Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Christopher R. Edgar of Purpose Power Coaching.
I used to have trouble taking criticism. When someone suggested I could have done something better—whether it was a superior at work, a loved one, or someone else—I’d feel an overwhelming urge to fight or flee. Sometimes I’d attack, trying to point out flaws in my critic’s statements or bring up their shortcomings. At other times, I’d surrender, meekly agreeing with them in the hope that they’d lose interest. Either way, I responded out of fear, as if my survival were at stake.
It almost seemed, when I was being criticized, like my critic was challenging my right to exist. If I didn’t prove them wrong, or make them relent by passively accepting their accusations, I would die. Thus, it was no surprise that I felt unsafe when someone put me down. It was only when a friend pointed out that I was treating criticism like a threat to my existence that I saw I was trapped in this mode of thinking.
I started exploring ways to free myself from this fear, and the first approach I experimented with was an intellectual one. Each time someone said something I interpreted as critical, I’d start mentally repeating to myself that I was a full-grown adult, and that this person’s disapproval wasn’t a threat to my survival. But this just didn’t seem to do the trick. No matter what I told myself, I’d still feel a chill in my back and shoulders, as if I had a low-grade fever, when I’d feel like someone was shaming me. And I’d want to run or fight to escape that feeling.
How I Discovered The Importance Of Awareness
I finally found relief when I started taking up more practices, like meditation, yoga and qi gong, that helped me bring my awareness into my body. These exercises helped me notice that the way I felt often depended on where in my body I directed my attention. By bringing my attention into a part of my body, I mean focusing on the sensations I’m feeling in that part. If I’m holding the soles of my feet in my awareness, for instance, I may feel the ground beneath me, my blood circulating, the warmth of my socks, and so on.
I started to see that, when I wasn’t very aware of my body, or my awareness was trained on a high point like my head or neck, I’d be more likely to feel vulnerable or defensive when someone criticized me. But if my attention was on a lower area, like the soles of my feet or my pelvis, people’s jabs didn’t seem to knock me off center. Instead, I felt solid and powerful, as if I were rooted into the earth. This approach worked well, I found, not just when I was faced with criticism, but in most situations I encountered in life.
What I paid attention to in the outside world, I discovered, also seemed to affect my emotions. If my attention was fixed on a narrow area of the world around me, I’d be more susceptible to anxiety. But as I expanded the scope of my attention to include more of my surroundings, I felt safer and more confident.
For instance, if I’m at a social event, and my attention is focused solely on one person or feature in the room, I’m likely to have more trouble relaxing and enjoying myself. But if I take in everyone in the room with my awareness, I’ll feel more secure and have a much better time. And I get the best results—I feel the most secure and composed—when I hold my body and my surroundings in my awareness all at once.
Why does the way I direct my attention affect how confident I feel? As I see it, the more my awareness takes in my body and my surroundings, the more familiar, and even friendly, the world feels to me. If I’m less conscious of what’s happening within and around me, the world seems less inviting, and the risk that something could surprise or even attack me feels more real. It’s as if I’m walking through a jungle, and the more alert I am to my surroundings, the more I’ll feel capable of dealing with potential predators. Thus, where I place my awareness can profoundly affect how I see the world.
On a related note, psychologists suggest that each of us has a tendency to regress to childlike ways of thinking and acting in certain situations. The events that trigger these age regressions differ—some of us may start frantically apologizing and appeasing like shamed children when confronted with an angry person, and others might revert to our childhood habit of screaming when we don’t get what we want—but almost everyone has some of these “trigger points.” This is often because the events that trigger us resemble painful parts of our childhoods.
When we keep our attention on our bodies and our present surroundings, we’re more likely to remember that we’re mature adults when one of our trigger points gets hit, and be able to approach life in a calmer and more resourceful way. As psychologist Susan Aposhyan writes in Body-Mind Psychotherapy
, “there is a relationship between having a strong sense of self and embodiment. . . . When we are not literally feeling our bodies, we cannot make self-informed decisions.”
Some Exercises For Focusing And Expanding Attention
I’ll discuss a few of the exercises I use to pay more attention to how I’m feeling on the inside and what’s occurring around me. By just focusing my awareness in the ways I describe, I’ve developed a more composed and peaceful attitude toward life.
1. Feeling The “Inner Body.” Many meditation teachers prescribe an exercise that simply involves slowly scanning your awareness over each part of your body. Jon Kabat-Zinn gives a particularly good description of this meditation in Wherever You Go, There You Are
. To do this, begin by directing your attention into the soles of your feet, and just noticing what sensations you’re feeling there. Perhaps you feel a tingling, an ache, the steady pulse of your circulation, or something else.
Notice how just bringing your awareness into a part of your body helps relax the muscles and relieve any tension that may have been there. Then, slowly move your attention upward through your body until you reach the top of your head, noticing the sensations you experience, and relieving any tension you may have been feeling in the process.
This exercise is also good for shifting your attention away from painful or distracting thoughts and returning it to the present. As the sensations in your body always occur “in the now,” focusing your awareness on them helps to keep your attention in this moment. For instance, when I want to go to sleep, but my mind is clouded with worries or repetitive thoughts, I train my attention on the parts of my body that are in contact with my bed. If I’m sleeping on my side, I focus on the light pressure the bed exerts on my arm and torso. This helps me clear my mind and drift off.
2. “Grounding Out” Your Thoughts. Most of the approaches out there for dealing with negative and distracting thinking are cognitive—they focus on using positive or logical thinking to undermine the unwanted thought patterns. I think many of these techniques are great, and that using the way we focus our awareness to manage those thoughts is another dimension worth exploring.
When I find myself under attack from, or being distracted by, unwanted thoughts, one technique I use is to imagine those thoughts as an electric charge located somewhere in my body. I then visualize myself directing that charge, like a lightning rod, down through my feet into the ground, where the energy dissipates. If I’m sitting, I imagine the energy arcing down through my pelvis into my chair, and from there into the ground.
In Your Aura & Your Chakras
, Karla McLaren describes another useful approach to this exercise, which involves imagining “a grounding cord directly in the center of your discomfort. Allow the cord to grow from within the energy of the pain and to travel downward toward the center of the planet. . . . Let it drain the painful energy away from you, like a rope unraveling off the edge of a table and finally falling off altogether.”
I’ve found that this approach also works if I’m in an interaction with a person that feels a little frightening or embarrassing. If I have the presence of mind to notice where I’m feeling the fear or embarrassment in my body, and direct that energy into the ground, I become able to respond from a calm place, rather than defending myself or running away.
3. Expanding Your Boundaries. The Vijnana Bhairava, an ancient tantric text, prescribes a meditation that goes like this: “imagine spirit both within and without, until the entire universe spiritualizes.” This exercise helps us experiment with a new perspective on who and what we are. On one level, we’re separate, individual human beings. But at another level, we’re all made up of the same energy, or substance. This meditation helps us experience ourselves as part of that universal energy field.
As I understand the exercise, it works like this. Sit alone in a quiet place. Start focusing your attention on the sensations you feel on the surface of your skin. After a little while, you may begin to notice that your skin’s surface, though it may look solid, is actually permeable—energy moves through it into and out of your body. Focus your attention on the movements of energy through your skin until you feel the boundaries between the inside and outside of your body begin to blur.
As you have this experience, notice how you begin perceiving objects in the “outside world” more acutely—almost as if you can touch them without using your hands, or feel them in the same way that you feel your circulation and breathing. Expand the range of your “feeling” to encompass everything around you, including the ground and sky. Consider the possibility that you aren’t just imagining how things outside you feel—that, in fact, there is nothing “inside” or “outside” you at all, because you are everything.
The more I’ve done this exercise, the more I’ve found my awareness expanding to include my surroundings. When I experience firsthand this feeling that I’m more than just one person—that, in a sense, I’m everything there is—I’m gifted with a deep peace and focus. This exercise may sound a little “new-agey” at first, but if you try it I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results.
Copyright © 2008 Christopher R. Edgar. All rights reserved.
Author Bio
Christopher R. Edgar is an author and success coach who helps people transition to careers aligned with their true callings, and find more fulfillment and productivity in their work. He may be reached at http://www.purposepowercoaching.com.
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