For several years I’ve seen a reiki healer who lives in the valley next to my childhood home. She feels what’s true before I say a word and she always knows what medicine I need.
One day she told me to bathe in the ocean under a full moon.
The moon doesn’t do anything to be loved, she said as she handed me a tincture in a shot glass. Do you understand?
I nodded weakly, and she continued: You hold on too tightly, you worry too much, you create problems that don’t exist. Just live in the moment. Focus on the ocean and the wind.
I gave her a more convincing nod and she laughed.
You will heal yourself. You just don't know it yet.
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It didn’t occur to me that I could heal myself with my attention.
As a little kid, I would sit at my little table and work on my little projects, happily occupied for hours at a time. She’s so busy! my parents would say, handing me another marker.
Attention, for me, has always gone hand in hand with anxiety. Whatever makes me prone to hyper-awareness also makes me prone to ruminating, projecting, and scanning the horizon for threats.
Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of crying the night before a piano recital or a dentist appointment, because I couldn’t think about anything other than the dreadful outcome to which my mind had attached.
That kind of focus feels like it has a life of its own. If you’ve ever taken Adderall to bang out a paper and then spent five hours organizing your closet, you understand.
The best approach, I found, was to direct my attention toward something I could control. My preferred method was to invent a sideways world—like a castle beyond a wall of mirrors, or a glass dome in the center of Jupiter's Red Dot. As I got older, these escapes became less whimsical, but they were always there.
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At some point during the pandemic, I noticed a change. After a year of anxiety-filled isolation, I started spending more time in nature and feeling more aware of my body. The life I’d created in my mind—full of familiar stories and distractions—seemed dull, and frankly, stupid.
It was around this time that I started seeing a new therapist who incorporated different techniques into our sessions, including yoga, tapping, breath work, and visualization.
I've been in therapy since elementary school (a story for another day), but I had never allowed myself to recognize and feel intense emotions in my body. Instead, I’d describe them from a safe intellectual distance and wonder why I still felt so shitty and repressed.
My new therapist helped me notice the physical sensations of shame, guilt, anger, and loneliness. It was the first time I came face-to-face with my rage, and the first time I let myself cry in front of anyone without apologizing.
The lightness I felt inspired me to get further out of my mind and into my body. I researched somatic healing, read a lot of earnest self-help books, and looked for healers. Each trip led to the next, and down rabbit holes about everything from ancient mystics to epigenetics.
One of the things that struck me most is that the human brain is a prediction machine, programmed based on patterns we’ve learned over the course of our lives. It makes sense that the conscious mind is designed to help us survive, not to help us expand or find peace.1
Sound healing, meditation, and various plants have helped to deactivate my survival brain so I can delete old programs and write some new ones.
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I learned about hypnosis at exactly the right time, while catching up with a friend I hadn't seen in over a year.2 We were talking about psychedelic-assisted therapy when she mentioned a hypnotherapist. That’s how I started seeing Jo—an angel, an intuitive genius, and the single person to whom I’ve sent the most referrals, including several of my mom’s friends, three tattoo artists, and my college roommate/soulmate.
In our first session, done via Zoom between Hawaii and Nova Scotia, I visualized floating in Hanalei Bay at sunset and snuggling in a hammock with my best friends. Jo led me down deeper, into my Play-Doh-scented kindergarten classroom, where I met my five-year-old self and we braided each other’s hair.
In the next session, I scrubbed the stone floors of an Italian villa then washed away beliefs that never belonged to me in the first place. Jo encouraged me to focus my attention on the space around my heart, the magnetic place between my brows, the golden vine of my inner voice. I came up from that session buzzing with the loose high you feel after a long massage.
Almost immediately, these subconscious experiences translated into shifts in my waking life. One afternoon, while walking to pick up a sandwich, an overwhelming warmth spread in my chest, which I knew to mean I love you, I’m proud of you, I’m right here. I’d never said those words to myself before.
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I’ve been on this healing journey for about a year. Unsurprisingly, the biggest shifts have happened in the three months since leaving my job.3
99% of my attention was once directed toward work, daily obligations, and various existential and social worries. I now have the energy to pay attention differently. For the first time I can remember, my mind isn’t spinning to anticipate what’s next. I can be here, which is exactly where I need to be.
Mary Oliver wrote that attention is the beginning of devotion. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
I’ve come to see attention as a portal to the epic and unfamiliar. It’s a cosmic gift, a potent medicine, the closest thing we have to magic.
It will heal us, if we let it.
Only tangentially related, but did you know that an octopus exposed to MDMA will become less solitary and more social, because the part of their brain associated with fear becomes less active? Same.
I’m writing this post from Turkey, where the idea of kismet is fresh on my mind. Kismet, as I understand it, is God’s will—a force beyond human control. That also reminds me of a recent conversation with Anam in which she shared that Islam means to surrender. The poetry of it all!!
It’s a luxury and a privilege to get up and leave for 18 months, let alone do it without working, and I struggle to feel “worthy” of it. (That’s also a post for another day.) For now, I’ll make another plug for rest. Do nothing for as long as you possibly can! Defend your stillness! Question everything you think you have to do! You won’t regret it!
Lovely. Mahalo for bringing attention to attention -- a necessary daily intervention :)
You are doing heroic work. Keep going. <3