If you’ve ever gone to a nutritionist for one reason or another, one of the first things they might have you do is log everything you eat in a day. This helps to establish a baseline for any changes that need to be made. Going into this process, you might be pretty certain that you’re a healthy eater. This belief is based on the fact that you value healthy eating and that you prioritize other healthy lifestyle habits such as exercising, and also there was that one time that you meditated for 3 days in a row and read some facts about supplements that you now have committed to memory. But what happens when you actually write down everything that you eat over the course of a few days? If you’re feeling itchy right now, you probably already know.
In most cases it turns out that valuing healthy eating is not the same as practicing healthy eating. Attention is currency, or expressed differently, it is a system of valuation. If there was an inventory taken of everything you paid attention to in a day, that would show you what your values look like in practice. If that feels a little uncomfortable to think about, that’s a great sign that you have enough of a starting point of self awareness for these practices to make a difference in your life.
Attention is one of our most powerful resources. I’m sure you’ve heard that saying: where your attention goes, energy flows. Focus creates and activates neural networks in your brain, enabling literal energy to be directed towards what you pay attention to. But this isn’t the whole story; that saying needs an extension: where energy flows, doors open and close ... where energy flows, something new arose, or more is disclosed…
The point is, attention is not passive. According to physics, the observer effect is the phenomenon in which the act of observing something necessarily changes it. Conscious attention activates a reciprocal energy exchange between you and whom or what you're valuing with your attention. And to stay true to the science, it’s not just what you observe but how.
On a quantum level, it is impossible to measure both the speed and the position of a particle at the same time, due to the wave-like nature of matter. When an observer asks questions about the qualities of a particle, the implied assumption of being able to know something in a static state collapses the wave function of the particle. Think of a ripple in a body of water. If we wanted to know the qualities or position of one peak of a wave, we would have to freeze it in time. If we wanted to know about the movement or the flow of the wave, we would have to let go of any definite understanding of its qualities, as it is constantly changing.
To be continuously releasing our expectations of what we’re attending to is to bring the world to life, through our relationship with it. In the following practices for paying attention, challenge yourself to let go of the aim of definitive knowing. Instead, pay attention to the world through your entangled movement.
The practices:
Listening walks: Go for a short walk and take in all the sounds around you, especially attuning to nature sounds. Pay attention to what you hear outside of you, rather than to the contents of your own head. If you notice that your attention gets diverted inwardly, simply shift it back out. I’ve been assigning these listening walks (and listening runs) to the people I coach who are training for endurance events, as we’re working on incorporating experiences of flow for increased performance. Since a flow state is a synchronization of your inner and outer worlds, this is a useful tool for attaining the type of attention that integrates you - the listener - with your environment.
See yourself from above: This is best done outside to include a wider range of focus. Take the perspective of an imagined drone flying above your head. It may be difficult to see yourself from another perspective but give it a try and see what you notice.
Pay attention to the angle of the sun coming in through a particular window every day. Think of your window as an aperture: an opening that allows a particular amount of light through. Watch how the light changes across time and seasons. Build a relationship with our closest star.
Pay attention to the energetic or emotional qualities of a space. Have you ever walked into a room and immediately felt the tension of whatever was going on in there? Since emotions are not confined to a particular body but can inhabit space, pay attention to how different qualities of particular environments influence mood and behavior. Maybe you notice that different types of lighting affect your ability to be creatively inspired. Maybe the setting of a particular coffee shop gives you more outward social energy while another one gives you more internal productive energy. Or maybe you’ve been concerned with your low libido lately when really the problem has been the energy in your bedroom. Burn some sage to clear that bad energy out and then be more intentional about creating an energetic space that suits you.
Natural navigation: I have always had an impressively terrible sense of direction and never considered that there was anything I could do about it. Recently, I read a book called “The Natural Navigator” by Tristan Gooley, who invites us to awaken to the ways in which our senses determine our experience and our understanding within the natural world. One helpful tool for those of us who have navigational deficiencies is a way of paying attention to the relationship between temperature and smell. Gooley says, “There is a difference in smell between open land and woods and this can be used to find your way out of the woods if you pick it up on the breeze. If the sun is bright and the wind light, then you might be able to sense a pocket of warm air that is richer in smell. This is where an opening in the wood has allowed sunlight in to warm the vegetation and create a stronger smell.” Gooley also reminds us that there are biases in our view of the world that manifest themselves in what we notice. For example, we are much more sensitive to shape than we are to color. We will notice the path curving away in front of us but will fail to notice the subtle shift in hue from one side to another. Practice paying attention to features of a landscape that you might not typically notice.
Pay attention to someone you love as if you don’t know them as well as you think you do. When we see people as we expect them to be, even if our expectation is that they are perfect and wonderful, we don’t see them as they truly are and we limit their ability to grow. Maybe you’re still seeing your partner or your kid as who they were a few years ago and expecting them to behave from that place, rather than giving them space to evolve without confinement. This is why practices for paying attention comes right after practices for doing nothing. Watch what happens when we empty our minds and free ourselves and our loved ones of our own patterned seeing.
Speaking of patterns, break one: Anytime we break an ingrained pattern, we have no choice but to pay attention. For example, if you move to a new place of residence, you have to pay attention to so many things that used to be on autopilot, like all the routes you drive to and from your new home. Notice how thought patterns are intertwined with movement patterns and how a different morning routine inspires an energetic influx to begin your day with.
When we pay attention with the world, through interwoven open-ended movement, we intuitively know something about our speed and direction. Let’s bring this all the way back to the first essay in this series, where I first introduced the topic:
“Wayfinding Topic 4: If you want to know the future, tune into as many intricacies of the present moment as possible. Challenge the assumption that goals should be big and lofty. Consider how the smallest goals can be the most revolutionary goals. Take nothing for granted.”
We don’t discern where we’re going by focusing our attention on the distant future, constructing plans and contingencies for an abstracted existence. When we do so, we collapse the wave function of living and drive ourselves crazy trying to operate through time as if standing still. There are steps and order to creation but they are up close, not far away. The order of the practices in this series have been: attention in (grounding), then out (life force), then in (rest & nonproductivity), then out (paying attention).
These practices are breathing. They are creation through living, up close.
After sending attention out through our sense perceptions, including the 5 recognized senses as well as our intuitive senses, we breathe what we have gathered back in. We integrate ourselves further into the world through grounding, and we begin again. Through paying attention and gathering information about our direction, we either confirm our path or make small revolutionary shifts, 1 breath cycle at a time.