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attention liberation, attention reparations

attention is one of our most valuable resources.

in your own life, attention is what determines the quality of your lived experience. if your attention stays on what’s wrong, on your powerlessness and pain, you can become identified with a victimized, power under narrative, and that will grow.

if your attention is instead on gratitude, collective power, experimentation, curiosity and celebration, these things will grow in your life. brené brown and oprah and ava and all the manifestors know this.

to be able to pick your attention up from the main stream of crisis and commercials (and other competitions for your money), and to put your attention where you want and need it, is something i’m starting to think of as attention liberation.

with this administration it’s clearer than ever that there are many forces who benefit from keeping our attention on a reactive string, puppeting us through fairly predictable responses that usually don’t change underlying conditions or power dynamics. we listen to stories that leave us feeling furious and helpless, and we get engaged in our prescribed response (lately it’s usually a hashtagged post about how messed up the story is from every possible angle) – until the next time our attention is directed, to the next scandal or controversy.

but we can train our attention, train ourselves to pick our attention up and place it where we want it, where we need it to be. i do this with meditation, learned from various teachers and through generative somatics.

i meditate by focusing on my breath for 10-30 minutes daily. when i forget to practice, i quickly become reactive. i start to scroll the news obsessively, feeling my powerlessness and hypocrisy more than anything else.

when i meditate daily, when i intentionally liberate my attention, i find i have enough focus to make healthier life choices, feel my agency, and to do work that has a longer, deeper arc of transformation.

it’s not that i ignore the news. i dose myself with current events in the news cycle – i’m still learning to balance and measure how much is useful and when it becomes a distraction or a trap. i accept mainstream news as fairly cyclical, generally overwhelming…and as another way that money moves. there’s a ton of waste information, useless filler. the things we should know about are declawed, pitched for greatest affect, or told to us in a way that makes us scared, vulnerable to the suggestions and sales of others.

and there’s a compulsive and hyperbolic liar in the highest office of this land.

so i scan for what i believe and what i can impact. i take the impactful action as soon as i can – make the donation, spread the word, sign the petition, etc. if there’s not more i can do, i get back to my work, work i deeply believe is my calling.

i don’t want to spend my life reacting to other people’s cycles, their mistakes, lies, or ignorant projections, or the domination cycles of those who measure their humanity in false supremacy. those things will continue. but what we pay attention to grows. so i pay attention to the places we as a species are learning, changing, getting free, experiencing pleasure and joy.

my life feels so different when i liberate my attention that it almost feels like the universe is gifting me attention reparations. instead of being frozen by hopelessness and fear for my species, which is often my reaction to the news, i experience a lot of days where i’m full of awe, laughter, work that induces pride, noticing the small and massive miracles that are part of each day.

it’s taken a long time to train my attention even a bit, and i’m still super beginner level with it. but the results in my daily life are already so powerful. i feel somewhere between productive and prolific on the days i wake up and set my mind on freedom.

i want to see people with a transformational world view be as productive and prolific as possible. it’s a ways off yet, but i imagine it all the time, that we burst the shell of the old world with our vibrant, biodiverse, generative resistance in the form of willful, manifested ideological evolutions.

let us put our attention on a revolution for our species, and grow it until we earn the miracle.