Time-Stressed
Sitting in Loews Hollywood Hotel, not a guest but waiting for our daughter and son-in-law, I had my computer with me and could/should be working on my blog post due the next day. Almost an hour passed, but being a procrastinator, I could not get motivated to open the computer cover. My only chance over this busy weekend to work on my blog. I was time-stressed.
Gerd Altman – Pixaby
Too time-stressed even for Open-Focus Therapy, I suddenly thought of my mother-in-law who in a few hours would hold up the minister and her daughter’s wedding congregation of more than three hundred people. She never apologizes, though she is not inconsiderate, and always helping people. But with no sense of time, her life goes on outside of time. As a result she is zero percent time-stressed.
So I decided to model her and almost instantly shifted into diffused Open-Focus zone outside of time. So many things are possible through modeling. Shutting my eyes and breathing deeply, sounds from all around were in discordant concert. Some sounds maybe were coming from inside my head, but I listened to them too.
Sorry, but it felt so good not to stress about time that I missed Sunday’s blog post.
Narrow Focus
Most of our formal education encourages a narrow focus of attention. “Pay attention” is a phrase most of us have heard through grade school. Pay attention means to focus narrowly on what I am saying or on what you are doing. But constant narrow focus leads to the gradual accumulation of physical and mental stress, distress, sometimes burnout. I burned out long before I understood enough to use Attention Therapies in my job as a counselor, school psychologist, and teacher of second grade up through college.
Time Stressed
Pay Attention
Open Focus
Open Focus is a mix of narrow and diffuse focus. If you are narrowly focused on a book you are reading, in open focus mode you take in space all around. If you are engrossed in an internal dialog, you open up and experience the world all around. You alternate attention between narrow and diffuse focus, sometimes paying attention simultaneously in both modes.
Remote/Objective versus Immersed Focus
In addition to narrow versus diffuse, Open Focus includes remote/objective versus immersed focus. With right-brain focus, you are immersed in what you are experiencing. If you are tasting something and get totally into the tasting experience, this is immersed attention. An immersion-style of attending is associated with mindful meditation where we attend to the body, emotions, sense modalities, and passing thoughts. Remote attention is when you create a distance between yourself and the object of attention.
Right Brain
Open-Focus attention that integrates narrow and diffuse attention is positive, creative, flexible, even loving. Open Focus is flexible attention that opens up your right brain to the world. A right-brain, diffuse, immersed and absorbed attentional style is unselfconscious and inclusive. It allows you to see things in context. It helps us adapt to a world that is constantly changing and evolving, a world that is never fully graspable, never fully known.
In 1982, Les Fehmi and George Fritz self-published 150-page spiral-bound 81/2 x 11 “The Open Focus Handbook.” I found the information too tightly packed to understand, no less put it into practice. Then in 2007 Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins published a full-length book,“The Open-Focus Brain: harnessing. the power of attention to heal the mind and body.” This book contains lots of exercises to optimize attention and experience a fuller life space.
Open-Focus Alpha synchronous is the quickest path to meditation possible. You need to focus on space and you can learn the basics with the short video below. But it is a completely different method of perception, so it takes learning and ongoing practice. When mastered, together with Ki Breathing Meditation, it is virtually an instant shift into balanced alpha brain waves. It is a shift from anxiety, stress, and fear. Open Focus is an Attention Therapy method that can lift you out of uncomfortable affective states into an alpha world state of mind.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus (Sample Chapters)
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
