If you’re like me, which you might be considering you’re reading this blog. You spend a lot of time “up there”. You know, up in the sky where the birds live —have you ever noticed that? When I’m deep in reflection I find my head moving upwards towards the sun. We spend a lot of time in the clouds, with our thoughts. Thinking, pondering, wondering, reasoning, and all the rest. And we spend little time “down here,” focused on our physical bodies, grounded in our physical reality.
It may seem ironic, but I learned a lot about being physically grounded in my body through a hypnosis course. “Focus on your breath,” “Notice your back leaning against the chair,” “Feel the breeze brush against your face”. While much of hypnosis is focused on being elsewhere —an imagined future, a childhood memory, an alternate past, a great deal of it was also focused on the here and now.
Once in class, our teacher said, “For a moment, widen your perspective.” He didn’t mean theoretically, but physically. We were staring at him through the screen via zoom, blocking everything else out. For a moment, we let the room back in, we let our bodies back in. The bookshelf across from me reappeared, the windows again came into view. This simple exercise and many others that either hyper-focused our attention on one thing or widened our attention to many things made me realized how seldom I used the later skill.
I wrote a post a while back urging readers to ‘not forget our bodies‘ as women. But while this message may be more urgent for women it is crucial for us all in modern society. What this does is hard to describe. I know that once he told us to widen our attention for a moment, I felt less tense. I realized that in our attempt to focus we waste a great deal of energy attempting to block out all else. What if we took it all in without being overwhelmed by it? What if all the “excess noise” could also lead us to our goals?
My dad was gracious enough to let me practice hypnosis with him a few months back, the circumstances were not ideal. Family members spoke in the background, we heard the passing of cars outside, and even when we tried to relocate the noise continued. While certainly not ideal, I held on to what we learned in class, perhaps doesn’t matter. I found myself repeating often what our teacher taught us as a part of the induction process (which I also repeated throughout the hypnosis session), “All external noises are here to help you go deeper.” Yes, perhaps that’s just a mind trick and not inherently “true”. But perhaps the idea that a given task can only be done if you turn on your blinders to all else and strain your eyes to only focus on the task at hand is also just a mind trick and not inherently “true”.
Outside of whether or not ‘external noise’ supports or distracts from a given task is the more valuable goal of heightened awareness. Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, in his podcast episode with On Being, talks about how we lose touch which the natural sound landscape. Few of us are aware of the birds chirping in our neighborhood, the distinctions in their sounds, the times they seem most aroused. Their noise, along with the beeping cars, and chatting passerby’s become “background noise”. I think what my teacher and perhaps what Hempton wants us to recognize is that all the noise is a part of life. We can decide what’s worth attending to at any given moment, we can tune in or out of it but we don’t have to suppress it.
Perhaps most importantly, we have the power to choose how it moves us. “External noise” does not have to be a distraction or even annoying, we can choose to experience it anew. We can simultaneously be attuned to many things without losing ourselves in many things. We can be fully present with our bodies, our environment, and the task at hand. Or, at least, I’m open to the possibility.
Recent Comments