Sinopsis
SOME DAYS we flow
easily through our lives, while other days we struggle to get by. We might feel
loving, generous, and absorbed one moment, and critical, unfeeling, or irritable
the next. A problem might feel overwhelming in the morning and seem like “no
big deal†by afternoon. A pain in a leg may pound one minute and feel like
it’s gone the next. What accounts for these changes? In my view, the most
fundamental reason is a spontaneous change in styles of paying attention. People
are affected by shifts in attention all the time, but they usually don’t
realize that changes in how they feel have to do with changes in the way they
attend to thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations.
Shifts in styles of attention—in the way we shape and direct our
awareness—play a large, unrecognized role in our lives. In fact, our choice of
type and direction of our attention is vital. Certain kinds of attention can
quickly dissolve physical pain and emotional stress and can cause widespread
changes in physiology. It is my view that any therapy or relaxation technique
that helps us make positive changes works, at least in part, by bringing about
beneficial shifts in attention.
A large part of the pleasure and relaxation we get from watching a movie or
fishing or going on vacation, for example, derives from these activities
changing, for a while, the way we pay attention. On vacation we stop narrowly
focusing on the bills, work, or other responsibilities, and our physiology
responds in a positive way. Vacations also broaden attention to include a
multisensory awareness (for example, the whiff of salt water or the smell of
pine trees) as we take in uncommon environs we have not yet learned about.
My own research and clinical experience over the past four decades strongly
suggest that the way we attend has powerful and immediate effects on the nervous
system. (For a detailed scientific overview of my research into the role of
attention in mental and physical health, see the appendix and www.openfocus.com.)
Attention is all-encompassing in our lives. Feeling at home is the result of
a way of paying attention. Love is a way of paying attention. When we pay
attention in a rigid, effortful, and thus stressed way, it is a drag on the
entire mind-body system: We are more likely to overreact in ways that are
fearful, angry, effortful, rigid, and resistant. When we pay attention in a
flexible way we are more accepting, comfortable, energetic, aware, healthy,
productive, and in the flow. Full attention leads to creativity, spontaneity,
acceptance, faith, empathy, integration, productivity, flexibility, efficiency,
stress reduction, endurance, persistence, accuracy, perspective, and
compassion.
Let me clarify an essential point about improving our health and well-being
through the power of our attention: The issue it is not what we attend
to. Far more critical is how we attend, how we form and direct our
awareness, and how we adhere—rigidly or flexibly—to a chosen style of
attention.
Whether we realize it or not, we pay attention with our whole body and mind,
in ways that are measurable. Our style of attention impacts the brain’s
electrical rhythms, as can be shown in an electroencephalogram, or EEG.
Because the brain is the master control panel for our mind and body, when we
change its electrical patterns we initiate systemwide effects, including changes
in muscle tension, respiratory rate, and the flow of neurotransmitters and
hormones. Our perception, memory, information processing, performance,
physiology, and emotional well-being are all influenced by (and, in my view,
often subordinate to) attention.
In our culture we do not recognize or make use of the full repertoire of
attention styles. Few of us are consciously aware that there are different
styles of attention, each with different qualities and each suited to different
kinds of tasks. Instead, we are culturally biased to stay locked in limited
modes of attention, to our great detriment. Many of my clients feel trapped or
walled in, and they do not know what the walls are made of or how to dissolve
them. Many know they built the walls themselves somehow, but they think they are
constructed out of the content of their awareness—by the things that have
happened to them in their lives—or by any number of external factors and their
thoughts about them. They can’t find their way out because they are stuck in a
process of continually scanning the content of their problems for a solution,
when the walls that trap them are largely made out of attentional biases.
Content
- An Addiction to Narrow Focus
- Sweet Surrender: Discovering the Benefits of Synchronous Alpha Brain Waves
- The Full Complement of Attention
- What Lies Beneath: Anxiety
- Dissolving Physical Pain
- Dissolving Emotional Pain
- Love Is a Way of Paying Attention: Open-Focus Tools for Relationships
- Peak Performance
- Living in Open Focus
- Attention and Psychotherapy
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