AWARENESS / NOISE

Awareness is the flashlight beam of attention.  Some people are penlights held close to a surface.  Their world is small and bright.  Other people are large flashlights whose beam covers a bigger area.  Some are spotlights who light up huge fields.  In each case, the area that is lighted is the world that particular individual lives in.

The size of our flashlight depends on what we pay attention to.  If I am a penlight that is curious to see more, I can pull back from the surface and light up a bigger spot.  I can keep backing up to see more, more and more.  My curiosity will cause my beam to grow and, without noticing it, I will become a bigger flashlight living in a bigger world.

This is all about what I pay attention to and how much attention I pay to it.  If my attention is diluted or clouded, I can’t see as well and my world gets smaller.  I am living in a fog.

Our media provide the fog by overstimulating and misdirecting our attention.  Our media provide the noise that blocks the signal of our clarity.  This noise can overwhelm the signal.  We can become confused.  We can become lost.

Fortunately, we have remedies to this confusion. 

We need to get quiet.  Inwardly, we can bring our attention the here and now with meditation and mindfulness.  Outwardly, we can turn off the TV and radio and put down our cell phones.

The noise has an on/off switch.  Use it.

CHANGE THE SUBJECT

Thoughts are like birds that fly through the sky of our attention.  Some may sit on a wire and hang around for a while if you pay attention to them.  Otherwise, they simply fly by.  One thought follows another. 

What you pay attention to is the key.  You have control over what you do, or don’t, pay attention to.

Some thoughts are sticky and hard to let go of.  They have aroused an emotional response in you.  In other words, you can feel them.  If you have gotten stuck to a bad-feeling thought by paying attention to it, it can be hard to shake.  You do have a choice, though.  You can change the subject.

Choose a good feeling thought.  Since you can’t really think more than one thought at a time, the new, better feeling thought, will push the bad-feeling thought aside.  You can replace your thoughts as often as you wish.  Change the subject until you find a really good-feeling thought and stick with it.  This is just as arbitrary and artificial as it sounds, but it works.

Good feeling thoughts are the ones that are consistent with your highest good in some way.  That’s why they feel good.  Concentrating on them will bring positive experiences into your life.  This is automatic.  You don’t have to think about it.

GOOD DAYS

Immersed as we are in the familiar routines of ordinary life, it is easy for us to lose the sense of wonder that we had as children.  Each fresh morning is a new birth filled with bright possibilities.

 

I ask myself, will I make my day a rerun of my yesterdays?  Or, will I see, with clean sight, the chances that are open to me?   Will I see the possibilities?

If yesterday was delicious, I might follow a similar path and set up a version of yesterday that I can enjoy today.  But, I don’t need to be locked into a version of yesterday unless I want to be.  I might have commitments like a job or family ties that seen to lay out the skeleton of my day but the flesh of it, the tone of it, the flavor of it, comes out of my attitudes and expectations.  I get to choose those.

It’s all about choice and choice is about thoughts.  One important thing about thoughts is that I can change them.  They are more or less under my control.  I can contradict a bad-feeling thought by internally changing the subject or I can reward a good-feeling thought by paying attention to it and approving of it.  I need to be noticing what I’m feeling/thinking to be able to do this.  The key is attention.  I need to be focused.  That means that I need to be awake to my feelings in the moment. 

It is true that one thought leads to another.  It is also true that any thought will lead to another that is like itself.  I can enjoy an ascending series of good-feeling thoughts or a descending cascade of miseries depending on my starting thought and my reaction to it. That’s my choice.

Every moment can be a new start.

The best place to start is with gratitude.  If I begin my fresh new moment by saying and feeling “thank you” for good things in my life, I will kick off a positive chain reaction.  This attention to good things will allow me to notice other good-feeling opportunities that I can act on to keep my energy flowing in the right direction.

The better it gets, the better it can get.  The opposite is also true.

We are all chain-thinkers.  We run on habit.  If we take the trouble to redirect our thoughts toward good-feeling ones enough times, this pattern will become our habit.

While our best alternative is to be alert, alive and fully present in every moment, the habit of choosing good-feeling thoughts is a pretty good second choice.

BEING HERE NOW

Being present in your own life is the same as being fully alive.  It seems silly to even say that.  We all think that we are present in our lives all of the time, at least during waking hours.

The truth is that we are mostly running on habit, conditioned behavior.  Or, we are daydreaming, lost in memories of a past that does not exist or projecting futures that also do not exist.  While we are busy doing these things, we are absent to the present moment which is the only time that does exist.  It is only in this moment that we are alive.  Most of us spend most of our time not being alive and we don’t even notice.

What to do?

Control of attention is the key.  If I can purposely pay attention to exactly what my senses are reporting and to what emotions I am feeling, I am here, now.  It takes effort to do this.  So, at first, it will seem like a lot of trouble to stay present.  My attention may wander back into habitual tracks.  When I notice this, I’ll refocus my attention back in the moment.  It’s a little tug-of-war that I play with myself.  It’s good to keep a sense of humor about this.  If I persist long enough, I will notice something interesting.  I will begin to habitually focus my attention on the present.

What a weird idea!  Habitually being alive!  I’ll settle for that.

OUR EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM

We are constantly making decisions in our everyday life.  Most of these decisions are so minor and routine that we don’t even notice that we are making them.  This is where habits are useful.  We can run on automatic pilot, making predetermined moves, without giving them any thought.  That’s pretty efficient.  It saves time, energy and headspace.  We don’t really have to pay attention.

The downside of not paying attention, of being unaware, is that AWARENESS EQUALS LIFE.  When we are not aware, we are not really present and not really alive.  So, it’s a good idea to control the amount of automatic behavior that we allow into our days.  We need attention breaks when we pull our heads out of the haze of habit and become fully present.  You probably have favorite ways to come into the present. Most of us do.  We just have to remember to use them.

The bigger decisions in life, the ones that directly bear on our happiness and wellbeing, can be harder to make.  The rational mind is not much help.  It’s too easy to get into a “On the one hand” and “On the other hand” debate in your mind and get stuck there. 

Conventional wisdom tells us you should “follow your heart”.  That’s good advice but what does it mean?  I think it means that I should pay attention to my emotions.

Emotions have gotten a bad rap.  They are sometimes thought of as trivial, petty, irrational and undependable.  They can be all of that if we don’t know how to use them.

Emotions are precise tools.  They are the responses of my wiser self to the exact thought that I am thinking at any moment.  Good feeling emotions indicate that my current thought is in agreement with my best interests.  Bad feeling emotions indicate that my current thought is in conflict with my best interests.  My emotions are an internal compass that allows me to steer my life toward happiness and fulfillment.

I steer by choosing thoughts that feel good when I think them.