Choosing your focus

Years ago, I saw this very graphic old film footage of a dead body. It was in an autopsy scene. They had taken a slide of a dead body down the middle, width wise, to reveal all the different layers that we are: Skin, fat, soft tissue, muscle, bone, organs. I remember thinking how fascinating it was that in any one slice of our human body that there are all these different things going on that makes up a body.

Imagine what else is going on when we are alive. We are skin, fat, thoughts, muscles, nerves, cells, dying, dreams, blood circulating, memory, organs pumping and filtering, pain, growing, digesting, breaking down, inflaming, crying, smiling. So much happening at exactly the same second. We usually are not aware of anything other than the thoughts that drive us. We think we are our mind, or our outward facing physical body.

If it is the case that we all these other things happening at the same time, then why do we focus on our thoughts so much? We let our thoughts, especially when we are in reaction, rule everything we do. Our thoughts (and our body’s stress or relaxation response that follows) go into over-achievement and we feel powerless to be any different.

Our mind’s sole job is to keep us safe. When we are stressed, anxious or depressed, we signal to our body via our mind that things are not well. Our nervous system (which is the holy grail of all things) plunges deep and hard into a stress response. Our heart rate goes up along with our blood pressure, our digestion slows and clogs or speeds up and stops absorbing the good stuff we eat. The mental stress we feel effects all those other subtler layers of ourselves - nervous system, the slices of muscle, feelings, organs, emotions, growth of disease-causing cells. We are letting our mind rule our everything. We are what we think. We often only identify with the catastrophe we believe is going to happen to us or has happened to us.

We need to disengage with our thoughts. Practices that help us do this, like meditation, support us to create a different relationship with life as it unfolds because for small moments we are more than our thoughts. Controlling life’s events is bonkers - we can only create our relationship to events, not the events themselves. The only way to do this is get off the mind train and into the body.

Remember what it’s like to float in the ocean? We so deeply merge into sensation. The water, sun, weightlessness. This relaxed, intentional body shape makes us breath different, into our bellies. We have a slight smile on our lips which signals to our nervous system to welcome in the relaxation response (heart calms, digestion improves, immunity boosts, dopamine hormones released). These signals switch the mind from thinking and doing, to feeling and being. Stressed time stops.

At the same second that we are identify with only our thoughts we are also a whole bunch of other sensations and happenings. Our muscles are loosening or tightening. Our breath is shallow or deep. The sun is resting on our face. Thoughts are only one sensation present at any given time. We can choose a different focus other than our thoughts. We can choose to float in the ocean and feel.

Our society mostly privileges and focuses on drivers of profit or consumerism, and mind-based success. We shove other perspectives and experiences aside. A yoga-inspired life is the opposite. It’s about letting the mind go and focusing on other sensations in the body - focusing on all the other processes and feelings that are going on. We widen our language for living to include feeling all sensations, without judgement. They are there because of who you have been. Who you will be next, is because of how you are right now.

Some meditations are about dropping down into your body and feeling these sensations. These can include feeling non-mental sensations like tightness or lightness. Hot or cold. Tingling. Electricness (I don’t think that’s a word but that’s sometimes how I feel when I imagine nerves firing through my body.) Close your eyes now and non-mentally see if you can feel something going on in your body. A texture. A swirl. A tingle. A color. An awareness of a particular organ. Trust what you feel because it could be your body showing up.

There’s a saying Yoga - where attention goes, energy flows. What you focus on, expands it. If you focus on the release of muscles in the back of neck, your muscles will relax. If you focus on the time you where angered at something someone said, you’ll relive that feeling of anger in your body and it will cause damage. You are not only what you think, but you are also what you place your attention on.

So if all that is the case, and if we can slow down enough and do practices like meditation or restorative yoga to be more non-mentally present in our bodies, then don’t we then also have the ability to replace icky stuff with something more positive, or hopeful or helpful or fun ? We can recall the sensation of floating in the ocean, or sitting in the sun, or cuddling your cat. Sensations of joy rather than dread. Love rather frustration. Sharing a sadness. Sure, when we are reacting to something or being triggered, it’s dam hard to choose something more lovely. One of my teachers, Kamini Desai, says “We are allowed our first reaction”. But then we can learn from the experience by slowing down and noticing how we feel in our bodies. We can then learn to transform the ick.

We have a new spa pool. I’ve resisted it for most of my adult life because of cost and environmental reasons. But stuff it, we got one. Most mornings at sun rise, after my cold ocean plunge, my partner and I sit in our spa. We immerse ourselves in how the world wakes up. We see the birds migrate from Mana Island over our forest to wherever they are going. If we talk about anything tense, or the past, or worrying about the future, we try to stop ourselves. We want to focus on our connection with nature and each other: The migratory patterns of birds; Tui that dart up our driveway and dive into the forest; the way the light falls; how we feel; response to a smile. It’s a choice. It takes practice. It takes constant reframing and refocusing on how we want to feel and who we want to become. It’s harder to do when there’s trauma in our lives or our family, or down our street. But we must try so we can be of better use. We can be both and choose.

All this relies on restorative and meditative practice so you can feel other sensations that thought. We can be driven by so much more. We can not only choose what we focus on and feel in our bodies at any time, but we can proactively place intentions in the space we create by slowing down. Our bodies hear everything we do and say. Choose.

Try this. The next time you find yourself in reaction, choose something else. Sit down, go for a walk, close your eyes. Focus on something else. The birds flying above. The sound of your breath. Feel what expands when you breathe in and what releases when you breathe out. Imagine blood flowing freely through your body. Feel all the teeny nerves and muscles in the back of your neck relax. Feel the difference. That’s yoga. Forget the foot behind the head stuff. That’s only for intense yogis and not ordinary people. The physical posture side of yoga is only one of the eight limbs of yoga. They all lead to this: experiencing resting in silence and stillness from which everything arises. And it’s a lifetime of beautiful, slow, immersive and insightful practice, one change of focus at a time.