Talk : Can I Have Your Attention?

So,

Welcome one and all to another Insight Timer Live.

A lovely sunny Friday afternoon here in the UK.

Today we're going to be talking about attention management.

This is a head of a workshop,

My first workshop that I'm running next month on the 8th,

The 15th and the 22nd of April.

I'll be sharing a code with you later on today which will allow you to get 50% off the investment in the workshop.

So,

Do stay to the end.

That's okay,

We'll probably go on for about 30 or 40 minutes today because it's a weekend and I guess people want to get away and start their lucky weekend.

So,

Attention management.

This is the second of two warm-up lives which I've done,

The one two weeks ago which is now live on the app as I'm recording.

What I want to talk about today is the title for this session is called,

Can I Have Your Attention?

I want to explore with you all the nature of how our attention gets grabbed.

So perhaps in the chat box,

While we're just waiting for a few more people to join us,

Just share with me and others on the live why you are here and what brought you here.

So,

Why are you here today and what brought you here today?

That's very kind of you,

Thank you Senka,

You.

And Liz,

You feel like you can't focus now,

That's really interesting.

And again,

Rohan,

I have ADD and find it difficult to focus on things that I don't love.

And yes,

And you get distracted too much as well and read curiosity,

That's interesting.

Well,

Here's the thing,

I've got a very loose agenda for today and it seems that there seems to be a thread in here about people getting distracted and also losing focus.

So what I'm going to do,

I'm going to pretty much cover the same materials that I planned for each of these lives,

By the way.

And in fact,

The workshop,

I always do a mind map,

Which is my way of focusing my attention.

And let me start with that first tip.

Mind mapping is a whole brain activity.

The map allows the right brain to see the whole picture and the left brain to fill in the detail.

And when we get into the whole brain state,

That's going to be the first thing we're going to do on the first session of the workshop.

It's a state called EMT or extended me time.

We'll spend a whole hour on extended me time in that first session.

We'll brush on to it today.

So pretty much everybody has said they're either coming here because of me,

Thank you very much for that,

Or you can get distracted.

So just going over the point of attention management,

Which I think is the new time management,

The basis for it is this,

That the normal human mind,

And it's only the normal human mind,

You can develop this out of this state,

Is only capable of having one thought at a time.

So if you think about what you're thinking about,

The thing you were thinking about gets replaced by the thought you're now having about the thing that you were thinking about,

Which sounds interesting.

And in the last Insight Time Alive,

If you were there,

That's great.

And if you weren't,

It's on the app now.

I introduced three meditation techniques,

Four meditation techniques that allow you to jump out of this unfocused state into a focused state.

And these techniques are used in loads of people's meditations,

Including my own on the app as well.

And they are to meditate on the breath,

To meditate on a sound,

To meditate on a mantra,

And to meditate on thought itself.

And we'll do a bit of thought itself today.

But if you think about what brought you here today,

It's not necessarily one thing.

So some people said multiple things in the chat room,

Which is lovely.

So we are awash with senses.

Now,

It's thought that we used to have five senses,

So I think it's probably more like about 39 senses.

And that's scientists that are not even counting the six senses of clairvoyance,

Clairaudience,

Clairsentience,

Claircognizance,

Clairauditory,

And clairolfactory.

So we can develop senses.

I love starting to call them super senses.

They're not psychic.

We've all got them.

And actually,

In the workshop,

It's going to be quite magical and metaphysical,

As you might expect from me.

So we're not just going to do linear attention management.

We're going to weave some magical spells,

And I'm going to share lots of things with you.

So the sort of thing that brought you here today is probably a multiplicity of things.

So it could be something you saw.

So you saw a link somewhere,

Or you saw the workshops coming up.

It could be something you heard,

So someone might have told you to come along to this workshop.

It could be something you felt.

So often what happens when we find a place on the internet,

Something guides us there.

And in the attention management workshop,

I'm going to be introducing you to another time state called IMT,

Which is inner mind time.

Now our inner mind centers,

Namely the gut and the heart,

Run ahead of time.

So often our gut and our heart knows something.

And I say knows in the loosest sense of the word,

Because they're not conscious.

They're not self-aware minds.

They're conscious centers,

Consciousness centers.

Often what happens is our gut,

A few seconds ahead of time,

Drives us somewhere.

So it could be that you didn't know this workshop was on,

But you just saw this and there might be other workshops that are running at the same time.

But this is the one that grabbed you and brought you here today.

And the other thing that someone did actually mention in the chat room about curiosity is something intrigues us.

Now the intriguing energy is something we also explore in the workshop,

And I call that outer mind time.

And it's our future self calling us to do something in the now,

So we can evolve into that perfect version of us.

And a tip for all the authors out there,

Peter,

Is that if we tune into our future self,

We know in the future the words that we're going to write in the now.

Now this is an imaginary technique.

We will cover it again in the workshop.

And it's an imaginary technique,

And we can tune into the future version of us that knows the words we have to write just now.

And then we get out of the way and allow the stuff just to come through us.

So often when you're intrigued about something,

Is you've got an inkling,

Your future self has got an inkling,

And that you're being dragged and entangled towards that thing.

And then the other thing that brings us to any sort of workshop or meditation or any activity for that matter,

Is something that might be concerning you.

So there's something going on in your life that is giving you some sort of grief,

Then our soul body brings us to the solution.

But sometimes we don't recognize the solution.

So while this session might be about attention management,

And the workshop might be about attention management,

At a certain level it's all about connecting with our soul and reconnecting with our soul.

And you could equally well call it soul management or something like that,

Because it's all about us,

Not just as beings in the physical sense,

But also the multidimensional beings that are incarnate in the earth plane.

Now I'm just going to deal with a couple of questions while we're there.

Okay,

Amy,

This is a massive question,

Okay?

Well I don't necessarily know how the answer to,

But I'll give you my opinion.

Do you believe we can fully heal from chronic health conditions?

Please no advice from anyone else right now,

I'd like to be present and focus on Tom's response.

And will this be addressed in the workshop?

Well I mentioned the workshop is not necessarily about healing or whatever,

But if you imagine that the chronic condition,

And this might not be the case,

But let's imagine the chronic condition,

Is there as a lesson and as a pointer to take us to a new way of being,

Then it's possible that any workshop,

Any live,

Inside time of life,

Any meditation that you listen to can take you out of that chronic condition.

Now I do do,

I haven't done them for a while,

But I do do healing sessions online that deal with those things specifically,

But nowadays I like to work one to many rather than one to one.

I think what I will do,

I'm not going to do any Insight Timer Lives next month because I'm running the three workshop sessions,

But the next Insight Timer Live I do in May,

I'm going to run it as a healing session to show you some of these healing techniques.

Now what's interesting about that,

I can back reference what we're doing now,

Is my attention was drawn away from the camera to a large post from Amy,

And that was the future me saying there's a need out there for this,

A requirement out there,

And a desire for this,

And if I was to put something on of that nature then it would benefit people.

You know what,

In general,

If things benefit people,

They benefit you as well.

So I believe we can heal fully from chronic health conditions.

Sometimes we might need a mix of allopathic traditional medicine and also what you might call the woo woo la la things,

But the only person that can really really heal us isn't a doctor or an external healer or a shaman or a shamanka,

Sorceress or sorcerer,

It's us.

If we want to heal,

Then yes you can be healed,

That's my personal view.

Hope that answers your question.

Lovely,

Okay so that's a date for May,

I want to be the first week of May because I'm hopefully going off on holiday for a week,

But mid second,

Third week of May I'll put something on well-being.

Let me bring my attention back to attention management.

So going back a little bit then,

Multiple things grab our attention.

It might be our conscious mind,

It might be the classical five senses,

You know someone literally giving you a nudge and poking you on the shoulder,

On the arm or something like that will point you in that direction.

You seeing something,

You hearing something,

Your nose might take you somewhere either physically or metaphorically and what have you.

But also one of the things that really changes our direction is what happens first thing in the morning and I'm going to point you a meditation on the app,

It's called Hypnopompia and it's a lovely word.

It relates to the state of consciousness between being asleep and being awake.

You know that lovely time in the morning when you just come out of your dream state and you're waking up to a new day.

There's another state called Hypnagogia and I've done two versions of that,

Two nagogia and then there's one with hypnagogia extended and that's the state between being awake and falling asleep.

Now it might be an impossible story but Salvador Dali,

The Spanish painter,

After lunch,

Maybe have some sangria or some red wine,

He'd put his elbow on his table and he'd put a spoon underneath it and he'd drift off to sleep and then when his elbow slipped and the spoon cluttered to the floor,

He'd wake up and then he'd draw whatever was on his sort of slightly sleeping mind.

Now that's actually him dropping into the hypnagogic state but the hypnagogic state and the hypnopompic state are very very similar.

And what's interesting about the hypnopompic state is that we can actually induce it at any time,

We don't have to just be waking up and in that state,

What happens is that the mind,

The conscious mind and if you're an author like Kitha,

The conscious mind might be thinking,

Oh I haven't got time to write,

If I do write,

Nobody's going to read it or it's going to be difficult to get published.

So authors can run lots of those dialogues inside their brain.

I've done for years,

I became an author's mentor and I run a script inside my head which is better for me to help someone else to be a bestseller than it is for me to write a bestseller.

I mean how useful is that as a script to run inside someone's head.

So it took me quite a gap between my first ever book and my second book to actually get that out but after that I was spewing them out at least once every year which is kind of interesting.

So this state,

This state that we can get into just after being asleep,

So I use that state actively,

So I go from that state into meditation and then I get into whatever I'm doing creative writing,

Either writing something or recording something or doing some musical and that sort of thing.

And that's only because I've been working at this for 15 years now and I've got to this lovely state where I don't need to exchange time for money anymore which is,

And by the way that's taken 15 odd years working really hard to get to that state.

So don't give up your day job.

But I do find that when I'm in that extended hypnopompic state my attention is grabbed by the thing that wants to come through me,

The muse that wants to come through me.

And I always say that magic doesn't come from you,

It comes through you.

My books,

I don't know where some of the books have come,

Some of the ideas,

Especially when I've been into my,

I've recently got into fiction,

I mean these ideas are just absolutely out of this world and bizarre.

And I've been writing about time a billion years from now and stuff like that.

I can't have any conscious knowledge of the universe at that point so you can only channel that stuff through.

Anyway,

That's another great question.

Do you time your meditations and creative writing practices or do you allow yourself to be guided through the felt sense?

Well,

I'm not sure I quite understand both the sentences but I'm trying to answer them,

I'm sure they're relevant.

And again,

My attention was drawn to that.

So when you get into this state,

When you stay in the hypnopompic state,

Time takes this sort of lovely squishy quality on and you see what seems to happen is the linear time that you got available.

So let's say I've allocated from nine o'clock to 10.

15 as my writing time.

Whatever it is I set out to do,

Whether it's to write a meditation which is 500 words but I might be spending some time on the hypnotic language structures in the meditation or a bit of non-fiction or a mini short story,

In that one hour and 15,

Because you're in this squidgy time state,

The EMT state,

You seem to get everything you need to do done.

I hope that answers that question.

So you're in a kind of felt sense because you're not in the conscious sense that answers that question.

So I thought what we'd do is a short practice to induce the hypnopompic state at any time of the day.

I've got another meditation on the app as well called a snoozitation and that does a similar thing but actually that one is designed to give you a power nap in the afternoon as well which is going to be a really good thing to do,

A sort of Salvador Dali-esque power nap which is fantastic without having to have a bottle of red wine at lunch.

So yeah,

This technique is fairly easy to do and it's great to do just before you get into a creative task.

Now I'm purposely going to not do some of the techniques that you'll already find in other meditations,

You'll find one on the app called Getting in the Zone that will take you through nostril breathing and eye exercise.

This is going to take you pretty much straight there into this zone.

So the first thing you do is you focus on something.

By the way this is an eyes-open meditation.

So I purposely moved a few things around behind my shoulders and I'd like you just to focus on one thing in my studio office here.

Just focus your attention on that one thing.

And for the purposes of this recording if you focus on the screenshot which accompanies the meditation that should do the same thing.

I know it's a still image but it should do the same thing.

With your gaze absolutely locked on to that one thing.

Don't move your eyes,

Just widen your attention so you become aware of the other things top and bottom and left and right of that thing.

And now let your attention widen still.

So have you still got the thing in the centre of your gaze?

And widen so you've got the top and bottom of the screen and the left and right of the screen and that's the boundaries,

That's the current boundaries of your attention.

And if a thought comes in just tell that thought that you're busy attending to something else right now and bring your attention back to that thing.

And now widen your attention further so it goes beyond the top and the bottom and the left and right of the screen you're currently looking at.

So look beyond the device you're currently watching this Insight Time Alive on and become aware of the things on your periphery in your room but still with your gaze absolutely locked on to the thing on the screen,

The centre of your gaze locked on to the thing on the screen.

And now widen your attention still further so you're actually aware of the ceiling above your head,

The floor beneath your feet and the walls to the left and the right of you.

Now depending on your visual acuity that might be limited somewhat but you just have a sense of them,

A sense of the walls either side of you,

A sense of the ceiling above your head and a sense of the floor beneath your feet while your eyes are still locked on to that object in my current room.

And now we're going to extend this concept a little further.

Let's imagine that just behind your head or maybe to the left and the right are your guides and your guides are observing you observing the thing in my room and the things that you're aware of,

That your attention is aware of in your room.

Now our guides might be imaginary,

They might be real,

Some people can talk to their guides,

Some people have relationships with their guides.

I've been on a few workshops where I've been integrated with my guides and instead of me having this dialogue with them they just came straight in so you're now looking at Tom and his guides all kind of merge together which is interesting.

And hi Siri,

My attention will just grab by you popping up there.

So now imagine that your guides are actually seeing this thing.

And imagine this,

That it was your guides that originally pointed you at that particular object.

What was the reason for that?

And you can ask them why that particular object is important right now.

It could be that if you're thinking of writing a book that's the seed thing,

That's the seed idea that can take you somewhere else.

And around us we're just surrounded by ideas,

Seeds,

Things that can germinate.

Every single thing around us is a sign.

Even the things that we might find could be blocking us or restricting us,

It's all a sign.

There's a company in the UK who supplies electrical goods,

Washing machines,

TVs,

Fridges,

That kind of thing.

And they're called AO.

And I was driving along the other day thinking about the Alpha and the Omega only to see the AO fan shoot past me.

Everything's a sign.

Most of the time that wouldn't even get our attention.

So the fact that that particular thing happened inspired me the next day to work on an Alpha and Omega meditation.

That simple non-consequential thing that most of the time you wouldn't spot.

An AO band delivery man driving past you.

I want to share another story.

There's a lovely lady I know who does readings where she explores your Greek god or goddess archetype.

And I did a questionnaire with her and about a week later she sent me the results of what my god archetype was.

And it turns out that I'm influenced by the god Hermes who is a messenger.

A bit of a trickster as well,

He's exactly my character all over.

But just to re-emphasize the point,

I was on the island of Herm in the Channel Isles,

H-E-R-M,

When I got the email from her about me having the Hermes archetype.

Now all of these things happen to you all the time.

And the difference between somebody that's supremely creative and lucky is paying attention to those coincidences.

Often we get reminded if you don't pay attention the first time you might see three AO bands if that's important to you at the time.

And in this particular case I got reminded twice.

I got an email saying by the way pay attention to the energy of Hermes because that's what you embody.

And by the way I was on the island of Herm at the time.

As there's no vehicles on the site otherwise a Hermes delivery van might have been driving past at the time.

I noticed they rebranded themselves recently.

Anyway that's out of interest.

So the hypnopompic state is this state where our attention is wide but narrowly focused on one thing.

And what's great about that is using all the neurons in our head,

In our left hemisphere and our right hemisphere.

So the right hemisphere tends to look at the big picture and the left hemisphere looks at the detail.

And sometimes we can get caught into the detail and not see the big picture.

Sometimes we can get lost in the big picture and not pay attention to the detail.

And one of the things about being an artist which is productive and focused is being able to look at the details and know that each and every word is important and how they all flow together but also retaining that big picture at the same time of where you're trying to go.

And that's the real key to attention management being wide and narrow at the same time.

Now I hope I've been holding your attention.

I hope I've been boring you.

And we're going to come back in April the 8th,

The 15th and the 22nd of April.

Normally one hour sessions but they might go on a little bit.

But remember an hour when you're in this squidgy time can be a very long time.

So I'm going to point you at two resources.

First is a link which is www.

Tomevans.

Com.

I got told off the first time I did this.

But the link is slash atman and the reason I've done that is to share the link verbally with you that the actual link to this workshop would be not that easy.

So I've done a redirect on my website.

So tomevans.

Com slash a double t m a n.

That will take you straight to the workshop.

But this code atman50 will actually give you 50% off which should be great.

Which takes it down from $99 to $49.

50.

If you miss a session or some people I know in Australia are coming along there will be a recording available too.

You also get access to the PDFs of my Managing Time Mindfully book.

Now great question from Dutch.

Really good question from Dutch.

How does that work with the eyes?

As a photographer I focus on my subject with my right eye and see the whole picture with my left.

Well the left eye maps into the visual cortex on the right brain at the back and the right eye maps into the left brain at the back.

So what's happening with your right eye?

The detail is going into the left brain and then the big picture from your left eye is going into the right brain.

And that's pretty much for all mammals by the way.

There's a great book called Master and his Emissary by a guy called Ian McGilchrist and he talks about how chickens look with their left eye for the danger and with their right eye for the grains of wheat and what have you on the floor.

Liz I don't think it has to be uppercase.

It's a slightly different experience on the web from the app and I couldn't find initially where to put the code on the web but it's in the top right.

Obviously then that might be the left eye seeing it.

The website address didn't come up.

I'll point that for you.

Www.

Tomevans.

Co.

A.

T.

M.

A.

N or if you go to my profile on Insight Timer you'll find the workshop there.

So any other questions?

If not I'm going to wrap up.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me your attention today.

Have a great weekend,

Have a peaceful weekend.

Let's send our attention from our hearts to all those people in Ukraine to their hearts and also to those people in Russia too who don't want this to happen either.

So peace to all,

Have a great weekend everybody and I hope to see you next month starting on the 8th where we're going to dive into this whole subject in a whole load of more detail and discover what it is that really is trying to grab our attention.