Pay Attention

Now you are in the present and living from awareness and not the thought-stream, it is time to turn to the second principle – Pay Attention. It is simple, but takes practice. To pay attention means to notice what is happening and what we are doing in real time.

It can be as mundane as washing the dishes – seeing whether they are actually clean or not after being washed…or paying attention in a discussion with a loved one, and responding to what is actually being communicated rather than superimposing the distortion of the thought-stream…noticing our intentions, rather than being oblivious to them.

My education in paying attention has largely come from my children, bless them. When they were babies it was about noticing that they needed feeding, changing, cuddling. As they have grown it has been about paying attention to what they are communicating to me. When I don’t pay attention, my kids jump on it and act out accordingly. When I am paying attention, they still push the boundaries, but because I am present and paying attention, I respond to what is actually going on and not some distorted pictures in my head.

So we have to pay attention to what is going on outside, we also have to pay attention to what is happening on the inside. If you don’t notice your feelings and emotions, you become them and they rule the show, and become destructive patterns of behaviour. We get lost in them, this is when shit that hurts happens.

By being present in real time, no longer lost and determined by the monkey-mind, I am free to pay attention to what is going on around me and within me.  Silent awareness it is called, and it allows us to act from a place of authenticity, free of stories and chatter.

It is a challenge for me to put what I understand from Robert’s work into words because it is experienced from a place without words.