Getting Out of Your Own Way Tip #3

I hope you have already applied yesterday’s blogpost tip and are feeling some relief from not blaming, shaming or criticizing yourself. It can make a huge difference in your life and opens the door so you can get out of your own way. As important as it is to stop the blame game, equally important is to stop focusing on the problem.

What Is This Way You Need To Get Out Of?

And Why Would You Want To?

It’s becoming more and more obvious in my own experience that we already are equipped with everything that fulfills us, makes us happy and inspires us to live a purposeful, meaningful, peacefilled life.
Looking around the world, it sure doesn’t look obvious and it hasn’t been easy for me either to start trusting this Goodness.
We have all been conditioned to focus on what is not working, what makes us feel unfulfilled, purposeless, isolated and unloved and it can be quite a task to see beyond it. We are lost in trying to survive, both physically and emotionally and all our attention goes to just that – hoping it will change one day.

Where You Place Your Attention Is Where Your Energy Goes

When you keep pushing and fighting and efforting to change something in your life that is not working for you, that is where your attention goes so that is where you energy flows.
It doesn’t leave much energy for what I call the Divine Feminine Flow (free ebook to your right). The efforting, pushing and working hard to change what you don’t want in your life is taking all your energy and you don’t have much left to focus on what naturally wants to unfold inside of you through the deepest longing in your Heart.
I’ve seen many people feel lost or even sad when asked the question: “What do you deeply want or long for?”  It’s a foreign concept to many because we have been swept away by the business of life and never considered it could be different. A common answer is “I just want to be able to pay my bills,” or “I just don’t want to feel like this.”
These answers are focused on the problem, not what their Heart longs for.
When you listen to your Heart, you may get answers like: “I long for peace in my life,” or “I would love to have enough to cover everything I need and have more left over to give away.”

Well, maybe it had to be problem focused in the past (who knows?) but today is different as so many of us are waking up to new possibilities. It turns out that we have access to this new life right inside our beautiful Hearts. All it takes is a shift of attention and then … that is where our energy goes.

Transfixed On The Boulder In The Flow Of Life

First let’s bring attention to this boulder and see how we can shift it. Until we consciously know where we ‘parked our attention’, we’ll stay parked there 24/7 not realizing the meter is ticking and the price we pay is the preciousness of life. Please take a little time out of your busy (problem-filled life?) to notice where your attention goes without you even thinking about it.

It takes awareness to do this – and willingness. It’s like meeting another blind spot that runs your life without you consciously agreeing with it. Unconsciously, yes. Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it. So we need to make this conscious and give you the gift of choice.

Today, I want to invite you to just notice where your attention wanders every time you are not paying attention to this wanderer. In other words, become conscious of unconscious patterns. You’ll need to pause consciously, take a breath and refocus your attention. Instead of having your attention in the pattern, now you hold your attention around the pattern. This creates Space and this gives you choice and that’s where change happens. Let me remind you of tip #2 from yesterday’s blog post How to Let Go of Old Patterns: Choose not to blame, shame or criticize yourself no matter what!

What’s Your Problem?

What is the problem that your wandering mind keeps focusing on all day?
In my Meditation and Mindfulness Program, one of the meditations helps you become aware of your unique ‘parking space’ in your mind. Every time I teach this program at UCSC, the students are always amazed at what they find. Usually we are not aware of what we focus on all day, because we have no Space around it. We are fully identified with it and therefore without choice.
Now that you are beginning to see that you have choice and are taking time to find where your awareness is parked, what do you notice?

Where Do You Park Your Attention?

Here are a few common ‘parking spaces:’

• To do list
• Health issues
• Financial problems
• Relationship conflicts
• Worry about ….

There is no end to this list and it takes more than just realizing your parking space if you want to get out of it. Of course you need to take care of your body and health; of course you need to pay your bills etc. We don’t want to go into denial or doing a spiritual bypass here. What we do want to do is creating Space around them and move a few steps out of the identity and open our focus to see that there is more to life than our issues, even though it may not feel like it. We need to get out of the contracted problem first – then we start feeling what else is available.

Survival concerns on all levels creates a narrow focus and keeps us stuck in our parking space, unable to see there might be a much better parking Space right next to us. But because all our attention was on the problem, all our energy went there… and alas we couldn’t even see the Space right beside you.

Tip #3:

Get curious and follow where you park your attention.

Just get curious – no judging yourself – just: “Wow, I had no idea I put all my energy into this misery all day.” And be grateful that you can see it. The Space you have created in order to see, is the same Space that has bigger, better, brighter solutions. It’s just a matter of where you park your attention and what you focus on. Yet because most of us didn’t grow up knowing about this Space, how can we trust or know that the solutions may come from there? It takes curiosity and courage to take your attention out of the problem and find out what happens.

Are you game?

Now that you are seeing where you have put your attention and energy, it may not be so surprising that things felt a little stuck. Energy is energy. Everything is energy. It’s just energy. You can focus your energy on anything your Heart longs for. Unless stuckness and problems is what you long for, try and shift it and see what happens
We’ll talk more about that later… For now ‘go find your car!’

Learn more about my work as a Self Love Mystic & Mentor at Divine Feminine Flow. I also teach meditation and mindfulness at UCSC. If you want to learn more about mindfulness, which is important if you want to focus on something other than problems, please start with the Meditation & Mindfulness course. Feel free to contact me for a free 30 min. Discovery Session to learn how true Self Love can turn your whole life around.