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The following three quotes are from Yoga Master Erich Schiffmann’s book: Yoga, The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness
“When your attention is no longer splintered and dissipated through conflict, indecisiveness, or half-heartedness, you will experience an increase in energy and feel more alive.”
“Notice what attracts your attention and what motivates you. And attend to the change of tide – when do you start being less interested and why? What brings it to life again? Notice how your interest fluctuates, how at some moments you are more interested than at other moments. This is not only the heart of yoga, it is the heart of life.”
“It is not that you should be wholehearted and fully attentive. It’s that more and more you will want to be that way simply because being wholehearted and attentive to your present moment of conscious experience is where the greatest enjoyment lies.”
* * *
We have all had moments of supreme disillusionment in our lives.
As children, it was Santa Clause, the Eastern Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
We learned they are and always were untrue.
As adolescents it was our parents and our friends.
We learned they are fallible and can betray us.
Now as adults, what illusions are left unexposed in our lives?
What illusions are you avoiding?
I like to say: Welcome disillusionment, or stay illusioned.
Attention Training and the resulting Awakened Attention is the illusion destroyer.
Why else do you think every great earth-shaking being who ever lived, recognized the value of Attention Training?
What part of your Life is dedicated to training your attention?
Me?
Every
waking
moment!
Everyone I talk to agrees that they spend much of their lives on auto-pilot, often lost in thoughts about past and future, and missing their actual present experience.
One of the causes of our inability to remain awake in our experience, rather than asleep in our minds, is our desire for convenience, comfort and predictability.
Our desire for convenience, comfort and predictability often leads us to create a lifestyle and living environment that demands very little from us.
Inconvenience, discomfort and unpredictability demands attention, making our experience the center of our focus.
While I won’t try to vilify the desire to live an utterly hedonistic life, the consequences of this way of life are numerous and far reaching.
Rather than go into the details about those consequences right here, I’d like to make a suggestion.
Take it or leave it.
Let me suggest that tomorrow, you start your day with the plan of doing everything just a little bit different.
Rather than automatically getting out of bed in the morning, as you lay there allow yourself to realize that one day you won’t get out of bed, ever again.
When you do get up, drink coffee from a bowl, eat with your hands and walk around your home naked as you brush your teeth.
Write down the ‘word of the day’ and then try to say it 5 times in your daily conversation.
Try to breathe deeply 5 times before starting and turning off your car engine.
Take a different route to work while listening to classical music.
Wear your watch upside down on your ‘wrong’ hand.
Change the appearance option for your email to lime green and orange.
Change your voice mail to “Hi, this is _____ .
I’m off having a good time somewhere but I’ll call as soon as I’m finished.”
Answer the phone “Having an amazing day here, it’s ______ .”
When you get home, lay down on the grass and look up at the sky.
You are alive.
Soon you won’t be.
The magic and beauty of your present aliveness will cease,
and your colorful but overlooked options, will be no more.
* * *
For more on this topic, take a look at my book.
If you’ve ever been to one of my public events or read my book, Waking Up to Life!, you know that I’m really big on using the stuff of our messy lives to work with in our efforts to Wake Up.
This means identifying areas where we are stuck, reactive, inattentive and asleep, and using them as Wake Up Calls to help us become free, responsive, attentive and AWAKE!
For example, I spend many hours each week on Alberta highways. In the last couple months the highways have been packed with vacationers in motor homes, kids on summer holidays and slow moving farm equipment.
This, is for me, a fair definition of hell….
I am not in my happy place in these situations.
I have a mind that has a LOT to say about how things are unfolding on the highway. This often leads to the urge to share my displeasure with those whom I deem are not giving their driving the attention it warrants.
A slow moving truck in the passing lane, the guy has a cell phone to his ear and a motor home in tow. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that there are 17 vehicles behind him.
When I get next to him I shoot him a look that says “shame on you”, then I shake my head in disgust, hoping I have somehow enlightened him to his inadequacy so that he can become a better driver and stop causing so much suffering with his lack of consideration.
In reality, he doesn’t know I exist.
In reality, my suffering is self generated, caused by a mind that becomes over-involved with its surroundings while offering a harsh commentary that sends waves of tension throughout my body.
In reality, I am the one that is asleep.
But…
What happens when I slow down and tear some of my attention from my driving situation?
What happens when I attend to the drivers around me with a silent but alert mind?
What happens when I give the rolling, soon to be autumn country-side some of that attention?
Here’s what happens:
My driving agenda is dropped, my body relaxes, and waves of en-joyment wash over me.
I am enveloped in silence, everything softens and expands wide open without edge.
I connect to the immediacy of my presently unfolding Life, beneath my life situation.
Everything becomes a magical display of beauty and grace.
Then, wide awake, I relax and uncoil AS Life without separation.
Here, thought does not disturb the depths, like ripples on the ocean.
Here, I remember I am the vast Ocean of Life, that for a moment or two
mistakenly thought
it was but an itty
bitty
wave…
I wouldn’t normally use this space for this kind of message, but I know how fast it can spread and the difference it can make.
Don’t watch this video if you are awake, enjoy KFC and want to continue to do so.
If you are asleep, it isn’t going to matter anyway.
A Day In The Life: Heart Attacks, Strokes,
and Other Man Made Maladies
I awoke one morning to find my neck stiff, as I sometimes do.
It was really quite bothersome, but I have had this happen for maybe ten years and it had always simply disappeared on its own so I never paid much attention to it. While on the highway commuting to the hospital I work at part time, I found myself squeezing my neck and wondering what causes this to happen.
It was then that I noticed an intense ache in the center of my chest.
The thought arose, ‘that doesn’t feel right…’, which was met with another thought ‘just take it easy and relax’. The pain intensified and another thought appeared, ‘heart attack?’ As the pain reached severe and progressed to crushing, there was a whole committee in my mind, arguing about my current state of affairs.
One voice was saying, ‘Heart-Attack! Go straight to Ponoka General’, while another said, ‘not Heart-Attack, stroke!… STROKE!’. Another voice was trying to remember ‘which arm is it that goes numb in a stroke?’ Another chastised me because ‘I’m a nurse and I should know these things’. Another was saying ‘you are way too young for a heart attack, or a stroke’, while yet another was arguing, ‘you’re never too young, remember what’s his name’, trying to offer past deaths as evidence that this was indeed fatal. One more voice of pessimism suggested, ‘maybe both heart attack and stroke’.
Finally a loud voice cut through them all, demanding, ‘RELAX! BREATHE!’ and as I did so, a voice said, ‘there, now that’s more spiritual’. Quickly another voice countered ‘no, that’s the ego and you’re afraid to go to the hospital, because you will look like a crazy person and they will send you to the very Psychiatric Hospital you work at’, and I thought ‘yes, yes….’.
As I was trying to be the moderator of all these kindly and concerned mental entities (m.e.’s) my chest and throat erupted in an almost barf-kind of wretch. I burped the burp of my lifetime. Instantly, the heart attack and stroke were gone and a bemused silence fell over me.
One voice piped up with simply ‘Lucky…’.
(This is an excerpt from the book Waking Up to Life! The Art & Skill of Awakened Attention available here.)
Astonished lately?
Why not?
Why resist your natural unknowingness?
Why not be amazed?
Greet perplexity.
Allow bewilderment to wash over you…
Just when you think you are lost
you are found.
Amidst the fog and confusion -
within the mist of illusion -
the truth inside the delusion?
There is always, eternally and only…this!
***
Big questions lead to big answers,
but none will come from the thinking mind.
Instead, become a living breathing question,
with no hope of an answer.
Live and Be the Mystery that IS Life!
***
One of my all time favorite quotations:
“When it’s over, I want to say:
All my life was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
~ Mary Oliver
It’s common knowledge to the point of cliche that many people, while on their deathbed and asked “what would you have done differently? report, “I wish I would have stopped to smell the roses.”
This is another way of saying they wish they would have slowed down and paid more attention.
Of all the benefits of Attention Training and it’s resulting Awakened Attention, this to me, is the greatest.
When attention is strong, stable and energetic, life does not escape you.
We all know how easy it is to become distracted by our own minds, becoming lost in imaginings that have little to nothing to do with our immediate experience.
In short, we sacrifice our direct and immediate experience for fantasy, imagination, and distorted dramas of the thinking mind.
The story of Rip Van Winkle is about a man who awoke after a 20 year sleep. His life has passed him by while he was absent, asleep under a tree.
How many have their lives slip by, asleep with eyes wide open?
How about you?
