The I AWAKE glossary
To the feeling you couldn’t quite name. The habit that looked like your whole personality. The idea you keep finding in different books.
Look up a word, follow a connection, stay where something interests you. There’s no need to begin at A.
Acceptance means allowing yourself to acknowledge what is happening, including how you feel about it, so you can decide how to respond.
Active imagination is a practice within psychiatrist Carl Jung’s analytical psychology in which you engage with an inner image or figure and allow an exchange to develop.
An adaptation is a way you adjust to the people and circumstances around you. Here, we’re concerned with changes in how you behave, express yourself or deal with difficulty.
Affect is a broad psychological term for feeling-related experience, including how pleasant or unpleasant, energised or subdued a moment feels.
Agency is your ability to participate in what happens through choices and actions, within the circumstances you actually have.
All-or-nothing thinking reduces a varied situation to two extremes: perfect or worthless, successful or a failure, entirely independent or hopelessly needy.
Ambiguity means that something can reasonably be understood in more than one way because its meaning isn’t yet clear.
Ambivalence means having different, sometimes opposing feelings or attitudes towards the same person, choice or possibility.
Analytical psychology is the psychological tradition developed by Carl Jung, concerned with conscious life, unconscious patterns and meaning expressed through dreams, images and relationships.
In I AWAKE, ancestral literacy means looking closely at the family histories, stories and inherited expectations that still take part in your life.
Anger is an emotion that can arise around a perceived wrong, frustration, obstruction or crossed boundary.
Anxiety involves worry or apprehension about possible threat or difficulty, often with physical unease and attention pulled towards what might happen.
Appeasement means trying to reduce tension or prevent a feared reaction by agreeing, soothing or making yourself less troublesome.
Approval is another person’s positive response: they accept, appreciate or support what you are doing.
Archetypal psychology, associated particularly with psychologist James Hillman, places image, imagination and myth at the centre of psychological inquiry.
In Jungian psychology, an archetype is a shaping pattern that can appear through different images, stories and ways of relating, rather than one fixed character with one fixed meaning.
Arousal describes a level of activation or alertness. It can concern excitement, stress, sexual response or readiness to act, depending on the context.
Assertiveness means expressing a need, view or limit clearly while recognising that other people have needs, views and choices too.
An association is a connection that comes to mind between experiences: a word and a memory, a colour and a feeling, a gesture and an expectation.
An assumption is something you are treating as true without having fully checked it in the situation in front of you.
Attachment concerns the bonds through which we seek closeness, reassurance and dependable connection with important people.
Attachment anxiety describes a tendency to worry about an important person’s availability, care or willingness to stay close.
Attachment avoidance describes a tendency to protect independence or reduce felt dependence when closeness and reliance become uncomfortable.
Attention is what you notice and give mental or sensory focus to at a particular moment.
Attunement means responding to someone with attention to their actual state and needs, rather than only to what you expected them to feel.
Aurora is the I AWAKE practice partner, being developed to help you explore the books, follow your own questions and notice connections across what you choose to read and practise.
Authenticity means expressing and acting in ways that have an honest relationship with what you think, feel and value.
Autobiographical memory is your memory of your own life: particular events and the knowledge and stories through which you recognise your history.
The autonomic nervous system helps regulate bodily functions such as heart activity and digestion, largely without you having to direct them consciously.
Autonomy means having meaningful choice and a sense that your actions are your own, rather than being driven entirely by pressure or control.
Awareness is the capacity to notice experience: thoughts, feelings, sensations, images and what is happening around you.
In I AWAKE, awareness literacy means recognising how you are relating to an experience: caught up in it, noticing it, avoiding it or trying to control it.
Awe is a response to something that feels larger than your usual frame of reference and asks you to take it in differently.
The Being cards are the symbolic figures in the deck of the Hidden Hero’s Journey, one of the Three Hero Journeys of the I AWAKE universe.
Belonging is the experience of having a place with other people, where important parts of you don’t have to be continually hidden to keep the connection.
Body awareness means noticing physical experience from within: warmth, tension, movement, tiredness, ease, pleasure and the details that don’t always make it into your explanation.
A body map is an outline or drawing where you record what you notice physically: tightness, warmth, pressure, heaviness, movement or very little sensation at all.
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen developed Body-Mind Centering, an experiential approach to movement, touch, anatomy and developmental patterns.
Boundaries are the limits and conditions around what you will participate in, offer, accept or make available.
Breath awareness means noticing how you are breathing without immediately trying to make the breath perform a particular pattern.
The realm Capacity is one of the three realms of the Creative Hero’s Journey within I AWAKE. It explores what will support you and your creation as attention, opportunity and responsibility grow.
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology, a tradition that takes dreams, symbols and unconscious patterns seriously in understanding a person’s life.
Choice is the act of considering available options and deciding how to respond, including whether to act now, ask for help or take more time.
The Circle is a guided imaginal encounter found throughout the I AWAKE books. You follow the guidance into an inner scene or setting and meet aspects of your experience through image, sensation and relationship.
The Circle cards are nine cards in the deck of the Hidden Hero’s Journey, one of the Three Hero Journeys of the I AWAKE universe. They concern how you approach an exploration, rather than which part of your life you are exploring.
Co-regulation describes how people influence one another’s emotional and bodily state through interaction, such as tone, pace, attention and responsiveness.
Cognitive defusion means changing your relationship with a thought so you can notice it as a thought, rather than automatically follow it as a fact or command. The term comes from acceptance and commitment therapy.
Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adjust how you think, consider another possibility or change approach when the situation calls for it.
Cognitive fusion is becoming so caught up in a thought that it functions like a fact, an instruction or a complete description of who you are. The term is used in acceptance and commitment therapy.
A coincidence is a striking overlap between events for which a causal connection hasn’t been established.
Collective memory is the way a group remembers and passes on its past through stories, commemorations, images, institutions and shared accounts.
The collective unconscious is Jung’s proposal that human psychological life includes shared underlying patterns beyond an individual’s personal memories and learning.
Commitment is choosing to give something continuing attention, action or responsibility, rather than relying on the intensity of the moment when you first wanted it.
The companion book is the written guide that comes with the deck of the Hidden Hero’s Journey within I AWAKE.
Compassion is concern for suffering joined with a wish to help, while staying attentive to what help would actually involve.
Competence is the experience of being able to meet a task, develop a skill or have an effect through what you do.
In Jungian psychology, a complex is a cluster of emotionally charged associations, memories and expectations that can organise your response before you have fully considered the present situation.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to favour information that supports what you already believe while giving less attention to information that challenges it.
Conflict avoidance means trying to prevent or escape disagreement, often by withholding a view, smoothing the moment or postponing a necessary conversation.
Consent means freely agreeing to a particular activity with enough understanding and room to set conditions, change your mind or decline.
Contemplative practice is a deliberate way of spending time with attention and experience, through approaches such as meditation, reflection or quiet observation.
Context is the surrounding information that changes how an event, response or experience can be understood.
Convergent thinking brings possibilities towards a workable answer, using criteria, judgement and what a task actually requires.
Creative authorship means taking responsibility for what you choose to make and how you shape it, while remaining open to influence, learning and collaboration.
Creative direction is the choice of what you want to make, for whom and for what reason, before every possibility starts asking for your entire life.
The Creative Hero’s Journey is one of the Three Hero Journeys of the I AWAKE universe. Its three illustrated books with guided audio explore what you want to create, how you act on that choice and what supports your creation as it grows.
A creative process is how something takes shape through noticing, trying, making, choosing, revising and learning from what happens.
Creativity involves making connections, possibilities or work that is new in its context and worth developing.
The destination Cry Like You Mean It is the third destination on the map of the Sensual Hero’s Journey. Its guided seven-day book is They Said Time Would…, which explores old pain and the reactions that can accompany it into present life.
Cultural inheritance is the language, customs, values, stories and expectations you receive from the social worlds you belong to.
A cultural narrative is a shared story about what matters, how life works and what people like you are expected to become.
Curiosity is the desire to find out, understand or experience more, without needing the answer to confirm what you already think.
Daydreaming is the drift into imagined scenes, possibilities or stories while awake, often away from the task immediately in front of you.
Decentering means gaining enough perspective on a thought or feeling to notice it as an experience you are having, rather than the whole of who you are or what is true.
Dependence means relying on someone or something for a need, task or part of life.
Depth psychology is a broad term for approaches that attend to unconscious processes, symbolic meanings and influences not immediately available in a person’s conscious account.
Desire is wanting: an attraction towards an experience, person, possibility or way of living.
In I AWAKE, a destination is one of the nine places on the map of the Sensual Hero’s Journey. Each has its own illustrated guided seven-day book and accompanying audio.
Disappointment is the feeling that arrives when something hoped for doesn’t happen, or doesn’t meet you in the way you expected.
Discernment means making useful distinctions so you can judge what fits, what is supported and what a situation actually needs.
Divergent thinking opens multiple possible responses instead of moving immediately towards one answer.
A domain is one of the six connected territories on the map of the Hidden Hero’s Journey within I AWAKE. Each offers a way to explore influences on how you experience your life.
Donald Winnicott was a paediatrician and psychoanalyst whose work explored early relationships, play and the conditions in which a person can feel real and creative.
Dream imagery is the scenes, figures, sensations and events experienced in dreams.
Dreamwork means approaching dreams through reflection, recording, association, dialogue or creative expression. Different psychological and cultural traditions do this differently.
Embarrassment is the uncomfortable feeling of being seen in a way that doesn’t match how you hoped to appear.
Embodied Authorship is a central focus of I’m Done Asking, the illustrated book with guided audio for the realm Permission in I AWAKE’s Creative Hero’s Journey.
Embodied cognition is a family of approaches that examine how bodily activity and interaction with the environment participate in thinking and understanding.
Embodied imagination is imagining an experience while noticing the sensations, posture, movement or felt response that accompany it.
Embodiment means experiencing and expressing something through your body and actions, rather than only understanding it as an idea.
An emotion is a response involving feeling, bodily changes, meaning and an inclination to act. It can be brief, mixed or difficult to name.
Emotional availability means being able and willing to participate in emotional contact, including listening, responding and allowing another person’s experience to matter.
Emotional granularity means describing feelings with finer distinctions rather than placing many different experiences under one broad label.
Emotional literacy is the ability to recognise, describe and respond to feelings with enough detail to understand what may need attention.
Emotional needs are the forms of connection, recognition, security or support that matter to how you feel and function in your life.
Emotional reasoning is treating a feeling as sufficient evidence that an interpretation is true: I feel guilty, therefore I did wrong; I feel unwanted, therefore nobody wants me.
Emotional regulation concerns how you influence the intensity, duration, expression or course of an emotional response.
Emotional replay is repeatedly revisiting an event, conversation or imagined alternative in ways that keep the feeling active.
Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel something of another person’s experience while recognising that their experience isn’t identical to your own.
Enactive cognition is an approach that understands cognition through an organism’s active involvement with its environment, rather than treating knowing as detached processing alone.
Envy is the uncomfortable feeling that arises when someone else has something you want: recognition, freedom, intimacy, an opportunity or a life that looks easier to inhabit.
Episodic memory is your memory of a particular experience: something that happened at a time and place, with you involved in it.
Eugene Gendlin was a philosopher and psychotherapist who developed Focusing, an approach to attending to a bodily felt sense that isn’t yet fully expressed in words.
Everyday practice means bringing something you have explored into an ordinary moment, where the old response has a habit of arriving first.
Evidence is information that gives you a reason to support, question or revise an explanation.
Experimentation means trying something deliberately so you can learn from what happens, rather than having to settle the whole question in advance.
Expressive writing is writing that gives your thoughts and feelings room to become words, rather than concentrating only on producing something polished for a reader.
Exteroception is the sensing of information from outside your body, such as light, sound, temperature, contact and the surfaces around you.
Extrinsic motivation concerns doing something for an outcome beyond the activity itself, such as payment, recognition, a qualification or avoiding disapproval.
Family loyalty is the attachment, responsibility and allegiance you feel towards your family, its members and sometimes its ways of living.
A fantasy is an imagined scene, possibility or story that goes beyond what is happening now. It can express desire, offer pleasure, rehearse an alternative or provide an escape.
Fatigue is a sense of tiredness or reduced energy that can affect how you think, feel, move and meet demands.
Fear is a response to perceived danger or threat. It can change your attention, bodily sensations and readiness to act.
Feedback is information about how someone experiences, understands or evaluates something you’ve made, offered or communicated.
A felt sense is an initially unclear bodily sense of a whole situation, used in Eugene Gendlin’s work to describe something more particular than a named emotion or isolated sensation.
First-person experience is what something is like for the person living it, rather than how it looks to an observer.
Flow describes becoming deeply absorbed in an activity, with attention engaged in what you’re doing and less occupied by monitoring yourself.
Focusing is an approach developed by philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin for attending to a bodily felt sense and allowing meaning to become more specific.
The domain Forest is one of six domains of I AWAKE’s Hidden Hero’s Journey, which explores the influences shaping how you experience life. The domain Forest attends to instinct, protective responses and the symbolic figures through which you can meet them.
Framing is the way a situation is presented or understood, which makes some details stand out and others seem less important.
Francisco Varela was a scientist and philosopher whose work connected cognition, bodily activity and lived experience. He was also a co-founder of the Mind & Life Institute.
The destination From Upcycled to Altar is the seventh destination of I AWAKE’s Sensual Hero’s Journey. Its guided seven-day book, All of Me, explores how your thoughts, feelings and bodily needs can take part in the same decision.
The domain Garden is one of the six domains of I AWAKE’s Hidden Hero’s Journey. It explores emotional life: what you feel, what affects those feelings and what kind of care they may need.
A gesture is a movement that expresses or communicates something, from reaching out to turning away, opening a hand or drawing it back.
Gratitude is appreciation for something received, experienced or recognised as valuable.
Grief is the experience of responding to loss. The loss may concern a person, a relationship, a role, a possibility or a future you expected to share.
Grounding means directing attention towards present, concrete details so you can become more aware of where you are and what is happening now.
Guided audio is a recording that leads you through a practice while you participate. In I AWAKE, Camilla’s voice, pacing and music have a place alongside the words you read and the responses you write.
A Guided Dive is an illustrated book-based experience in I AWAKE’s Hidden Hero’s Journey, with accompanying guidance for exploring one of its six domains in greater depth.
A Guided Creative Immersion is one of the three illustrated books of I AWAKE’s Creative Hero’s Journey, used with accompanying audio and creative practices alongside something you want to make.
A guided practice gives you a sequence to follow while you explore an experience. The guidance might be written, spoken or both.
Guilt is the feeling that you have done, or may be doing, something wrong. It can point towards responsibility. It can also appear when you disappoint an expectation you have learned to treat as a rule.
Henry Corbin was a French philosopher and scholar of Persian and Islamic thought whose work gave the word imaginal a particular philosophical depth.
The hero’s journey is a pattern of departure, encounter and change associated with mythologist Joseph Campbell’s comparative work on stories and mythology.
The Hidden Hero’s Journey is one of the Three Hero Journeys of the I AWAKE universe. It explores the less obvious influences on how you experience life: identity, perception, emotion, instinct, culture and awareness.
The destination Home Is Where the Heart Beats is the sixth destination of I AWAKE’s Sensual Hero’s Journey. Its guided seven-day book, Unleash My Heart, explores your relationship with emotion and the stories, memories and imagined conversations that keep it moving.
Hope is an openness towards something you want to become possible, even when it isn’t certain.
The domain House is one of the six domains of I AWAKE’s Hidden Hero’s Journey. The Hidden Hero’s Journey explores how identity, perception, emotion, instinct, culture and awareness influence your experience.
I AWAKE is Camilla Wellton’s universe of guided experiences for becoming more intimate with yourself and more alive in your own life.
Identity is your sense of who you are, shaped through qualities, relationships, roles, affiliations and the stories you use to recognise yourself over time.
Identity literacy means noticing how your ideas about who you are influence what you express, what you overlook and which choices feel available.
An image is a representation you see or imagine. An inner image may come with sound, movement, feeling or a sense of presence, not only a clear mental picture.
Imaginal describes engaging with images as meaningful experiences you can enter and respond to, rather than treating them only as decorative pictures or deliberate make-believe.
In I AWAKE, the imaginal field is the lived space of images, sensations, memories and associations you enter during an imaginal experience.
An imaginal practice is a guided way of engaging with an inner scene, figure or landscape and noticing what develops as you participate.
Imagination is the capacity to bring to mind something that isn’t simply being perceived in front of you: a scene, possibility, conversation, image or way things could be.
Imaginative absorption is becoming deeply involved in an imagined scene, story or inner experience, so that it occupies much of your attention.
Implicit learning refers to learning that develops without full conscious awareness of the pattern being learned or a clear verbal account of what you know.
Incubation is a period away from deliberate work on a problem or idea, after which a different connection or approach may become available.
Individuation is Jung’s term for developing a more complete relationship with the different aspects of your psyche, rather than identifying only with the person you already know how to be.
An inference is a conclusion you draw from information, rather than something you directly observed.
The inner critic is a way of naming harsh, judging or discouraging self-talk, especially when it arrives as though it already knows what other people will think.
Inner geography is I AWAKE’s way of giving the different areas of your inner life places and connections you can explore.
An inner guide is an imagined figure or perspective through which you explore a question with a different quality of attention.
An inner map is a way of organising and exploring your experience so that you can recognise patterns, distinctions and connections within it.
Inner parts is a way of describing different needs, impulses or perspectives within you, especially when they want different things.
Inner speech is the experience of thinking in words, such as silently rehearsing a conversation, giving yourself instructions or commenting on what is happening.
Inner technology is I AWAKE’s language for deliberately developing the human capacities you use to notice, feel, imagine, choose, relate and create.
Your inner world is the lived experience of thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, images, wishes and meanings that other people can’t directly see from the outside.
Instinct can refer to an innate tendency in biological usage. In ordinary conversation, people also use it for a fast inclination or response that appears before deliberate reasoning.
Integration means letting what you have understood or experienced become part of how you live, with your thoughts, feelings and bodily responses considered together.
An intention is something you mean to do or a way you want to participate. It points your attention towards a chosen action, quality or direction.
Interdependence means that people affect and rely on one another while still having their own needs, choices and responsibilities.
Interoception concerns the sensing and interpretation of signals arising within your body, such as heartbeat, hunger, breathing and internal tension.
An interpretation is the meaning or explanation you give to something you observe or experience.
Intimacy is closeness in which something of your experience can be known and met. It can involve affection, conversation, touch, shared life or the ability to remain present without performing an acceptable version of yourself.
Intrinsic motivation means taking part in an activity because something about doing it interests or satisfies you, rather than only for a separate reward.
James Hillman was a psychologist and writer associated with archetypal psychology, which places imagination, image and myth at the centre of psychological inquiry.
Jealousy is a response to a perceived threat to an important relationship or your place within it. It can include fear, anger, comparison, sadness and the wish for reassurance.
Joseph Campbell was a writer and mythologist known for comparing stories and for the pattern commonly called the hero’s journey.
A guided seven-day journey is an individual book-based experience within the Sensual Hero’s Journey. You read, write, use body maps and follow accompanying audio, with time to notice what happens in your own life.
Joy is a feeling of delight, gladness or aliveness that can arise through connection, beauty, play, discovery or something as ordinary as a really good moment.
Kinesthesia is your sense of movement: the felt experience of your body or part of it changing position.
Learning transfer means using something learned in one setting in a different situation.
The destination Lick Your Mirror is the fourth destination of I AWAKE’s Sensual Hero’s Journey. Its guided seven-day book, I Want to Be Touched, explores contact, sensation and the difference between receiving an experience and managing it.
Liminality describes a threshold condition: a period in which something familiar has changed or ended, while what comes next isn’t yet settled.
The lived body is your body as you experience life through it, rather than only the body viewed, measured or described from outside.
Loneliness is the painful experience of lacking the connection you need. It isn’t measured simply by how many people are around you.
Longing is a sustained wish for something that feels absent or out of reach: closeness, recognition, a place, a possibility or a way of feeling alive.
The destination Make a Mess! Call It Art… is the eighth destination of I AWAKE’s Sensual Hero’s Journey. Its guided seven-day book, Pleasure Is My Medicine, explores making room for enjoyment, play and a less supervised relationship with being alive.
Marion Woodman was a Jungian analyst and writer whose work connected psychological life with the body, image and the pressures of perfection.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a philosopher whose work gave the lived body a central place in understanding perception and experience.
Meaning-making is the process through which an event, feeling, memory or image comes to signify something to you.
Mental imagery is the experience of representing something in your mind without directly sensing it at that moment. It can involve sight, sound, touch, movement or other sensory qualities.
Metacognition is thinking about and monitoring your own thinking: noticing what you know, what you assume, how confident you feel and which approach you’re using.
A metaphor describes one experience through another, allowing a connection to become easier to imagine or feel.
Mixed feelings are different emotions present around the same situation, even when they appear to pull in opposite directions.
A mood is a feeling tone that lasts for a while and can colour how a period of time feels, without always having one clearly identified cause.
Moshe Feldenkrais developed the Feldenkrais Method, an approach to learning through movement and awareness.
Motivation concerns what moves you towards an activity or choice, including interest, need, reward, pressure and the wish to avoid a cost.
Movement is a change in bodily position or action, from a small shift of a hand to walking, dancing or making something.
A myth is a culturally meaningful story through which people explore origins, relationships, values, powers and the shape of human life.
Narrative identity is the sense of who you are that develops through the stories you tell about your life: what happened, what it meant and what kind of person you became.
A need is something important to your well-being or functioning, such as rest, nourishment, connection, autonomy or appropriate support.
The domain Ocean is one of six domains of I AWAKE’s Hidden Hero’s Journey. It explores family, culture, history and inherited expectations: the influences larger than one individual life that can still be heard inside a private thought.
The destination Only Prey Pray for Praise is the second destination of I AWAKE’s Sensual Hero’s Journey. Its guided seven-day book, Living on Love Crumbs, explores care, approval and needs that remain unanswered inside relationships that also contain real affection.
Orientation means getting your bearings: noticing where you are, what is happening and what kind of participation is possible now.
Overthinking is repeated thinking that has stopped adding useful understanding or helping you decide, while continuing to occupy your attention.
Pacing means adjusting the amount, speed and intensity of an activity so you can remain involved in it rather than push past yourself to finish.
People-pleasing describes repeatedly organising your behaviour around keeping others comfortable or approving of you, even when your own needs, preferences or judgement are being set aside.
Perception is how you become aware of and make sense of information from the world and your body.
Perception literacy means noticing how you arrive at a view of a situation, including the details you observed and the expectations, interpretations or omissions that helped shape it.
Perfectionism is a demanding relationship with standards in which mistakes, criticism or an imperfect result can feel unusually difficult to tolerate.
The realm Permission is one of the three realms of I AWAKE’s Creative Hero’s Journey. It explores acting on your decisions, protecting time to create and letting your work be seen without requiring everyone’s approval.
Persona is a term in Jungian psychology for the social face through which you meet the expectations and roles of public life.
Perspective-taking means trying to understand how a situation may look or feel from another person’s position, while recognising that you can’t know their experience perfectly from outside.
Phenomenology is a philosophical approach concerned with describing lived experience: how things appear and matter to the person experiencing them.
Play is activity that allows exploration, experimentation or enjoyment without every move being judged only by an external result.
Pleasure is enjoyment you experience, from the taste of food and the feel of movement to affection, beauty, creative absorption or a moment of ease.
The realm Possibility is the first realm of I AWAKE’s Creative Hero’s Journey. It explores what you genuinely want to create beneath comparison, obligation and the imagined rewards of success.
Posture is how you hold and organise your body in a moment, including the positions and relationships of its parts.
Potential space is a concept associated with Donald Winnicott, describing an area of experience between inner life and shared reality in which play, creativity and cultural experience can occur.
Practice is something you return to doing so you can learn through participation, not only through explanation.
A practice partner accompanies your engagement with a practice, helping you stay with a question and find ways to use what you’re discovering.
Practice Space is I AWAKE’s continuing-practice offering, separate from the recordings that accompany a particular book.
A preference is what you would like in a particular situation: this rather than that, more, less, slower, later or not today.
Presence means being involved in the experience you are having, with some awareness of what is happening in and around you.
Present Bridge is the name used in They Said Time Would…, a guided seven-day book of the Sensual Hero’s Journey, for a small movement from a familiar reaction towards the present situation.
Privacy is having a say in what is shared about you, with whom and under what conditions.
Procedural memory concerns learned ways of doing things, such as skills and action sequences that become familiar through experience and practice.
Projection describes a way your own feelings, expectations or difficult-to-recognise qualities may contribute to what you perceive in another person or situation.
Proprioception is your sense of where your body and its parts are, and how they are moving, without needing to watch every movement.
A protective response is something you do to reduce a perceived risk, such as conflict, rejection, shame, overwhelm or feeling exposed.
Psyche is a word for the whole of mental and inner life, including conscious experience and processes that aren’t directly available to awareness.
Psychological flexibility is the ability to remain responsive to circumstances and act in relation to what matters, even when difficult thoughts or feelings are present.
Reality Literacy is I AWAKE’s name for staying close to your experience while examining how its meaning is being made.
The Reality Literacy deck is the 78-card deck and companion book of I AWAKE’s Hidden Hero’s Journey. It offers images and questions for exploring what may be shaping a situation, rather than predicting what will happen.
A realm is a larger area of the I AWAKE maps. In the Creative Hero’s Journey, the realm Possibility, the realm Permission and the realm Capacity each have an illustrated book and guided experience.
Receiving means allowing care, help, pleasure or attention to reach you, rather than immediately dismissing it, repaying it or taking charge of the person offering it.
Reciprocity is an exchange in which people respond to and contribute to one another, rather than care moving only in one direction.
Reconstructive memory describes remembering as an active process, rather than the playback of a fixed recording.
Recovery is the process of regaining enough resources, steadiness or functioning after effort, strain, illness or disruption. What it requires depends on what happened.
Reflection is giving attention to an experience so you can understand something about it, consider its meaning or decide what to do next.
Reframing is considering a different way of understanding a situation, so that details, meanings or options overlooked by the first account can become visible.
Regulation is the process of adjusting activity, attention or intensity so you can remain involved in what you’re doing. In this glossary, the context may be emotional, bodily or behavioural.
Relatedness is the sense of being connected with and mattering to other people. In self-determination theory, it is one of three basic psychological needs, alongside autonomy and competence.
Relational safety describes conditions in which you can participate in a relationship with a reasonable sense that your limits, needs and dignity will be respected.
A relationship is an ongoing connection shaped by what people do with and for one another, the expectations involved and the experiences that accumulate between them.
Relief is the easing you feel when a pressure, threat, discomfort or uncertainty lessens.
Repair is what you do to address harm, misunderstanding or a rupture in a relationship, with attention to the effect on the other person and what needs to change.
Resentment is a lingering response to something experienced as unfair, imposed, unacknowledged or costly. It may gather around what you keep giving, accepting or leaving unsaid.
Rest is time in which demands lessen and you have room to recover, settle or simply stop performing an activity. It may involve sleep, but it isn’t limited to sleep.
A ritual is an action or sequence given particular attention and meaning through how it is repeated, framed or shared.
Ritual space is a setting you give to an intentional experience. It can be physical, imaginal or both, with enough separation from competing demands that the activity can receive your attention.
A role is a familiar way of behaving in a relationship or setting, shaped by what you and other people expect from you.
Rumination is repetitive thinking that circles around a concern, feeling or problem, often without producing new information or a useful change in response.
Sadness is an emotion that can arise around loss, disappointment, hurt or the recognition that something matters and isn’t as you hoped.
Scale Capacity is the central practice focus of What If It Works?, the book connected with the realm Capacity in I AWAKE’s Creative Hero’s Journey. It concerns the personal and practical support needed as a creation brings greater reach, demand and responsibility.
Secure attachment describes a pattern of relating in which closeness and support can generally be sought and received without overwhelming fear of abandonment or a persistent need to avoid dependence.
Self-awareness is noticing something about your own experience, behaviour or way of relating: what you feel, think, want, expect or keep doing.
Self-compassion is meeting your own difficulty with care rather than treating pain, error or limitation as a reason to become cruel to yourself.
Self-criticism is a judging response towards yourself, your behaviour or your work. It can range from useful evaluation to harsh, global conclusions that make the next step harder to take.
Self-esteem is your evaluation of yourself, including how positively or negatively you tend to regard your own qualities and value.
Self-image is the picture or account you hold of yourself: your qualities, limitations, appearance, abilities and what kind of person you believe you are.
Self-intimacy is a close, honest and attentive relationship with your own experience: what you feel, want, sense, imagine and find difficult to admit.
Self-regulation is the process of influencing your attention, emotions or behaviour in relation to what you are trying to do and the circumstances you are in.
Self-silencing is holding back a need, feeling, view or preference to preserve approval, avoid conflict or remain acceptable in a relationship.
Self-trust is confidence in your ability to attend to your experience, consider information and participate in decisions, including revising them when you learn more.
Self-worth is the value you recognise in yourself as a person, beyond the success of one role, relationship or piece of work.
A sensation is a physical experience you can notice, such as warmth, pressure, tingling, tightness, heaviness or movement.
Sensorial Scenecraft is a practice named in I Want It All, a guided seven-day book of the Sensual Hero’s Journey, for giving a desired experience a small, specific imagined scene you can explore through the senses.
Sensory attention is giving attention to what you can notice through your senses: taste, sound, touch, smell, sight and the felt details of an experience.
Sensory overload describes feeling overwhelmed by the amount or intensity of sensory input, such as noise, light, touch or several things competing for your attention.
The Sensual Hero’s Journey is one of the Three Hero Journeys of the I AWAKE universe. Its nine guided seven-day books explore your body, feelings, relationships, pleasure, desire and the familiar ways you leave your own experience out.
Sensuality is your capacity to experience life through your body and senses, including pleasure, contact, preference and the details of what feels right to you.
Shadow is a Jungian term for aspects of yourself that are difficult to recognise or include in the identity you consciously maintain.
Shame is a painful experience of feeling exposed, unacceptable or diminished as a person, rather than only recognising that a particular action went wrong.
A signal is information that draws your attention to something. In I AWAKE, the word may concern an interest, sensation, recurring wish or detail worth investigating.
Signal Separation is the central practice focus of I Was Born for More, the book connected with the realm Possibility in I AWAKE’s Creative Hero’s Journey. It means distinguishing a creative interest from the expectations, comparisons and hoped-for rewards gathered around it.
The domain Sky is one of the six domains of I AWAKE’s Hidden Hero’s Journey. It explores perception: what you notice, what you expect and how you decide what an experience means.
The destination Smell Your Undies is the first destination of I AWAKE’s Sensual Hero’s Journey. Its guided seven-day book, That’s Not Me, explores the roles and learned rules that can begin to sound like your personality.
A social script is a familiar expectation about how a situation should unfold and how people are supposed to behave within it.
Solitude is time spent alone, which can be chosen, restorative, creative or simply welcome.
Soma, in the somatic tradition associated with Thomas Hanna, refers to the body as experienced from within: sensing, moving, responding and learning.
Somatic learning is learning through attention to bodily experience and movement, rather than only receiving a verbal explanation or copying an outside shape.
A somatic practice gives attention to the body as experienced from within, often through sensation, movement, breath or the physical qualities of an activity.
Somatics is a field of approaches that explore the body as you experience it from within: sensing, moving, learning and responding, rather than only being observed from outside.
The domain Space is one of six domains of I AWAKE’s Hidden Hero’s Journey. It explores awareness, perspective and your relationship with questions that don’t yet have an answer.
Your state is how you are at a particular time, including energy, mood, bodily sensations and the way your attention is working.
A stress response is the set of bodily, emotional and attentional changes that can occur when demands feel challenging or threatening.
Support is the help, resources and conditions that make something more possible than relying on your effort alone.
Sustainable creativity means developing a way of creating that can continue without repeatedly consuming the time, energy, relationships and resources you need to live.
A symbol is an image, object or figure that can hold meanings beyond its literal appearance.
Symbolic thinking is making and exploring meaning through images, objects, figures or stories that stand for more than their literal form.
Synchronicity is Jung’s term for coincidences experienced as meaningfully connected without an ordinary causal explanation linking the events.
Tenderness is a gentle, attentive response to something vulnerable, precious or easily hurt. It can involve affection, care and a willingness not to handle the experience roughly.
The destination Think Dirty, Stay Holy is the fifth destination of I AWAKE’s Sensual Hero’s Journey. Its guided seven-day book, Seduce My Mind, explores your relationship with thoughts, including the ones that become convincing, repetitive or difficult to leave alone.
Thomas Hanna was a philosopher and educator who developed influential language around somatics, including the distinction between the body observed from outside and the soma experienced from within.
A threshold is a point of approach or transition, where you are considering entering something different from the familiar situation.
Trust is a willingness to rely on someone or something in particular ways, shaped by what you know, what has happened and the risks involved.
The destination Turned On All the Way is the ninth destination of I AWAKE’s Sensual Hero’s Journey. Its guided seven-day book, I Want It All, explores desire, receiving and the life you would like to participate in more fully.
Uncertainty means there is something you don’t yet know, can’t fully predict or haven’t decided how to understand.
Unconscious describes processes, patterns or meanings that aren’t directly available to awareness at a particular moment. Different psychological traditions use the term in different ways.
Values are qualities, principles or directions that matter to you and can help you decide how you want to act.
A values conflict occurs when things you genuinely care about suggest different actions, or when acting on one value has a cost for another.
Visibility is letting some part of yourself, your work or your experience be seen by other people.
Visualisation is deliberately imagining a scene, action or possibility, often with some visual detail. People also use the word more broadly for imagined experience involving sound, movement or sensation.
Voice is how spoken sound carries words and expression: tone, pace, volume, pauses and the bodily experience of speaking.
Vulnerability is the exposure involved when something matters and you can’t fully control how it will be met.
Wonder is the feeling of being drawn towards something you don’t yet fully understand, with curiosity, surprise or a sense that your familiar explanation isn’t the whole experience.
