Focus

Do you often struggle with finding the willpower to meditate, do yoga, or do the other things you know you should for your spiritual health? Or maybe you sit to meditate but your meditations just seem like “watching your thoughts while sitting for a while?” Or perhaps you’ve got a good handle on meditation but can’t seem to bring that presence into your day-to-day activities.

Strengthening your will energy and cultivating an Inward-Pointing Focus are required to achieve full-time awakened presence.

Will energy is what lies behind your focus. The more ‘will’ you forge into your focus, the more your focus will sharpen and the more your focus can accomplish.

Think about a scene where you’re at a grocery store, where your attention shifts from people shopping around you, your judgments about those people, to vegetables, to remembering your list, to an idle thought about your friend, to the next thing, the next thought about that thing, so on and so on ad infinitum.

That is what I term Outward-Pointed Focus, and it’s how most people use their focused consciousness in order to navigate the world. This sort of focus requires very little will and is mostly the unconscious mind simply reacting to stimuli and neglects listening to your body. Focus with this quality leads to more ‘selfing,’ more separation, more judgments, more mental noise, more thoughts, and less presence.

Replay that grocery shopping scenario again in your mind. Shoppers, vegetables, list, etc. except this time, imagine that you are willing your focus to shift inward to experience all the sensations happening in your body. You feel your breath expanding and contracting sensations in your abdomen, you sense a little apprehension energy around that crying kid in the aisle, you sense a craving arise when you pass the pastries section, you experience yourself as the awareness experiencing your body.

This focus is pointed inward and occupies as much of your whole body as it can. It doesn’t require thoughts about the experiences you’re having, it just experiences the experiences you’re having. It doesn’t require judgments or comparisons between myself and them in order to navigate the grocery store. It just experiences everything as it is, and wouldn’t you know, you can do this and still grocery shop! This is what I mean by Inward-Pointed Focus and is the key to taking your meditation with you in every moment.

By using an easeful willing focus, you shift how much of your awareness energy occupies your body. If you are someone who does a lot of intellectualizing, your awareness will likely primarily occupy your head and surrounding area. Most of the western world tends to occupy mostly their head-space which is partly why our society is out of balance.

For many spiritual teachers, mindfulness is the goal to achieve. In our work together, mindfulness is the vehicle we use to access greater states of conscious awareness such as Kundalini awakening, direct experience, and accessing Authentic Power (soul/personality alignment).

Focus work is ultimately a means to an end - the journey of a million miles from your head to your heart and beyond. It’s a way to become the awareness itself, not to remain as someone who’s just using the tool of mindfulness. Full conscious awareness requires full-body integration, which means expand your awareness beyond your thoughts to include a sense-based relationship with your body.

It’s through your body that your highest self communicates with you.

You can’t ‘will’ or ‘effort’ your way into awakening presence. Willfulness can be an egoic projection of separation, but the willingness to overcome challenges and keep trying will reap rewards in presence practice.

Imagine you are being tossed down the stream of a raging river. You have chance to escape if you are willing to stop fighting and let the current place you on the banks. Will is the energy that says, “I’m worth saving and I value my experience enough to stop resisting my process and become determined to act.” You in the river is a metaphor representing unconsciousness - the state of being swept away in ego-thought, outward-pointing focus. You can fall in by shifting your focus for just a moment and will is the energy that can help you climb out through the practice of shifting your focus inward.

Will is different than effort, as forceful effort won’t get you cross the threshold of presence.

Will in this practice also includes the willingness to surrender and let go. Surrender and release are better tools than resistance is when accessing presence.

As you become more proficient with holding Inward-Pointing Focus, you build the ability to become “empty.” Emptiness is a Buddhist term to point toward the same essence that Eckhart Tolle calls “stillness,” which an experiential state of being without the noise of the ego-mind.

Stillness is the language The Divine uses to speak and is where profound insights about yourself and the universe at large arrive.

My process is meant to get you to the point of accessing your own awakening presence experience regularly; after you’ve arrived, stillness takes over your teaching from there. Regular meditation practice is the best way to cultivate this focus, and can take months to years to master for the unacquainted.