Find Your Focus, Find Your Purpose

There is a famous saying, energy flows where attention goes. It has been popularised by people such as Tony Robbins in the personal development space but its origins date back thousands of years.

One example of this is the concept of drishti in the ancient practice of yoga. I first came across this in my late 20s during ashtanga yoga teacher training, where it meant to keep the focus during asana (physical postures) on a specific part of the body. Prior to that I came across it in karate through the practices of metsuke, a visual focus and awareness of your opponent’s whole body, and zanshin, a state of lingering awareness before and after executing a technique.

Something that isn’t clear in the famous saying is the importance of vision and gaze, particularly when directing attention outside of oneself. This is something I used to take for granted before developing a degenerative condition called macular telangiectasia, or MacTel for short. Without glasses, most things are blurry. My peripheral vision isn’t affected, thankfully, but the direction of my attention generally is. This changes the experience of ‘paying attention’.

During past karate training, before this condition developed, my teacher would blindfold me during training as a way of developing my other senses. He also trained me in the dark at the beach. Sometimes we would swim out into the sea and race back, no goggles and just a dim city light on the horizon to aim for. When training like this, I had to face fears within me that surfaced when vision was taken away. It is harder to balance, for example, when we can’t see.

I am grateful for this practical training, especially now that my literal vision is deteriorating. There isn’t an expectation I will go blind. Rather, I need to watch out for burst blood vessels at the back of my eye that will further blur my vision. When that happens, they will need to be drained. Then some vision will return. I count that a lucky prognosis as I’ll still be able to see. I am also realistic that I will need to train my other senses more to make up for the vision I will lose.

I think of the word ‘vision’ when it comes to finding our focus and purpose. In my last post, I addressed the ways in which Western therapies haven’t worked for me. Eastern practices – not really therapies, although Western therapies have sought to adopt them – such as mindfulness and compassion have provided a more holistic way of being with myself and the world around me. A distinct difference between Eastern and Western ways is the non-duality in the former.

In Western therapies, attention is generally turned inwards or outwards. In Eastern practices, there is a holding of space for both. As we attune to the outer world, we also attune our senses. Another core distinction is the response to emotions. In Eastern practices these are perceived through the lens of energy; they are simply passing through and there is less personal identification with them. In Western therapies, they are seen as messengers to listen to and explore. They are personalised; for example, I am angry rather than this body is angry.

Years ago, I trained with a women’s yoga teacher. I expected to learn about women’s hormonal processes and how to practice asana safely and effectively during the transitions of a woman’s life, through menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause. A yoga student had prompted my enquiry, asking about yoga for painful menses, and I didn’t know the answer. And so I joined this woman’s teacher training, not realising something else was in store.

Instead of directing our attention to the woman’s body and physiological processes as I had expected, she directed our attention to ourselves. First through the creative use of mythology and then through psychological inquiry.

I was in my early 30s, recently divorced, and had just completed my first year of a Western therapy that had seemed odd, as if looking for problems. I now know this to be a deficit-based approach to therapy. I would feel better once I had felt my negative emotions and to feel them I had to find them. My only problem was that they didn’t arrive neatly on time during an actual session. So I would sit there feeling the pressure to find some negative emotion to focus on. Unfortunately, with negativity, you don’t have to try hard to find it. I nearly always left those sessions feeling worse, or like I had been “corrected”.

This yoga teacher was on her own journey and looking back, she was taking us on it. I wouldn’t have minded so much if our attention was drawn to our own menstrual cycles and investigating the yoga practices that did and didn’t work for us. That would have created a valuable focus for learning. She could have then linked this kind of introspection to the subject of hormonal changes in a woman’s life, keeping the focus on yoga instruction. Instead, she kept bringing our attention back to emotions, over and over. And the implicit message was the same as therapy. We would feel happy when we addressed the dark within.

It makes sense on the one hand. We might be avoiding negative emotions that are subconsciously directing our lives. Freud certainly thought this in his psychoanalytical practice. Jung took it a step further. To individuate, or become whole, we need to “own” our shadows within, turning them “golden”. This simply means to take our sources of shame out of the dark, where we hide them from others for fear of judgment, and into the light. The dark side of the light chasers, as Debbie Ford once wrote, the core message being the need to avoid what is called “spiritual bypassing” and not healing old wounds.

It’s not that I disagree with this approach; rather, I find it to be full of pitfalls. I wrote a book in 2014 titled Wild Zen: An Inner Roadmap to Humanity and its core message was that we need to turn inwards and outwards to transform, and to extract wisdom in order to live truthfully. I wrote this book after walking away from the Western-focused therapy and this women’s yoga teacher training to find my own way. Both had left me utterly confused and overly focused on myself and all the suffering I could find within. When I listened to myself, I saw it wasn’t a case of either-or but rather, both. Just as I had learned in karate, the practice was both; being aware of self and aware of the world beyond.

Western therapies and their increasing influences on ancient Eastern practices like yoga run the risk of over-emphasising the self and driving the suffering inherent in life out of proportion. The person ends up thinking too much about themselves and this creates what Marion Woodman, ironically a Jungian Analyst, called ‘neurotic suffering, which burns soot’ (while ‘real suffering burns clean’).

In the hands of an overly self-focused teacher or therapist a natural process in life – that of suffering - becomes overly complicated. My contention isn’t with psychology but rather, the psychologisation of this natural phenomenon by repeatedly asking someone “what do you feel” and “what does this mean” and “what do you need to do” rather than “what do you sense” and “what do you notice” as you sit with not needing to do anything at all. It is the basic difference between doing and being and it lies at the heart of much of Western suffering. Too much feeling, too much thinking, too much doing.

Purpose emerges out of a way of being. It is sparked by paying attention to life outside of ourselves that speak to something true within ourselves. It doesn’t emerge out of years of introspection waiting to be healed; it is an outcome of engaging in the world whilst maintaining a degree of awareness within.

We find our purpose by giving up on ourselves, a Japanese Psychology teacher once taught me. It is then that we start to notice the world around us.