Metacognition is a key yet underutilised component of mindfulness. It is the elevated awareness, established from your observer self, of your thought processes, emotions, and the patterns that govern them. But what if metacognition is much more than this? It is the secret to unlocking new levels of self-development, inner peace, and spiritual alignment. Why? Because metacognitive states maximise your capacity to raise your consciousness and disentangle from the contents of your mind that might otherwise overwhelm you or distort or limit your perception. This transformative power of metacognition is central to advancing your spiritual consciousness and wellness, which in turn will benefit both you and the world.
How to Enter a Metacognitive State: Your First Step to Conscious Transformation
As you practise mindfulness and bring your attention back from the contents of your mind, you become aware of those contents from your observer self as just mental events and automatically enter a metacognitive state. The mindfulness of breathing meditation is a good basic technique to bring your attention back in this way by anchoring your attention onto your breath. Over time, mindfulness meditation strengthens your presence in your observer self and enhances your ability to enter and maintain metacognitive states.
In these metacognitive states, you can release the hold of mental events over you and create an empowering space for clarity and growth. With the right techniques, you can then access deeper layers of consciousness, fostering profound spiritual awakening.
Using Metacognitive States to Treat Anxiety and Depression
When you practise mindfulness and come back to your observer self, you can witness your thoughts, emotions, and sensations with non-judgement as transient mental events rather than as aspects of your self or direct reflections of truth (Teasdale et al., 2002). This metacognitive skill can de-escalate and prevent mental overwhelm and is the basis of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which is used effectively in clinical settings to reduce and prevent anxiety and depression. Patients learn to use mindfulness to induce a metacognitive state in which they disengage from ruminative and anxious thoughts and see them as temporary events in the mind that eventually pass. By creating this metacognitive distance, negative thoughts are no longer fed or amplified with constant attention and identification. Since patients are no longer entangled in them, they no longer create spirals of reactive thoughts and emotions, and, in cases of clinical depression or anxiety disorder, they no longer trigger a relapse.
According to John Teasdale (1999), who helped to develop mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, mindfulness gives us the skills to enter the “metacognitive insight mode, in which thoughts are experienced simply as events in the mind” rather than “direct readouts on reality”, and this can prevent a relapse of depression. A study by Teasdale et al. (2002) found that depressed patients were less able to enter metacognitive states than non-depressed controls. Mindfulness reduced relapse in recovered depressed patients by increasing their ability to experience metacognitive states.
Using Metacognitive States to Focus and Reduce Mind Wandering
Mind wandering is unconscious, automatic thinking that takes your attention away from the present moment. It can negatively impact you in several ways:
- Affecting your mental health by leading to overthinking with negative thoughts that spiral into anxiety or depression.
- Affecting your performance by causing you to lose focus, whether you’re working, learning, participating in sports, or engaging in important activities demanding your full attention.
- Reducing your awareness and comprehension while reading or listening.
- Causing you to lose sight of your choices and follow trains of maladaptive thoughts and automatic reactions.
- Making you dwell on the past or worry about the future, diminishing your power in the present moment.
- Causing you to lose presence and spiritual embodiment, hindering you from exploring and fulfilling your true life purpose and spiritual life path.
Mind wandering arises from a lack of metacognition, the requirement for effective focus. A metacognitive state helps you to regulate your thoughts and emotions with metacognitive skills, enabling you to maintain focus by keeping these potentially distracting thoughts and emotions from controlling you. By entering a metacognitive state and holding it consistently, you can hold your focus, prevent your attention from wandering, and attend better to the task or required focus of attention. This practice empowers you, maximising your presence, potential, and aliveness in the present moment.
Using Metacognitive States to Be More Conscious and Free Your Mind
Pause for a moment and consider how metacognition can make you more conscious and less automatised and reactive. In a metacognitive state, you can maximise your conscious awareness and disengage from the automatic and maladaptive habits of thinking and reacting that otherwise imprison you. You disentangle from the events of your mind that have been running automatically and controlling you. Entering a metacognitive state is, therefore, the key to freeing your mind and, by extension, your behaviour. Whether it’s an addiction, a compulsion, or an unconscious habit of thinking or reacting, you can disengage from it by entering a metacognitive state with mindfulness. The repeated cycle of responding automatically to cues that leads to life-limiting habitual behaviour is then broken.
By entering a metacognitive state and being conscious of your thoughts as simply events of the mind rather than direct readouts of reality, you can reappraise your thinking and spot the distortions of thinking and biases of your mind that you were previously unaware of. Being in a metacognitive state gives you greater freedom of choice to change your thoughts, perspectives, and beliefs. It’s like stepping out of a box. This is why mindfulness, when integrated into a spiritual practice, accelerates your growth and frees you from the trance that keeps you in limited, unconscious states.
Using Metacognitive States to Explore Your True Self
Metacognition creates the space for you to be more present in your true self and to explore your true nature. It can be challenging to embody and explore your true self when you have become identified with your thoughts, emotions, and behaviour through routine and living on autopilot. The same is true when your ability to be present in your true self is sabotaged by the endless distraction of thoughts, emotions, and external events and stimuli. This can weaken your spiritual embodiment and authenticity.
Given that your embodiment of your true self is critical for your life fulfilment and spiritual self-realisation, building and maintaining metacognitive states for the purpose of developing yourself and embodying your true self should be a priority, and the skill of doing so should be taught as a basic human skill along with learning to read and write.
When you practise mindfulness to disengage from the contents of your mind and its continual stimulation, you can allow yourself to be present in the infinity of the moment. It is through this presence and your experience of pure being, unmediated by reactive thought, that your false identifications, including the labels that you and others have put on yourself, can fall away. Conceptual overlays projected onto reality that limit your experience also fall away. The fragmentary experience of reality gives way to an increasingly unitive, infinite one that, if fully embraced and explored without resistance, can open the door to spiritual reality. You can then explore who you truly are by opening up to your spiritual nature and everything about you that was shrouded by your mind’s reactivity, conceptual overlays, and rational reductivism.
Summary
You can cultivate metacognitive states through mindfulness practices such as the mindfulness of breathing meditation. By consistently anchoring your attention on your breath and returning to your observer self, you strengthen these states. Metacognitive states maximise your conscious awareness and empower you to choose your thoughts and emotions with greater freedom. As a result, you can:
- Regulate your emotional states, allowing reactivity and difficult emotions to pass, reducing the likelihood of entering negative or anxious states.
- Reappraise the beliefs and perceptions that generate negative emotions, low mood, and cognitive distortions and biases.
- Maintain sharper focus for optimum attention, peak performance, and presence.
- Utilise metacognitive states to create an empowering space where you free your mind.
- Access deeper layers of consciousness to explore your true, spiritual nature.
Through metacognitive practice, you can reset your life and step into a more conscious, empowered way of being—one in which you fully embody your multidimensional self and align with your highest potential. By nurturing these metacognitive skills, you embark on a journey of profound spiritual growth.
Next Step: Developing metacognitive states is a key part of Spiritual Self-Development. To discover how to accelerate your spiritual growth and wellness through metacognitive awareness, book a Guidance Call now.
References
Teasdale, J. D. (1999). Metacognition, mindfulness and the modification of mood disorders. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 6(2), 146-155. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0879(199905)6:2%3C146::AID-CPP195%3E3.0.CO;2-E
Teasdale, J. D., Moore, R. G., Hayhurst, H., Pope, M., Williams, S., & Segal, Z. V. (2002). Metacognitive awareness and prevention of relapse in depression: Empirical evidence. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 70(2), 275-287. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-006x.70.2.275