Expanding your consciousness means widening the field of your attention — becoming aware of what normally runs on autopilot (your reactions, your ego, your inherited patterns) and staying present enough to choose your next move instead of repeating an old one. It is less about reaching an exotic state and more about noticing more, more of the time, without flinching away from what you find. Awareness that widens like this tends to feel grounded rather than floaty: you become more present to your body, your emotions and the people in front of you, not less.
There is measurable substance behind the claim that sustained practice changes awareness. In a 2004 study in PNAS, long-term meditators with an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 hours of training self-induced high-amplitude gamma-band synchrony — among the largest sustained values ever reported in healthy people — while deliberately generating a state of open, nonreferential awareness. A later 2011 PNAS study found that experienced meditators showed reduced activity in the brain’s default mode network, the circuitry linked to mind-wandering and self-referential chatter. Neither study proves any metaphysical claim, but together they suggest something practical: trained attention is a skill, and the “background noise” most of us take as fixed can quiet down with repetition.
What does “expanding consciousness” actually mean?
In practice it means becoming aware of the automatic self. This is the throughline of the Value Verses conversation between Niels Ramaekers and therapist Daniel Derweduwen, whose whole aim, as he puts it, is to help people “expand their consciousness — and that is ultimately what it is all about.” Derweduwen’s clearest example is the ego. He is emphatic that the ego is not the enemy; the problem is running it unconsciously. His metaphor is a radio: when you understand what the ego is for, “the volume knob stays at five” and it serves you; when you are in fear and disconnected from yourself, the volume jumps to ten and it starts pushing everyone away. Expanding consciousness, in his framing, is simply the capacity to notice which setting you are on — and that noticing is what gives you a choice.
That reframes the goal. You are not trying to escape ordinary life for a peak experience; you are trying to be awake inside ordinary life. The wider path this belongs to is the path from research, truth and wisdom to inner transformation — and expanding awareness is the faculty that makes every other step on it possible.
Practices that widen awareness
Derweduwen offers a concrete starting point rather than a philosophy. Sit still, he says, breathe slowly through the nose so the diaphragm drops and the belly rises, rest your hands together at the navel, and then review what has happened in your life over the last three months — but look at it without judgment, “neither toward another, nor toward yourself.” The instruction to drop judgment is the active ingredient: it is what lets you feel what is actually there, including the pain you would normally skip past, without collapsing into blame.
The best thing you can do is sit still for a moment and breathe through your nose… then look at everything that has happened, without judgment — neither toward another, nor toward yourself. — Daniel Derweduwen (translated from Dutch)
A daily version is enough: a few minutes of slow nasal breathing, then a non-judgmental scan of whatever is present in your attention. The research direction agrees — the gains in the studies above came from repetition, not intensity. If your attention feels crowded or hijacked, it may be less about needing more focus and more about protecting the quiet you already have; that is the ground covered in protect your inner clarity.
Why presence and grounding come before insight
Derweduwen is insistent that you cannot raise awareness while you feel unsafe. He talks about needing your own “territory” — a grounded sense of safety, security and self-worth — as the precondition for higher energy: without it, he says, other people “continuously violate your boundaries” and you lose the energy you were trying to lift. Practically, that means presence comes before any breakthrough. He suggests arranging even a small physical space around you with objects that reflect something you like about yourself, precisely because a felt sense of safety is what allows attention to expand rather than contract into defense.
This is also why the work has to start with yourself. His repeated point — “you can only help others once you have first solved your own problem” — is not selfishness but sequence: a scattered, unsafe nervous system cannot hold wider awareness for long. Steadying yourself first is what makes the expansion sustainable. If your own signal feels buried, the companion piece reclaim your inner spark and inner wisdom walks that recovery directly.
Why dropping the fight raises your energy
The most useful shift Derweduwen names is the move out of what he calls dualistic thinking — the habit of splitting everything into enemy and ally, good and bad, and then fighting one side. “In a fight,” he asks, “where does the attention go? To the fight.” As long as you are braced against something, your awareness stays narrow and low. His alternative is to see contradictions “as a whole” — to treat what you are not as a mirror that helps you define what you are, rather than an opponent to defeat. When the fight drops, he says, the energy is free to rise.
You do not have to accept his wider metaphysical picture — the “power of God,” the language of light and love splitting into polarities, or ascension across many lifetimes are his spiritual framework, offered as his perspective, not as established fact — to use the practical core. Expanding consciousness, on the ground, looks like this: breathe, notice without judging, steady yourself in a safe space, and stop fighting the parts of experience you would rather not have. Awareness widens in the space that opens up.
If you want to practice this with structure and support, the Ramaekers Academy runs guided breathwork, meditation and self-healing sessions built for exactly this kind of daily return — and if you would rather begin one honest step at a time, start with the first step of inner transformation.
