Attention and Awareness - Moving into your Better Future

As we all know, life can be quite overwhelming from time to time. Typically, that increase in stress and anxiety is associated with where we are putting our attention, energy and focus. I believe that we can shift that through increasing our attention AND our awareness of the life we are living and turning our Qi (life-force energy) into a powerful asset. According to the Webster Merriam’s Dictionary attention is defined as : the act or power of carefully thinking about, listening to, or watching someone or something. It goes on to define the word awareness as : knowing that something (such as a situation, condition, or problem) exists. While these to terms seem quite interlinked, there are subtle differences between them. The main one being that the brain is used more with attention, while your body, mind and soul can simple be in the energetic awareness of something without us having any attention to it at all. Simply put, attention is accomplished using more brain power, while awareness is from more heart power. In Qigong, as well as many other mindful practices, it is important to invite your attention to help build your awareness of all the energies that are all around you and help bring that into your conscious mind. Then, you can use this to aid in your healing, support your relationships and build the life that you want to have. Now, there are many ways to do this, but most (if not all) involve slowing down and letting yourself check in with what’s happening inside and outside of you. Through these contemplative actions gained through things like mediation, yoga, tai chi, qigong and others, you begin to open yourself up to more and more possible energetic outcomes than just staying in a stuck emotional and/or mental state. You can invite in more flow into your experience. Then, as you become more attentive and aware on how you actually use your personal power to support yourself (life, dreams, hopes) and the people you care about so deeply, you can create a paradigm shift within yourself, which will resonate out beyond you and your experience in ways that you can’t imagine. So it all begins with this question, where are you placing your energy, attention and awareness in your life? Everyone has good days and bad days, but when you open up to a bigger and bigger awareness of the unlimited potential you have, life will really open up for you into true feeling of freedom….freedom through awareness. I believe this is summed up in the following quote. American Author, David Foster Wallace once said, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad of petty, unsexy ways everyday. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”