Art of Attention: Five Keys to Emotional Consistency
1. This is not about purification or denial of your emotions. This is about using your attention, your only real tool, to cultivate your most essential capacity for inner consistency.
To be consistent emotionally, less reactive (raise your hand if that's desirable to you!) the starting point is a simple pause, an opening in the flow of time, a willingness to see what is viable and be more available to your potential for awareness. Everyone and everything is here to show you the way to your own freedom.
When things are going awry and you can feel your physical reactions (queasy belly, heart rate ramping up, nervous, volatile, reactive), OPEN your eyes and your ears. Stop talking. Don't try to direct, shape or mold any person or situation, for a few moments. Persist in recognizing the emotional surge and its manifestations; be the observer of all in that moment.
Then,
2. Collect and gather yourself. Notice what is appalling or frustrating about another's behavior and remember: Anything that truly gets to you, riles you up, is just some quality or behavior of your own. If you see it and it disturbs you, you possess that attitude in some shade or tone, and it's downright awful to see it played out in another person or circumstance in front of you. But be easy on yourself; judgment is wasteful at this point. See it as a trip to the zoo. At the zoo, there is no judgment; you look and watch, you observe, you marvel, maybe you recoil sometimes, but there isn't human "judgment," you're simply watching the animals as they breathe, eat and do their work of living. At this point you reiterate your commitment to observe but with a purposefully supportive inward stance.
"...what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need."
3. As promised in the first A of A post, each post will have a breathing practice. This week: UJJAYI.
Ujjayi is a victorious, uprising breath, very efficient in softening the charge of internal disturbance -- remember this as often as possible. Your breathing can effectively shift entire rooms full of people (not that that is the point, but it does).
Gently lower your chin slightly toward your chest, and open your mouth a bit. Inhale with a big HAHHH sound, then exhale with the same sound. Good. Once again in, and out.
Now close your mouth and do the same HAHH breath, mouth closed, and feel the resonance in the back of your throat, even along the roof of your mouth. Keep breathing like this as you read, and keep this in mind as you attempt -- once you've paused -- to align well in a situation that is threatening to pull you down.
This breathing shifts your inner disposition toward attentive calm by literally alkalinizing your entire body and bringing you closer to a sense of inner majesty, where calm is in full view.
4. With that breathing fully installed, it's possible to align elegantly with any disagreement or disappointment. Your experience of pausing and observing affords you the critical vantage point from which you can see, according to Julius Evola, that your "...emotions [need] no longer [be] experienced as subjective reflections [problems, personal affronts, heavy negativities], but rather as sheer forces moving through us."
Sheer forces moving through us.
Once fully understood from many months of watching your reactivity and how wasteful and draining it is, these forces become perfectly interesting, and the moment of elegant alignment -- appropriate responsiveness -- is at hand. And if all else fails, know that when the forces seem like absolute imperatives requiring strong reactions, it's time to backtrack to #3. Or watch yourself react, and then go back to #1. And have a laugh.
5. What you'll notice over time is that this is really a compassion-cultivating exercise, as much as it is a consistency-building practice. When you can clearly see that quality that you abhor as your own, in some shape or form, you've just experienced true compassion. I am you, you are me, we are all exactly the same in infinite respects. #5 is about how you can offer your experience of recognizing and then using your breathing to transmute your emotions into a helpful, life-enhancing response. Make your moments of inner calm externally manifest, factually, as your consistent attentive state, no matter what the moment. "What you yourself wish to experience, provide for another."
With gratitude to Hugo Cory, who helped me clearly see the hilarious horror of my behavior, and John Friend, whose elegant, concise set of alignment principles called the Universal Principles of Alignment™ shall inspire these posts in some way.
"The real prayers are not the words, but the attention that comes first."
Next week: your Heart.
Follow Elena Brower on Twitter: www.twitter.com/VIRAYOGA
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I love how you describe this art of attention or alertness as "spirituality" from one of your blogs, "This alertness is the way to that moonlight-esque sensation internally, where you feel softly, cleanly lit up from the inside out. When the desire of your mind becomes the desire of your heart." Lovely, absolutely lovely. Thank you.
Thank you Jennie. that's the last blog i did at virayoga.b
Here is how this practice has helped me so far: e-mails...
And it's only Monday!
Brevity and clarity - highly appreciated!
Elena, thank you very, very much for the Art of Attention posts. They are so insightful and truly helpful to me on this amazing path I am traveling through life. The five keys to emotional consistency are brilliant tools and I am trying very hard to make them a part of life so that i do not even have to think about using these tools but they come naturally. Thanks again. Big luv, blessings and light from Trinidad!
thank you thank you charls... with love and respect.
One think that has always concerned me with these types of methods is that you may be finding some sort of peace, but at the same time you may also be creating some sort of emotional detachment, or apathetic outlook in the process. What do you think?
All of the practices are first about affirming the presence of what IS, so no denial, no detachment, no purification or eliminatio
We cannot judge ourselves or others, we can only choose the behavior or course of action best suited to softening and receiving what is really inherently good about any moment in time, no matter how completely vexing it happens to be.
Not easy, but the task at hand. To delight in what is possible - to create space and ease - to support and be supported without a doubt or detaching from what is there already.
Does that help?
I've found something else that might be relevant to this inquiry in Anodea Judith's book, Waking the Global Heart. On p. 308, "By separating from the instincts of our bodies, it becomes possible to override these instincts. By separating from matter, we have been able to inspect and dissect the material world, solving many mysteries. While this separation has the danger of leading to fragmentation and dissociation, it is a necessary part of the evolutionary pattern - to separate, differentiate - and re-integrate at a higher level."
Hope that is useful...
For me, this post translates as a very real, applicable sharing and explanation of what "opening to grace" is. Thank you, Elena
thank you jillian... more soon!
"sense of inner majesty"
Interesting words. The feeling I aspire to is peacefulness.
peacefulness, yes...!
what i love about "majesty" refers to a sense of "dignity" - inner dignity.
for me the peacefulness of which you speak somehow ties in to a sense of
my own dignity and the dignity that my peacefulness can confer on others
around me... thank you so much for your comment.
Arguably, the most valuable piece of writing that I have read in a long time...tha
With the risk of sounding mawkish, what could have more profound and vast consequences than imbuing a simple breath with a conscious choice of cultivating compassion…?
thank you thank you christine. more on the compassion aspect in short order.
Thank you so much for this post. As a parent of two under 6 I often find the internal tension welling over silly things. These are great steps to remember and I promise to use them often. Also, I love how you incorporate quotes from books you suggest. What a great way to add to my "to read" list! Thanks E, terrific post!
a friend reported back that the links felt like opening little treasures.
glad you're enjoying. i'll keep that up, as so much of what inspires me comes
from those great beings!
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