Paying attention to my attention
Have you attended a yoga class with your mind absent? Have you worked on a painting but your mind was on how to impress everyone? I have, it felt as if my body and mind had taken different paths, I was there but I wasn’t actually there.
As I started to know more about the somatic body, I learned something miraculous. We can direct our breath to where we want in the body. When we focus on a discomfort, it intensifies. When we direct our breath to that discomfort and exhale through it, it gets soothed. This was and still is a shock for me. I’ve always thought soothing requires an external force, a remedy with active ingredients, an ointment, or at least a massage! It is shocking because this means what the mind thinks can directly affect how the body feels.
Attention is the lead
In Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a well-known principle is that “意到、氣到、身到”, which can be directly translated to “mind arrives, breath arrives, movement arrives”.
Attention is the lead. Breath is the bridge, bringing energy. Movement follows. The unseen guides the seen.
I grew up reading a lot of Jin Yong kungfu novels, so learning about all these just reminds me of the scenes where the character sat for hours to work on the internal Qi with unwavering focus. Sometimes the enemies would appear in the most pivotal moment when the highest concentration was needed. The character got distracted, the Qi went to the wrong meridian path, he got injured internally and vomited blood.
The empowering truth
Examine this formula, the mind → the breath → the physical. Notice how your breath is short and shallow when your mind is scattered. It feels as if the breath reaches the throat, barely touches the chest, and leaves. Notice how your mind settles, when you simply apply a breathing technique, such as 4-4-4-4 box breathing. How about the link to the physical? Dr John D. Young, the author of the book Breathe to Heal, noted that majority of the sick are with breathing issues. A recent study found that one month of daily 5-min breathwork practices significantly enhanced mood and reduced physiological stress.
If this is indeed the formula, then we are indeed creators of our realities. Why? Because we can control the first two upstream factors. We can work on focusing the mind, we can also work on changing the breath. In other words, when our physical reality is not what we prefer, we should examine the breath and the mind. The honest truth is, we are FULLY responsible of the reality we are in.
The empowerment lies here, in our hands.
So what, practically?
The reason I talk about this is that I find more and more need to say that our attention is everything. It is easy to scroll on social media pages for hours. It is easy to mindlessly stick your eyes on your mobile phone. Why is it so addictive, from kids to elderlies? Because it is a great distraction from the glaring discomfort we are feeling towards the reality. Why is it so harmful? Because it numbs the awareness we have towards our body, it allows negativity to grow without us realising. For example, attention on negativity → breath into negativity → body stores negativity. This feels bad so to self-distract, I pay even more attention on negativity (for the dopamine triggers). Every fucking element is not flowing right yet the loop continues. I think, this is an opinion that I have not found enough concrete evidence, but I think, this is how some illness, such as cancers, seems to happen out of nowhere.
So practically, be very very very mindful of where your attention goes. Stop yourself when you notice that it is going to where you dislike, there is no need to judge yourself, just bring it back to where you want it to be. Make this a daily practice.
And on an economic standpoint, your attention is how money is made. Attention equals to sale nowadays. So your attention is a very valuable currency that acts as a vote. What you pay attention to is what you are voting for.
The better we master “unscattering” the mind, the better we can vote for what is really important, and the better we can create aligned actions to manifest what is meaningful to us.
