Sustained Awareness Practice and Changing Self-Identification: A 22-Year Autoethnographic Case Study of Self-Observation

This preprint develops and demonstrates a transparent methodological approach for analyzing a single-researcher, long-duration first-person archive. The approach is illustrated through an approximately 22-year archive of self-directed awareness practice maintained from 2004 to 2026. The paper addresses a specific methodological problem: how to analyze first-person material when the researcher, participant, and analyst are the same person, but the person who produced the earliest records differs substantially—in knowledge, vocabulary, and interpretive framework—from the person who later analyzes them. To address this problem, the proposed procedure combines three commitments: a temporal-provenance framework distinguishing contemporaneous, transcribed, and retrospective material; an explicit separation between inductively derived codes and pre-existing sensitizing concepts; and a documented second-pass search for disconfirming evidence. The procedure is demonstrated through three worked analytic examples tracing the movement from raw archival material to interpretive patterns. An illustrative subset of eighteen excerpts, concentrated in 2004–2006 and 2026, is analyzed in detail. The analysis identifies seven principal first-person phenomenological patterns, represented unevenly across the excerpts, and presents four exploratory propositions drawn from the wider archive. Three disconfirming episodes from the early transformation period are also examined. These episodes are consistent with an uneven rather than steadily cumulative account of reported change. The paper relates the observed patterns conceptually to decentering, self-distancing, and metacognitive awareness. However, no standardized psychological instrument was administered, and no equivalence with these constructs is claimed. The primary contribution is methodological: a documented procedure that other researchers may apply, evaluate, and adapt when working with comparable long-duration personal archives, including journals, diaries, practitioner logs, blogs, and other extended first-person records. The procedure is demonstrated in one archive; it is not presented as validated and has not yet been independently applied. A secondary contribution is a candidate descriptive formulation for future psychological research: a longitudinal change in the experienced relationship between cognitive-affective events and self-identification. The preprint also discusses positionality, limitations, alternative interpretations, evidential boundaries, and recommendations for researchers studying long-duration first-person material. It does not claim to establish a general psychological law or to provide clinical evidence. Rather, it offers a transparent case-based method for examining how patterns of self-observation and self-identification may be documented and analyzed over extended periods. Keywords: autoethnography; longitudinal qualitative methods; temporal provenance; positionality; phenomenology; self-identification; self-observation; awareness practice; pure awareness; first-person research; reflective practice; qualitative analysis