The Mastery of Awareness
The mastery of awareness is the first step toward reclaiming your freedom. Not freedom as the world defines it, but the deep, quiet kind—freedom from the unconscious patterns that drive your choices, your emotions, and your perception of reality. For many people, the mind is in control. It repeats old fears and inherited beliefs and calls it identity. But the mind isn’t you. And awareness begins when you finally see that.
The mind is not a villain, but it is conditioned. It was shaped by survival, by domestication, by a culture of reward and punishment. It was taught to keep you safe by hiding your wounds. And so it did—burying your grief, your shame, your longing, and wrapping your life in performance instead of presence. It prefers you think rather than feel. It narrates instead of letting you notice. It loops instead of letting you land. But once you begin to observe this voice instead of identifying with it, the spell breaks. This is the core of the Mastery of Awareness.
When I first entered this work, I found that my inner world was ringed with what felt like electrified fences of fear. Behind each fence was a well of something unnameable. The mind told me I’d never survive going in. That I’d lose everything. That I’d die. But I was desperate enough to test the story. And when I finally crossed one of those fences, what I found wasn’t death—it was pain. My own pain. My old pain. The real pain I had been trained to avoid. It hurt like hell. But it also passed. And on the other side of that pain, I found clarity. I found presence. I found power.
The Mastery of Awareness is not about controlling your mind. It’s about watching it. Learning its patterns. Stalking its habits. Becoming the seer instead of the believer. And it’s about reclaiming your capacity to feel. To feel what’s actually there, not just what’s safe. This work requires brutal ruthless honesty. But honesty is how you find what’s real underneath the performance. The mind may be the narrator, but you are the awareness behind it.
In the Toltec teachings, this process is sometimes called “stopping the world.” It refers to the moment you stop reacting automatically to the stories your mind tells you. When you stop the world, you stop the machinery. And when the machinery pauses, you can choose. You can see clearly. You can stop creating from fear and begin responding from presence.
This is where the mastery of co-creation begins: not in manifesting what you think you want, but in learning how to stop creating from distortion. When your awareness is still hijacked by fear, shame, or survival beliefs, what you “create” is just a projection of your pain. But when you reclaim your attention, when you witness the mind without letting it drive, something shifts. Your energy becomes coherent. And from that coherence, the field around you begins to respond differently.
The truth is, you live in two realities. The mind’s reality, which is shaped by wounds and expectations. And the heart’s reality, which is awareness itself. The more energy you give to the mind, the more solid and fixed your world becomes. But the more energy you take back into your presence, the more flexible the dream becomes. This isn’t metaphor. This is how energy works. What you give your attention to grows. When you begin to withdraw energy from your mind and redirect it into awareness, you change the world you live in.
You don’t need to be spiritual to understand this. You just need to be willing to notice what’s actually happening inside you. Your thoughts are not neutral. Every thought has an emotional charge. Every pattern in your mind is tied to a wound it’s trying to avoid. Most of what we call our “reality” is really just our mind protecting us from feeling what we haven’t processed. And what we haven’t processed keeps showing up—over and over—until we do.
This is not an easy path. Most people are too busy avoiding themselves to walk it. But if you want to wake up, you will eventually have to feel. And the moment you’re willing to feel—not just think, not just analyze, but actually feel—your awareness expands. You reconnect with the power of presence. You start to see where your patterns came from, what they’re trying to protect, and what they’re costing you. And then you can choose something else.
Awareness is the beginning of freedom. It is the point where you stop feeding the lie. You don’t have to fight it. You just have to stop believing it. Stop giving your energy to the thought loops, to the judgments, to the roles. Start watching them instead. When you watch the mind without reacting, you reclaim your awareness. And from there, you reclaim your life.
This is where true intuition begins to come online—not as a mystical voice from the heavens, but as the quiet knowing that rises when the noise stops. Intuition isn’t a trick or a technique. It’s what your awareness naturally perceives when it’s no longer blocked by story. The more awareness you reclaim, the clearer your inner guidance becomes. The more you feel what’s really here, the more the next step reveals itself.
Awareness also asks us to accept. Not to condone or agree, but to stop resisting what is. Resistance feeds the mind. Acceptance feeds the heart. The more you judge your reality, the more you stay trapped in it. But when you begin to accept what you see, feel what you feel, and own your reactions as yours, something softens. Something opens. And in that opening, new choices emerge.
This is not just a Toltec path. This is a human path. The Toltec tradition offers a beautiful language for it—domestication, the parasite, the dream of the planet. But underneath the language, it’s the same work everyone must do if they want to stop suffering: reclaim your attention, observe your mind, feel your body, take your energy back, and remember what is real.
Awareness is not about becoming enlightened. It’s about becoming real. Honest. Present. Willing. It’s about noticing when you leave yourself and learning how to come back. Over and over again. And every time you do, you make it easier to live in coherence. Every time you do, you bring yourself closer to joy. Not the joy of escape or achievement, but the peace and joy of being—the kind that doesn’t depend on anything outside of you.
This is where the path begins. And where it always returns.
How to work with Todd
Todd works with individuals and groups. He does one on one teaching, group presentations, and works with companies.
Options for working with Todd:
- Individual coaching
- Apprenticeship
- Group talks/presentations for personal growth and change
- Retreats for groups or individuals