If you feel you are losing yourself, maybe lost yourself… How losing yourself happens, and how you can live a life where you never lose yourself?
This past week I had a lot of interactions: a lot more than usual.
I had calls, where the other person, from time to time, got hold of the steering wheel… and it felt dangerous for me of losing control or the conversation.
I also had to cancel some utilities and restart them with a different provider.
The bad cell phone connection, the voice mail systems, the operators that talk without listening, like a machine, the hold-music… all factors that could be causing me to lose myself.
Loud TV, a typical marketeer loud forceful audio on the computer, peak traffic, noises, bumping into carts in the grocery store… all tearing at you, wanting attention.
Many of you withdraw into your heads and choose not to be present. Or into a daydream. Or into reading trashy novels. But that doesn’t give you a sense of power: it actually makes you a victim, whose awareness factor is low, therefore your worth a damn factor that determines how much you can receive from life, is low.
Some of my students want to play music professionally… and there is an incompatibility between holding themselves together and being in a noisy crowd.
I don’t know if the people in the crowd feel their self lost, or not. I don’t care.
I don’t know if my social butterfly acquaintances feel their self lost. I don’t care.
I only care about you… I pick my battles…
I care about you, and I want you to keep yourself together, by a simple act that you probably haven’t thought of.
You see, staying closed, head up your arse, protecting yourself is not a solution. This solution leads to utter loneliness, and to unhappiness.
Because connecting to people is one of the few real pleasures humans can enjoy…
…and if you are protecting yourself, you can’t connect. But you already know that… albeit I don’t think you’ve known why you felt so lonely.
So, the magical words in the previous paragraph were: “connecting to.”
What do you connect with? What is the energy, or capacity, or organ that you use to connect?
It is the attention.
Attention is a vector: an energy that has a base from which it is directed. And, of course, has the arrowhead-like other end, that touches, reaches out to the thing you want to direct your attention at.
Example is an eye exam: the doctor darkens the room and flashes a strong light into you eye. The light has a cross (normally) shape.
Your instructions are: hold your attention, your eye, on the cross.
Everyone follows the cross, that moves according to what’s wrong with your eyes, instead of keeping the cross, with your attention, at a fixed point. That is the current level of consciousness of humanity.
We all live as if we had no control over our eyes. We live as if it were quite the contrary. And therein lies your misery in life.
You live life as if you were only a passenger in the vehicle your life is… and if your eyes had the steering wheel… Your eyes are intimately connected to your mind, by the way. So if you feel it’s your mind… it is really: eyes first, mind second.
You live life as if your eyes needed to follow what is moving, what is flashy, what is threatening, and as if you had no control over it. (Sometimes your mind follows suit… and you think about what the eyes saw… and you are lost to life.)
Honestly, I am not sure if what happened in 1993-ish, me having eye training to reclaim my power over my eyes, were what made me who I am today, or something else… but I have a strong hunch that I would have never raised my vibration to where it is today without that training.
Being an empath, my life is always noisy. Noisy as in sounds, sights, and feelings of others. All threatening to tear me apart.
I am able to hold the reins of my attention 60% of the time. And because this issue, losing “self” is coming up for my students, I can see that I can increase it with the simple pointers I have for you.
Your sense of self depends on your ability to direct your attention.
But how?
It is not easy, and it requires a lot of practice, eye practice.
You’ve seen, if you follow my writing, that several capacities are impossible without training your eyes, namely your eye muscles to follow your instructions. (Because the eyes are so intimately connected to the mind, this, controlling your eyes, will keep the mind in check too.)
Why? Because what you see is what gives you your life.
But what do you see? If your eyes are directed from the outside, by others, you are a pansy.
If your eyes are directed by your mind: you are clueless, unaware, and probably a victim.
If your eyes are directed by your intention: you have power. You start to become a person, because you are coming from your power to call the shot.
You don’t need to want power over others or over life: power over yourself is enough of a challenge, and makes you a human being. The rest, life lived out of your power, is what real life is about.
So, how do you begin?
“They” say: keep your eye on the prize. But what you understand: think, ruminate about the prize.
You see the immediate effect of the fact that the eyes and the mind are directly connected.
Thinking about something is NOT the same as keeping your eyes/attention on them.
- So the first exercise is all physical: walk or drive with the center of your cone of vision held on a point far out: the place where you are going. And at the same time, you want to be able to see all the traffic, without moving your eyes.
This exercise uses the muscles that pull the eye back into the socket, so you have wide cone of vision.
You may have to forcefully open your cone of vision: I call it “flash out” your vision.
- The second exercise
Do be more of an author of my own experience. (I stole this sentence from John, a student)
Decide, ahead of time, what inquiry will be the center of your cone of vision, your attention.
If you have done the first exercise often and long enough, successfully, you can pick something you are interested in, and hear and see everything else as well.
Example: I am interested in what triggers fear response in you. As an empath I can feel it. We talk, and the center of my attention is intent on catching the fear AND what came right before that.
I hear everything, I can talk, but my attention is mine… This is not about catching you, this is about me maintaining my function of driving MY car.
I could read this way, I could study this way: picking, ahead of time, what to be keeping in the center of my attention, what inquiry.
So, for example, if my musician student did this, when he gets off stage after the jam session, he would not be torn into pieces by people’s compliments, because he would be fully in control of his attention. He would be listening to people’s intention, or people’s hope to get some of his talent by osmosis, or whatever it is that makes people rub up against you when you are successful.
So he can go home and not be spending two hours putting Humpty Dumpty 1 back together, so he can sleep.
This applies to my other musician student as well…
Learning to control where the attention goes does two things:
- you become clear who you are, experientially, because you are directing your attention.
- you become available to growing, because you become the “owner” of the business: “you”. You call the shots.
You’ll prepare the ground, the soil of your being for higher capacities…
And what makes you deserving a damn, is now in your hand…
PS: I have made it sound easier and simpler than it is… you may need spiritual intangible capacities to do any of this. It’s a synergy, not a cause and effect.
For example I have noticed that the “big picture+humility” capacity causes people to be more coherent, which is a sign of coming from your power.
The “releasing control+being able to see the consequences of your actions” allows you to reclaim your power over where your attention “wants” to go.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
