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Ep44 Select This…Attention

Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Can selective attention help us to find inner peace?

In this episode I would like to take a closer look at how learning to ignore things can be the fastest way to achieve inner peace.

In previous episodes I have tried to point out how removing interferences, sort of like peeling away the layers of an onion, allows to live a cleaner and healthier life. I do want to share some foundational assumptions about this path. By clean and healthy, what I mean is the way a human being can live a life on this earth. One that is sustainable, happy, giving, filled with gratitude and love. Removing interferences means to get rid of negative emotions, energies and frequencies that take up tremendous amounts of time to correct while in the meantime cause one to miss valuable quality of life experiences.

I mean, we don’t know how long we have to live and somehow due to experiences by those ahead of us and around us we believe to have on average around 80 years. So why, if you know this, are we so eager to give away any of our precious time? Why we do this, I would like to save for another conversation. Today, I would like to focus in on the idea of removing interferences , specifically by using something we possess quite naturally, called selective attention.

How often have you looked at your phone while someone is trying to talk with you. You think you can pay attention to both but in the end the phone wins and you miss out on the immediate conversation. The phone wins because of something called visual capture. Visione is such a dominant sense that it takes over as the top priority while hearing/listenting takes a back seat.

So what is selective attention? According to John Spacey, there are 9 types of selective attention: selective auditory processing, selective listening, selective visual attention, covert attention, automaticity, divided attention, sensory distraction, situational awareness, sensory overload. All of these are examples of selective attention which is the human ability to filter sensory information to focus attention.

The neuroscience: in an article by Harold Schupp in the Journal of Neuroscience, his team found that negative stimuli ie: mutilation had the added emotional component added to attention. Showing that how incoming information is encoded and processed in the brain is not only based on emotion but amplified by the concurrent emotional experience.

As I have said in prior episodes, our brain spends the bulk of its efforts keeping us alive, meaning survival based activity. The neuroscience shows that we pay attention to that which is negative or harmful quicker and amplify that experience with emotions if we think our survival is threatened.

Now, the emotional warrior…how can use this information? Selective attention can help us to filter out negative stimuli. Since we already have the power of selective attention, lets use it four our own gain. Pay attention to what matters to your own personal growth and fulfilment. Much of the work and emotional warrior has to do is priming of thought. We have to take charge of our thinking. Of course bad things can and often do happen every day. But with the small steps philosophy of kaizen, you can choose the context for your thoughts.

Ex: You wake up and before anything comes into your mind, actively or selectively do a mental gratitude list of your life. Such as: I am happy and grateful for my life, my health, the love of my life, my mindset, the abundance flowing my way etc…

This sets into motion which thoughts of the millions around you get called into your awareness. Maybe you begin to notice small seemingly miraculous events and situations right in your immediate vicinity. No need to worry, the negative stuff is always right there, waiting, but it is your right and apparent hard...