Lessons From the Wheel
A few weeks ago, after much discussion, my doctor prescribed Lipitor – preventively, not because of any cardiac event or diagnosed disease, just a proactive measure. I took it for three days.
On the third day, I noticed a distinct depressive quality arriving in my thoughts – unmistakable, not subtle, not ambiguous. It took a minute to process…and then I became very aware – this isn’t me!
What is it?
Could it be the new medication?
I googled side effects….and yes – noting it as a rare side effect – but certainly a reported one.
I stopped taking it, checked in with my doctor…it intensified on day two…lingered into day three…and now day four…gone.
What I want to talk about is what made this discernment possible for me.
I came to learn the Wheel of Awareness early in the context of my therapeutic work for DID with my therapist and Wheel developer, Dan Siegel. I’ve been doing it daily for nearly 30 years.
When I practice the Wheel I use the metaphor of a bicycle wheel. The hub of the wheel is the open, spacious awareness from which we know…the rim of the Wheel holds everything that can be known – sensory experience, bodily sensation, memories, thoughts and feelings, our sense of connection to others. The spoke is attention – and importantly – we get to choose, with awareness – where our attention goes.
We get to choose.
What the Wheel practice built over time for me is the felt sense of being the hub. Not the rim…not the content of experience…the awareness that holds it.
When the depressive quality arrived on day three of Lipitor, I didn’t fuse with it. I noticed it from the hub. I could feel it on the rim…had a quality that didn’t match anything in my life. There was no precipitating event, no relational rupture, nothing I was ruminating about. It arrived without context, and that context-lessness was itself information.
That’s what 30 years of daily practice has given me – familiarity with my own interior landscape that something foreign was recognizable and understood in a reasonably short amount of time.
It was still an unpleasant and even unsettling experience – but not one that engulfed me. Just one I had awareness of what it was…a passing induced feeling.
This isn’t a small thing. For someone experiencing such feelings with no Lipitor to blame, the experience may be similar – a state arrives, the mind immediately recruits narrative to explain it, and suddenly the state feels like truth. The Wheel doesn’t eliminate that pull – it builds an observer position that might sometimes be able to catch it – discerning and asking ,”what’s generating this?” rather than immediately becoming it.
I have found The Wheel of Awareness a valuable life tool, not a substitute for appropriate therapeutic or medical care and guidance. Learning and practicing it within my own therapeutic work strengthened my ability to observe and discern. That awareness – the ability to notice, name, and not automatically fuse with internal states is a trainable capacity…and for me, a tool I use daily.
My brief Lipitor experience was an unexpected demonstration of that. The drug created a state…the practice gave me the ground to stand on while I figured out what it was.
If you want to explore the Wheel of Awareness, Dan Siegel offers free guided Wheel meditations at drdansiegel.com. It’s a good place to start.