Video Transcript

Welcome to the second section in this habit series.

One of the takeaways from the first section was about the complexity of habits themselves. As there are many different aspects, I’ll be speaking to some of them over the course of this series. The order isn’t representative of relative importance. Rather I’ll be presenting them in a way that I hope is helpful to open up our ideas around habits and support you in greater recognition of your own habits and capacity to cultivate the ones that you want with awareness and tools.

As I spoke to in the first section, as humans, we are essentially patterns of movement - movement that is physical, emotional, physiological and cognitive. As 20th century philosopher and psychologist William James put it, we are “bundles of habits.” Something that increases the complexity of our habitual movement patterns as humans is our capacity to not only just pay attention to and think about what's happening right here and right now -which is generally how most animals live - but to have this cognitive capacity to travel to times and places that are not just in this present moment. The capacity to think and imagine other times and places, this internal cognitive movement (that neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás has termed our “evolutionary internalisation of movement”), adds a layer of complexity to our wide range of movement patterns. This capacity is also what has allowed us as humans to create much of what we’ve been able to. Being able to understand the past and plan for the future is a really unique cognitive capacity. It also means the interplay of movements becomes even more complex: not only do we have our physical and emotional movements that are in connection to what's happening right here and right now but we also have those that are connected to what has happened, what is going to happen, and anything else we imagine.

The focus of this section is on this notion of attention. As Gay Watson (author of ‘Attention: Beyond Mindfulness’) writes: “Attention is at the heart of everything we do and think yet it is usually invisible, transparent, lost behind our fixation with content.” Similar to the physical movements and the patterns of movements that we've created and reinforced through repetition (such as how we walk, dress, feed ourselves, etc.), our mental movements also become patterned and generally out of our awareness. Watson points out that our processes of attention are both voluntary and involuntary. Just with other habitual movements, our mental patterns are the product of many factors, starting when we were in utero and include what we've needed to pay attention to for our survival, what we've been taught or modeled, etc.

The fact that you're reading this indicates you likely do spend at least some time attending to what you're attending to. Attention itself is a practice. Neuroscience has revealed our brain's neuroplasticity, meaning the patterns of movement in our brains (the pathways and structures of our neurons firing) is something that is that is created and transformed by experience and by practice. And although neuroscience can give us more understanding about the nature of habits and cognitive movements, it can't really provide the full picture of our experience as humans, which is far more complex.

The ability to be aware of where our attention is is a skill that can be learned and practiced. Attention is what we're present to.

I'm curious what are you paying attention to right now.

Take a moment now to notice what you’re attending to. Is it what you’re reading? Or something else? Does it shift?

I invite you now to put your attention on the sensations in your right foot. Notice what happens when I offer that invitation. I imagine you're probably noticing some sensations in your right foot now whereas a moment ago you probably were not aware of what you were feeling in your right foot. Those sensations were there even when you weren’t attending to them. This is a small example of how much is happening inside and outside all the time in terms of cognitive, emotional, and physical movements. We generally only attend to a small portion of all that is happening and attention has a big impact on how we actually experience life.

In the previous section, I distinguished between awareness and practice. This begins with increasing the awareness of what our attention is on. It's in this awareness of what we're attending to that we start to have choice. Otherwise we will attend to what is habitual and automatic thoughts, feelings and actions will follow from there. It is from this awareness that opens up choice that we begin to have other choices, including what we want to practice.

In this program you’re participating in, one of the things we’re doing is expanding what we're paying attention to. We all have our unique patterns of what we generally pay attention to. For example, some of you may already be attentive to what you're experiencing your body. And some of you may not be. I believe the more common orientation is less attention to the experience in our bodies. There are many reasons for this including ideas in our western culture and thought, such as the mind and body being separate and the former more important. Our popular beliefs haven’t really caught up with developments in neuroscience that have shown that such a separation is a false dichotomy. We can only think because of our embodiment.

That’s where the work I do comes in – inviting in this shift in belief and focus in order to lead more healthful lives. All our experience (emotional, mental, relational, situational, etc.) is through our body. Our body has a lot of information to convey to us yet many of us are not in the practice of listening for or to it. Most of us haven’t been shown how or been taught that it's important. Practices of somatic/embodied attention starts to build this capacity and increase our capacity to attend to what’s important to us in more holistic ways. Practicing bringing our attention to present moment sensorial experience can augment our attention to planning, assessing, learning and growing, attending to our responsibilities (such as family, work, health).

I'm curious: are you generally aware what you're paying attention to? Just like with all patterns of movement, it's incredible that we don't have to pay attention to them. And being able to choose to step back and notice is what allows us to shift the things that are no longer ideal for us, even if they served a purpose in the past.

Attentional and somatic awareness practices can help us become clearer for what we're needing in our lives now. You might already have some practices that help you bring your awareness to what you're attending to. Most mindfulness practices fall into this category. Somatic practices (or what some call bodyfulness practices) – practices that invite us to attend to what we’re feeling in our body – do as well. Somatic practices help us attune to our embodied attention and mindfulness practices help us notice the attention of our minds.

A practice that I like to do sometimes is called a ‘mind watch.’ It’s a form of meditation or mindfulness, which involves taking a couple minutes to notice what we’re thinking about/where our attention is going without trying to change anything. When we get lost in content we bring ourselves back to noticing without changing. This allows us to have a better understanding of our mental attentional patterns – what do we tend to attend to? Are there certain things we are more fixated on to the exclusion of other aspects?

Cultivating such practices opens up more choice. If we notice we focus more so on certain aspects of our experience, we can expand our awareness to include what’s happening mentally, emotionally, relationally, situationally, in our nervous system, etc. The practice you were given in this program was created with this intention: to both notice your attentional tendencies as well as cultivate more attention on what you’d like more of in your life.

So that’s a little bit about attention. In subsequent videos, I’ll be going into other aspects of habits.

Until then, an invitation for you is to increase your awareness of what you're paying attention to and notice what practices/things you already do that help you notice what you’re paying attention to right now, what you’re thinking about, and where your awareness is. Just as my simple example of paying attention to the sensations in your right foot demonstrates, although we may not always have choice of what's happening, we do have choice about what we attend do. Through awareness and practice we can begin to shift the well worn grooves of our habitual movements, including the grooves of what we pay attention to. The first step to shifting and having the attentional movements that we want is noticing them.

As you spend some time noticing what you're noticing, stay tuned for part 3 of this series coming soon, where I’ll offer you more ideas around habits that I hope can support you in moving in the ways that work best for you in what matters for you in your life.