How To Focus, Yet Expand Your Awareness

I wanted to talk to you today about focus and distraction. I’m filming quite close to the hotel, it’s early morning and the workers are starting to do their thing and prepare the hotel for the day.

So there will be a lot of distraction, a lot of noise and my offer to you is to focus on this video and to focus on what I’m saying.

I’m going to talk to you about focus and what the Hawai’ians call Hakalau, which is expanded awareness.

Why would you want to learn about expanded awareness? Well, there’s a couple of things. One is that the expanded awareness state, the Hakalau state, engages the parasympathetic nervous system.

Now the parasympathetic nervous system is the opposite of fight or flight. In fight or flight, we use the sympathetic nervous system. In the Hakalau, the expanded awareness, we engage the parasympathetic nervous system and that’s the de-stress system. So, if you want to de-stress quickly, this is definitely the place to go.

Another reason why you’d want to be able to engage the expanded awareness state, is because it’s much easier to have more consciousness of what’s going on around you.

It was taught to the American military in Vietnam because it helped them stay safer. It’s taught to advanced drivers on advanced driving courses because you’re always aware of what’s going on.

And if you try this outside, it is just so cool. Try walking in a park, in a place where there’s lots of trees. One client who I taught it to not too long ago, I taught it to her outside and we went for a walk and she said to me, “Oh my God, Jane, the trees are waving at me!” So, if you want the trees waving at you, this is the technique to do it.

Now, it’s also worth looking at why focus is important.

Focus is important because we so easily get distracted but energy flows where attention goes. And if your energy, if your attention, is all dissipated and all over the place, that’s what’s going to happen with your energy. So, it’s going to be very difficult to achieve a goal, to achieve any one thing.

Energy flows where attention goes.

So this ability to focus in a calm, centered, relaxed way is incredibly useful, both for every day life, for de-stress, and for manifestation.

So, here’s how it goes.

What you want to do is with your full-foveal, full-frontal vision, just focus up on a spot on the wall. Find a spot on the wall that you can really, really focus on. Full-foveal and focus on it as if it was the only thing in the world that you could possibly look at in this moment.

When you’ve got that focus, put your hands up beside your ears and just take them out slightly from your body and start to wiggle them. And notice them in the periphery, allow your vision to move into peripheral vision. What I used to call with the kids, wrap-around sunglasses vision.

Just allow your vision to move into peripheral vision, wobble you fingers and just start moving them backwards and see how far backwards you can take your fingers before you can’t see them anymore.

Take them as far back as you can and imagine you can see all the way around 360 degrees. That’s the state of expanded awareness.

Now, in that lovely relaxed, calm state, notice that it’s really difficult to feel a negative emotion or to feel upset.

Bring your eyes down to normal level, bring your hands down and just enjoy that sense of all around awareness.

This is the state you want to be in, this is the state that was known as the walking meditation of the Kahunas.

This was the state that the Kahunas, the shamans, the wise men and women of Hawai’i lived in permanently because it encouraged their consciousness, it helped them with connecting with spirit. It helped them to connect with the other realm and it helped them stay calm when everything else about them was falling into pieces.

So use focus and expanded awareness. And when you focus, focus on what you want and focus in that expanded way so it’s calm and centered and balanced.

Enjoy, and do go for a walk with trees and watch them wave at you, I’d love to hear all about it.

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