Attention Giving
Discovering where our attention is, and what kind attending does.
Cozy up with today’s tea bag quote:
Give to others and give to yourself the same attention.
“Everything I do I pay with attention.” ~Spiros Kapsapolous, a friend I met in Greece back in the summer of 1971.
Attention is a wonderful way to make contact both within ourselves and with one another. It takes so many different forms, we attend through our senses, we see, hear, smell, taste, touch one another, our environment and our own inner experience in a visceral way.
We attend with our awareness. Attention being the active side of awareness. Awareness is a dimension of Consciousness. Awareness and attention both take in or receive and give forth or offer as a result of being aware and giving attention. The sympathetic and parasympathetic aspects of our nervous systems are engaged at the same time.
We are tending to what we receive, all the information coming in from our Innermost creative alive loving intelligence and through our energy bodies that are constantly receiving information from our environment. Faster than the speed of thought, our systems are receiving incredible amounts of information and responding or reacting to them, depending on our inner state. Our systems tend to focus on certain things.
Our reactivity needs tending, so we give ourselves attention, but when is it the attention and tending of our Self, our LightHearted Being?
When we are simply present in awareness allowing ourselves to be as we are, and in contact with what’s going on, interested in what it’s all about. This in an inner conscious practice that keeps us in contact with what is greater than our self, our reactive small identified self. It connects us also with young aspects of ourselves that came into a certain shape and form as a result of the impact of living in the world and not being adequately tended to when we really needed it. No blame or shame, no situation we are born into is perfect, though some are awful.
So finally we give kind attention, we give ourself care and concern. The adequacy emerging within from our Beingness has no agenda, opinion or shoulds like the superego does. Presence offers radical acceptance that helps us relax and open into places where we and angels fear to tread. We’ve been abandoned there in excruciating ways, you see. We fear it’ll happen again. But with the Presence at hand active within us, something new is happening.
This is also and often easier for us to do with “others.” We are commanded to love One another as our Self. Guess what—only the Self can actually do that. We, of ourselves, cannot.
When we want to offer kind attention and tending to one another, we find ourselves in alignment with Love, and the will to Be Love offering out It’s grace to One and All. We emanate and radiate what Presence is.
I’ve seen and experienced myself and others in the most wretched places in life and place myself deeper in for a bit while I’m called to meet someone else’s needs. And you know what? You’ve experienced it I’m sure. My own system receives what comes through to benefit My Friend appearing as the other in distressed disguise. We both receive and give forth, not of ourselves anymore, but of who and what we are. Yet we experience a mutual appreciation, a benefit that is reciprocal. We come from such conversations changed.
This is the secret to be found in our practices, not only of meditating, presencing and inquiring, but of bringing what we find is real and true into our heart and belly centers, our systems wholly, and then live out from what is within us. We not only have the ideas but we feel them and sense them, act out of their vibration. Our thoughts, words and deeds increasingly line up with a wholesome life of right relationship: one based in the truth of unity. Our lives begin to harmonize, and we have the benefit of ease in living BIG: by infinite grace. It becomes increasingly established within us as so.
It’s only natural.
It is so.
So Be it.
