Does life have to smack you with a 2×4 to get your attention? Or are your senses more finely tuned to where you can recognize life through a whisper?
When I ask many people during a session, what they’re noticing, they will very often tell me things like:
‘I’m noticing pain, stiffness, imbalance’ and if it’s not one of those three, then they typically will say
‘Not much’. As if there was nothing else going on in their body.
So here’s a question: if you’ve learned to pay attention to your body only when it hurts, feels stiff or imbalanced, how else is your body going to get your attention?
It will get your attention only through pain, stiffness and imbalance. And that’s because of how you’ve learned to focus and pay attention. You won’t notice peace, or ease, or tranquility of mind. And if you can’t notice these states, how can you ever appreciate them?
Many of us have learned to focus only on “the bad” or what’s not working. And we hardly ever see “the good” or what IS working. And the kicker is that if we focus this way on the body, we will probably focus this way on the rest of our lives as well. So we end up reducing our experience of life rather than appreciating the richness of it.
What’s more, this habit of paying attention to your body or life only when something is going “wrong” is also reflected at a cultural level. Most of our systems are built this way. Take our health care system as a great example. Do you go see the medical doctor if “nothing is wrong”? Generally no. What does a medical doctor do? They try to identify “what’s wrong” and they try to fix it. If there’s nothing wrong, then there’s nothing to do.
In order to problem-solve, there has to be a problem first. There has to be a pain or a stiffness or an imbalance in order to pay attention and do something about it. Otherwise things are “fine”.
But are they? We all know that disease doesn’t just happen one day. You don’t just all of a sudden have cancer or diabetes as if a switch was flipped. It takes time for diseases to develop. At some point we develop symptoms but that’s usually late in the disease process. Up until that point in time, if we are focusing only on the problem/symptom, we’re clueless because the “problem” hasn’t shown up yet.
How we focus and pay attention is key to our health and our ability to enjoy life.
I think you would agree with me that life goes quickly. Do you want to spend the rest of your time in a subconscious bubble, where life is passing you by? Or would you rather expand your experience of life and how you pay attention?
On April 5/6, please consider joining a group of us like-minded people for the Align Adventure! We will be energizing our nervous systems, breaking old patterns and creating new ways to live that are more Aligned with our true selves. I hope you can join us.
For more info about the Align Adventure, you can click here. You can also attend a complimentary Zoom call on Wednesday, February 28th at 8:00 p.m.