive insights without warping it? We practice. We practice mindfulness and we also practice meditation. In those two practices, we start to find insights into how our minds work, and eventually into how the minds of others work. When we started being the observer we realized there were more than just the thoughts we thought we were thinking. There were thoughts we ignored, intentionally and unintentionally. The brain fires off every possible idea and reason it can, it's our job to pick the thought in this multiple choice web that we believe is "right". Now it's time to practice how we select the right answers from the mess in our minds. We should make a habit of verifying whether…