Energy is the currency of the universe. When you pay attention to something, you buy that experience.
-Emily Maroutian
This teaching is true, completely true. And there’s all sorts of Vedic wisdom plus a growing body of neuroscientific and quantum physical research to back it up.
This teaching is also not quite what it seems at first blush…
For the longest time, I understood this to be an injunction to only pay attention to the “good,” the things and experiences that I wanted. So, if something was bothering me, I consigned it to the closet under the stairs in my mind. Don’t look at it. Don’t think about it. Just ignore it. A whole spectrum of emotions–anger, frustration, fear, and their cousins–became a minefield to be avoided at all costs. Because if I gave any of my attention to the unwanted, or the problematic, or the challenging, then I’d just be would be inviting more of it into my life, right…?
When I felt irritation arise while talking on the phone with my mother, I’d squelch it and press on with the conversation
When I felt uneasy about a travel situation, I’d push it aside and fill my head with visions of smooth arrival at my destination
When I felt frustration in the ring with a horse, I’d tamp it down and keep moving through the exercise
Or, at least, I’d try to.
You can guess how well this tended to work, right?
Riiiiight.
My attempts to avoid my irritation, unease and frustration only made them loom larger. Like that classic psych experiment in which they told the subjects not to think about a pink elephant, and the subjects then proceeded to… well, you know. And there were physical manifestations of my fight to ignore what was bothering me in favor of focusing on what I wanted: I would feel my jaw harden with determination and chest tighten to ward off intrusions from unwanted thoughts. Problem? In my attempts to not spend the currency of my attention on the problem, I was spending all of my energy NOT thinking about it!
But, never fear, a lesson was already on its way to me… Shortly after I had been introduced to this way of thinking, I tweaked my back. It was, thankfully, not a serious injury. But I was having discomfort and it was affecting my ability to get around.
One of my first thoughts was that I didn’t want to give it too much attention, because that would just magnify the injury and its place in my consciousness. And I had no desire to become one of those people who has a bad back. On the other hand, the pain in my back and the (hopefully, temporary) constraints on my mobility were real, so I couldn’t ignore them. I had to find a way to relate to them. Ultimately, I found a way forward that involved acknowledging that my back needed special attention and figuring out how to provide it, while focusing my mental energies on health and a return to wholeness. It was a very delicate balance of being with the reality of my current experience and also inviting in a different reality.
Not surprisingly, it worked better than I could have anticipated. Because, as always, when I “got my mind right,” the Universe began to show off. I found several videos in yoga therapy web sites about how to provide myself with gentle therapeutic traction. (It’s amazing what you can do with a strap and a doorknob, nothing short of miraculous!) Instead of my usual work schedule, the following week involved two short-distance road trips to meet with clients. Which meant that not only was I able to stop frequently during the drives to get out and walk and stretch, but I was also able to bring all of my yoga props, including blankets and bolsters, with me so that I could continue to support my back while sitting and sleeping away from home. And I tuned in to my body’s messages about what sort of stretching and strengthening felt good and nourishing to it along the way. Within about ten days, I went from that initial gut-deadening fear that I had just acquired a chronic injury, to being back to full strength and activity.
I was recently “gifted” with the opportunity to relearn this lesson in one of my relationships. There was a persistent off-ness in my dealings with a very close friend–no explicit conflict, and yet I felt a distinct, persistent unease about something happening in the space between us. Not wanting to give it the currency of my attention, I turned away and told myself that everything was glitter and unicorn farts. But the more I tried to convince myself that nothing was going on, the louder my intuition screamed. And then my unease started to leak out in other ways: sniping, snarking, withdrawing.
Until I finally acknowledged that I needed another approach: just as I couldn’t ignore that injury to my back, I couldn’t ignore my emotional experiences of this relationship. I had to find a way to relate to them. Although more subtle than back pain, these emotions were indicators that something was off, and moving full steam ahead while ignoring them would have been just as damaging as continuing to practice acrobatics while my back hollered in pain. They were demanding my attention. So, I needed a constructive way to relate to them. I needed to find a way to acknowledge them and their message without getting caught up in the attendant negativity.
The answer was to accept them as my teachers.
To let these uncomfortable emotions teach me how and I want to be in this relationship.
To let them teach me how I want to be related to, what kind of spaces in-between I want to cultivate with the people in my life.
To let their discomfort be the contrast that shone a light on what I want to create…and then feel my way into alignment with that.
In this case, it meant surfacing some assumptions that I had made, some unexamined programs that I was running without realizing it–much less explicitly confirming that my friend was on the same page. It meant being real about how I was contributing to the problem. And then copping to that. And then sharing my vision for how things could be instead. And inviting my friend to meet me there, in Rumi’s proverbial field.
More subtle, perhaps, than packing bolsters and Epsom salts on a business trip, but the same principle: surrender to the reality of the discomfort so that you can find a safe, loving way forward through–and, ultimately, out of–it. And, equally effective: in the space of two days and one heartfelt conversation, we went from vaguely off to full strength, with new clarity and ease defining the space between us.
So, I ask you, where are you attempting to withhold the currency of your attention? And how might you instead spend it wisely and lovingly on the situation or person in question?
Fierce Whisper 