How do you use your attention? Do you think of it as a weapon, something that you wield like a laser? Or is it undefined in your mind and so it’s become this vague unwieldy miasmal spray? Or is it something in between? Something you’ve honed but never needed to define or find the root of or its function and force?

Growing up we’re told to pay attention all the time. But we’re never taught how to manage or use our attention. And we’re always told to direct our attention outward away from its source and power. So we’re not taught to embody our attention or the energy behind it. If you think about it on a larger scale this makes you easier to control. If we don’t consider our innate intelligence, our gut, heart, or brain and instead record experiences without discernment, our learning experiences become quite shallow and boring and again, easily swayed to believe whatever we’re fed.

What effect does technology have on your ability to pay attention? Distractions and interruptions bring us to new levels of stress and frustration. We’re overloaded with information making it harder to determine what’s important and what’s not. In order to choose for yourself and not be led and deceived and distracted I’d say the most important thing would be to strengthen and hone your ability to be attentive, starting with your breath and brain.

Energy follows attention so whatever you pay attention to receives the benefits of that energy that you’re paying out. We pay out all day long from a limited budget and by sundown we’re spent. When we do pay attention to ourselves it’s our thoughts that get fed. The downside to that is that thoughts cause tension and the reverse is also true: tension causes thinking. It’s a debilitating loop that gets played out over a lifetime. Tension builds all day long and if we don’t clear it from our body before we fall asleep it gets locked in and we wake up achy or tired or lost in a cloud of thinking, once again.

If you’re a chronic thinker like I was it can change your life to learn to direct your attention. The best place to start is with your breathing. How do you do that? Is it obvious? Most people seem to think so. But here are some things you might not have considered about breathing? Are you breathing equally into both lungs? This gives your thinking brain something productive to do: compare and contrast. There are some benefits to thinking. Here you’re taming your thought driven mind and transitioning over to a quiet mind. Do you know where your lungs are? Did you know that the left lung has two lobes and the right one has three? Reason being that the heart is nestled to the left of center in your chest.  Find your heart. Imagine the waters around the heart in the pericardium. What do you imagine the water looks and feels like? Dark and heavy or light and flowing? Where’s your diaphragm? Is it moving up or down when you inhale? Do you breathe into your back and sides of your ribs? What’s a reflexive breath? Is your throat open? Or tense? Where’s your spine in relation to your throat? What’s happening in your sinuses? Can you take one full breath without thinking? What effect does thinking have on your breathing? Is your breath smooth or ratchety? Do you dump air out of your lungs on the exhale? Most any habit you’ve developed in regard to breathing can be addressed with the right kind of attention and instruction.

If you fed your attention, put energy into directing it, you could move mountains. The mountains are inside you. A mountain is what appears between you and what you want. It’s a blockage or resistance. If your mind is subtle and quiet and focused it can dissolve the disrupter, the negative thought form, the physical tension, the emotional chaos or confusion.  

With attention you can open up airways, free yourself from repetitive thoughts, soothe anxieties, relieve physical pain, learn about yourself: how your mind and body work, eliminate negative behaviors and patterns, rewire your brain, improve or enhance your vision and hearing, learn to relax, delve into your unconscious and discover new levels of power and awareness. With attention and will power and imagination we can go wherever your curiosity takes you.

Regarding the brain, we spend most of our time in the language lobes, ignoring the rest. Thinking is actually a weak force compared to raw sensation, breath, vision, movement, energy, vibration, listening, intuition, instinct, time and timelessness, space, compassion, personal space, voice, and empathy. If you were to LIGHT UP the visual cortex you would escape the constant noise from repetitive self-talk, which can be entertaining at times, but is usually a distraction and a drain.

Our thinking demands our focus. And we are trained to rely on our thinking to figure out our problems, when it’s thinking that is causing the problem, or keeping us from neutralizing our reactions to a trauma or anxiety. Thinking becomes a rut, chronic and unhealthy. By moving to the back lobe of the brain, the visual cortex, we escape thought-fueled worries or over-planning or the creation of false scenarios that we can react to emotionally. From there we can observe our thoughts without being negatively affected by them.

One of the keys to Brainwork is moving your attention to the back of your brain. This is your occipital lobe or visual cortex. To find out more make an appointment by emailing me at xanderteacher@aol.com.Website: Bradleybrainwork.com. Bob Bradley 631-275-6954