Where is your focus? This one can shift everything. It is deceptively simple, so simple it is easy to miss. Where we put our attention creates our reality. What we give energy to grows. Numerous teachers have brought this to our awareness but most of us are blinded by the drama of the external world, seduced in to focusing on fear, on challenges, on pain. We have been both conditioned and trained to put our attention on the problem as a way to resolve things. Yet repeatedly experience shows us another direction. As a parent, if we place a lot of attention on our child’s misbehavior the problem is likely to increase, especial when we tend to escalate our reactions to the problem. Yet when the misbehavior is greeted with loving attention and curiosity, compassion, quickly the behavior is likely to be extinguished.
To shift our attention in the face of difficult circumstances is no easy task. Yet numerous masters and spiritual teacher’s recommend just that. It is valuable to find a way to focus our attention perhaps through a daily spiritual practice, a journal, a 32 day process for creating new habitual responses. To make this shift one must make a deep commitment to a daily, perhaps even hourly inquiry into where our attention is. We can even use a stopwatch or timer to set an alarm throughout the day to take just a moment to notice, is my attention on love or fear. I just discovered the book “The Greatest Secret in the Wold” by Og Mandino with a 45 week program to focus attention which I intend to utilize to support me in a strong daily focus on love and fullfilling my life purpose.
This does not mean that when a wave of emotions arises we do not ride it. It is vital to ride and allow all waves of emotions. It is meant to be energy in motion. The art is to ride the wave and then get off when the wave has crested, returning to focus on the inherent qualities of our own magnificence rather then getting lost or trapped in the emotion. It is a delicate art to learn but one that reaps rich rewards.
This speaks to the theme:
remembering the joy of being
