Attention

Don’t think about that white elephant! Of course, now that’s all you can notice in your mind. Where we place our attention is where we rest our power.

What you put attention on, you grant power. Where you choose to place your attention, then, is a crucial decision.

Yoga and meditation teachers often use the words ‘attention’ and ‘awareness’ interchangeably. To me they are fundamentally different, as they create two fundamentally different experiences of reality.

Attention means being focused on one thing. Awareness means taking in multiple things at once. Focusing on one thing gives us a distorted view of reality, especially when we focus on the most negative thing happening in any given moment. Learning to move from attention to awareness can transform your practice both physically and mentally. Ultimately, it can transform your life.

Attention can be focused and steady, and when it is, it can be quite helpful in quieting the monkey mind. Our normal mode is to be stuck in attention that is reactive rather than steady. Our minds tend to zero in on what appears to be the most pressing thing at any given moment. We do this to the exclusion of everything else, only to become obsessed with something different a few moments later.

This obsession over whatever seems most important at the moment literally distorts our perception of reality. It dramatically over-emphasizes one aspect of reality, while it erases from your view everything else that is happening. The problem is that we have an inbuilt tendency to zero in on the most negative thing happening in any given moment. Ignoring all the other things happening in each moment means ignoring countless things that are actually going well. Cultivating awareness is not the act of putting on rose-colored glasses. It’s the act of taking off the cracked, smudged, and soot-stained glasses you have been wearing all your life.

How moving from attention to awareness can transform your yoga

In yoga reactive attention manifests itself often as a fixation on a particular body part. Sometimes we fixate on the body part that seems to be working hardest at that moment. Sometimes it’s the one that is feeling the most intense stretch. Reactive attention also manifests itself as an over-focus on the front of the body , and a tendency to forget about the back body.

In yoga, allowing reactivity to rule us means we forget about the energetic shape of a pose. We forget about spacious alignment as our mind tries to convince us that we need to straighten that front leg NOW in Warrior II because the bent leg can’t support our weight any longer. Ironically, being able to move from attention to awareness is exactly the solution to the front knee turning to jelly.

Bringing awareness to body parts that don’t seem important right now is transformative. Spreading awareness allows you to realize that there are actually muscles you are not currently contracting that, when engaged, would really aid the pose. When you notice non-essential body parts you also notice that you may be holding tension where it is actually detrimental. Engaging what you forgot to engage, and relaxing what you forgot to relax can make poses dramatically more effortless. Of course, making poses more effortless is a mere side-effect of moving from attention to awareness, cool as it is. The real point of distinguishing between attention and awareness is to notice how reactive attention keeps us out of the here and now. The point is to notice that attention keeps us away from serenity