Play the Attention Game!
publication date: Mar 17, 2010
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author/source: Jim Andrews
By Jim Andrews
 If we want to change our life we must change how we think. If we want to change how we think then we must learn to find our thoughts by moving our attention. If want to gain control of our attention we must learn to find it. The Attention Game is a compact little exercise that helps you do just that. The first stage of The Attention Game is to take five minutes and notice things, as many things as possible. Do not try and notice the specifics of things (this part is very important), just note what sense your attention is using at any given moment. Again, it is very important not to try and notice the specifics, just realize and note moment after moment what sensory mode your attention is actually using. Your attention is constantly shifting. It moves from object to object non-stop all day long. It also moves from using one sensory method to another. One moment your attention is on what you are seeing, the next on what you are hearing. At any given moment there is only one thing that attention is focused on. The point of the game is to try and keep up with the constant shifting and to identify which sense you are using as your primary means of attention in each moment. These are the names of the sensory modes you will be noticing: Feeling – Hearing – Seeing – Smelling – Thinking Feeling Sometimes you will notice that your attention is on the body somehow. You may just be having an itch, maybe your stomach is growling, you may notice your breathing, your heartbeat, or you may be having an emotion. An emotion is a thought expressed in the body which we then “feel”. Therefore we call all of these things feelings. When you notice that your attention is on yourself in one of these categories simply label this “feeling.” Hearing When you hear things, your attention will be on a noise or sound of some sort. Simply label this “hearing.” Seeing When you find that your attention is on something that you see, simply label it “seeing.” Smelling Occasionally, you will notice that your attention is on an aroma of some kind. Simply label this “smelling.” As you do the labeling do not try to identify the object itself. When you notice you are hearing do not dwell on the type of noise. When you notice that your attention is on seeing do not begin to think about what it is that you see. Just simply name the sense that your attention is working through one at a time. And try to keep up as your attention bounces from one thing to the next. Thinking And now for the hard one. Every time you notice that you are thinking simply note “thinking.” Now You’re Ready to Begin For the next five minutes try to note absolutely everything, one thing after another, that your attention is on. Please go ahead and do this now. What was your experience? If you were to rank the frequency of the number of times you noted each sensory mode which one was first? Second? If you said thinking was the most frequently noticed then you get a gold star. The truth is that we spend most of our day thinking, but we expend very little of our attention on thinking. If you did not name thinking as number one then keep playing the game. Your thinking is there, you are just so used to its presence that it is like unnoticed background noise. We think at 1,000-3,000 words per minute. Therefore, a lot of our thinking goes unnoticed by us, so who is in charge of our thinking? I encourage you to keep trying this exercise frequently. It truly will develop your sense of awareness and help you connect with the world around you. And most importantly it will help you familiarize yourself with your own thinking. As you become more adept at this process you will realize that there have been many times that you were thinking and even though you were playing The Attention Game you did not catch it. We are so used to these thinking patterns that we don’t even notice them even when we’re looking for them. There are other stages to The Attention Game that we won’t get into in this article. They have to do with developing our sense of the texture of the object of our attention. Instead of just saying “seeing”, I would go the next step and say “seeing red, angular, bright, hard.” Notice I’m still not naming the item but trying to note the attributes of it. This exercises our ability to recognize how we form concepts about the objects we sense and how they are in effect converted into judgments that are passed along to other parts of our mind. There are other levels to the game that are related to the intentional directing of attention which I hope to publish in a future article. About the Author  Jim Andrews is a professional Life and Spiritual Coach and author of The MindTech Principles, a unique and unusual presentation of the fundamental principles that govern how we create what we want. As a life long explorer of the spiritual province and with years of experience in executive management, Jim has a determination to express the spiritual experience in a way that includes the rational as well as the higher parts of our mind. Visit www.BizandLifeCoach.com to learn more. |