July 1, 2025 • 18 mins
What if your attention, not your time or money, is actually your most precious resource? This groundbreaking episode explores the neuroscience behind our focus and reveals why the currency of attention shapes everything in our lives.
Our brains physically change based on what we pay attention to. When we focus on chaos and problems, we strengthen neural pathways for reactivity. When we attend to healing and joy, those circuits become more dominant. This neuroplasticity happens constantly, whether we're aware of it or not, making our attention the ultimate determinant of our experience.
Modern life has created a crisis of attention. Between device notifications and trauma-reinforced hypervigilance, we've become experts at scanning our environment while losing touch with our internal landscape. This diminished interoception, our ability to sense and interpret bodily sensations and emotions, creates a mind-body disconnect that blocks access to our innate healing intelligence. The antidote? Deliberate inward redirection, asking ourselves "What sensation am I feeling right now?" without judgment.
But not all attention is created equal. The quality matters tremendously. When we ask disempowering questions like "Why is this so hard?", our brain-as-search-engine diligently finds evidence supporting that narrative. By shifting to questions that engage our right hemisphere—"What part of this isn't hard?"—we create cognitive flexibility and access to creative solutions. This explains why somatic practices are so transformative: they bypass rumination and directly engage the nervous system, creating immediate state changes.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast.
Apply tools that you learn inthis podcast and your life will
be unrecognizable.
Successful Now your host, drKamal Aftar.
Hello, hello, hello everyone.
Peace and blessings be upon allof you.
I think by this time, in ourjourney through our podcast, you
guys are at a point where youknow that money is not the most
(00:25):
important currency.
It is an important currency,but it's not the most important
one.
But I also wish that I couldpermanently dismantle the belief
that time is your mostimportant currency.
It's not what's even morevaluable.
What is even a more preciousasset for you.
More foundational is yourattention.
(00:45):
Your attention is more valuablethan your time and your money,
because even before you spend asingle minute on a task, before
you whip out your wallet andyour cash or swipe your card,
you've already made aninvestment in that task.
With your attention, you'vechosen where you mentally place
(01:05):
your energy, your focus, yourawareness, and that choice
determines everything thatfollows.
So think of attention as theoriginal currency.
Whatever you give it to,whether it's a problem, a person
, a story, or whether it's asolution, that's what's going to
begin to grow in your life.
Your brain is neuroplastic andit doesn't take breaks from that
(01:30):
, which means it's constantlyreshaping itself based on what
you focus on.
If you're paying attention tochaos and conflict, you're
wiring your brain for reactivity.
You pay attention to healing,safety and joy, and those are
the circuits that you'restrengthening in your brain.
Those are the states that aregoing to take a stronghold in
(01:50):
you.
So there are two points I'mgoing to make in this podcast,
and that is we're wasting thiscurrency because we're paying
attention to the outside, andwe're wasting this currency
because of the quality of theattention we're paying, and
we're wasting this currencybecause of the quality of the
attention we're paying.
So, like I said, your brainchange is based on the
(02:11):
neuroplasticity towards whateveryou attend to.
Trauma decreases the gray matterof the prefrontal cortex.
It decreases the right and leftbrain connection of the corpus
callosum, but neuroplasticitycan increase both of these
entities depending on what kindof healing work you decide to
pay attention to.
So the loss of the gray matterin the prefrontal cortex, the
self-regulation area, is not apermanent change.
(02:34):
Same thing, the loss ofconnection between the right and
the left brain is also not apermanent change.
Through your biggest asset,that is, your attention, you can
change wiring in both of theseareas.
Now, one of the biggest impactsof technology currently is that
your attention is mostly outerfocused, it is focused on a
(02:56):
device, it is focused onsomebody else, something else
and, as a part of trauma andtrauma recovery, it is very
commonly known that the braingets attuned to outside focus,
paying attention to the cues inthe environment, both
consciously and subconsciously.
This is to constantly informthe body for your safety or
(03:17):
unsafety in the situation whenthe mind and the body are
working to pay attention to theexternal cues to keep you safe.
When the mind and the body areworking to pay attention to the
external cues to keep you safe,which is a habituated response
of previous trauma, whencurrently your environment might
be perfectly safe, then you'remissing out on interoception and
(03:38):
that is your ability to attendto yourself inwardly.
That is your ability to focuson your body's sensations and
needs.
That includes the physiologicneeds of hunger or using the
restroom, feeling tired.
Also includes the needs ofemotional cues like feeling
angry, frustrated, calm,peaceful.
When your attention is out offocus most of the time, thanks
(03:58):
to the very addicting nature ofthe devices or your previous
history of any trauma, you haveless attention to spare inwardly
and that creates a mind-bodygap where you're mostly thinking
and intellectualizing thesolution to your problems rather
than listening to your body,which is where most of your
subconscious mind is housed.
(04:19):
And this is exactly where yourhealing intelligence lies.
And when you miss out on thisbig piece of information, you
miss out on.
And when you miss out on thisbig piece of information, you
miss out on proper healing andyou miss out on proper
utilization of your currency.
So let's talk about where yourattention actually goes.
Most of the time, it's notwhere you might intend to go,
not where you plan for it to go,but where your brain defaults
(04:42):
your attention to when it's onautopilot.
If you're like most of thehigh-functioning, deeply capable
women that I coach, yourattention is constantly pulled
outwards because that's thedefault.
You're tracking notifications,scanning facial expressions,
(05:04):
worrying about the emails,decoding the shift of tone in
your spouse or your kids or yourcolleagues.
This isn't because this is abad habit or it's a lack of
willpower in you.
This is what the brain defaultsto when it's learned to survive
.
When you've experiencedemotional inconsistency or any
kind of relational rupture, yourbrain learns to scan the
environment obsessively.
It asks is it safe?
(05:25):
Am I in trouble?
Did I disappoint someone?
Is the vibe off?
The outer directed attentionbecomes your normal.
That drains your currency andthe outcome is, if you're in
this kind of circumstance, youspend a lot of time vigilantly
tracking that environment.
But if you decide to payattention to this dynamic, this
(05:46):
outward attention that has beendemanded of you through the
dynamics of your currentlifestyle or your past, you can
return that attention inwardsand you can build the muscle of
inward focus by just payingattention to your body.
Your attention is your mostimportant currency, whether you
decide to think about it or not,whether you know it has a
(06:08):
potential to change or if youdon't know.
And plus, thinking aboutsomething does not mean it will
change positively.
If you're paying negativeattention, if you're aspiring
negatively in your thoughtswhile thinking about a situation
, then of course the outcomewill be negative as well, which
is the second point I'm going tomake in this podcast.
(06:29):
But first, what's the antidote?
How can we fix this?
How can we retrain the brain todirect attention inwardly?
And that is by vigilantredirection.
When you see and notice inyourself that you're paying
attention outwards, you redirectit to pay attention inwards the
skill of noticing your internalworld, your heartbeat, your
(06:51):
breath, the tightness, the heatin your face, the analyzing of
your bodily sensations.
You're redirecting yourattention to listening to your
body, Moment by moment,sensation by sensation.
It's like learning a newlanguage, because you are.
One very important reflectionquestion that I'm going to ask
(07:12):
you to ask yourself is can Iname one sensation I'm feeling
in the body right now, and canyou do it without judging it,
without fixing it, just noticing, knowing that you're safe and
there is nothing harmful comingfrom that sensation?
Now, the second part of theattention that makes us believe
that it's not a most importantcurrency is that not all
(07:36):
attention is created equal.
When you pay attention to howdifficult your exams are and you
ask questions like why does ithave to be so hard?
Why am I having such a hardtime with chemistry?
Why can't I learn the newsystem?
Why does parenting have to beso hard?
Why can't I get it together?
Why am I always the last one toget it?
(07:57):
This is the type of attentionthat you're paying that's going
to inevitably lead you to findanswers that are not going to
create a positive change.
So, while your attention is themost important currency, even
more important than that is whattype of attention you're paying
.
You can pay a very low quality,negative attention to a
(08:18):
situation in which case you'rewasting your currency.
Not only are you wasting it,but you're paying money to buy
debt.
Not all attention is highquality.
How you spend it what matters.
Where you spend it is whatmatters, but also what is the
quality of attention that you'repaying?
(08:39):
You can focus on a problem forhours, days, even years, but if
the quality of the focus isnegative, hopeless, rooted in
blame, you're not investing,you're digging a deeper hole.
You're buying yourself moredebt For all intentional
purposes.
You are focusing, yes, butyou're reinforcing helplessness.
(09:02):
In that case, that kind ofattention feeds the problem loop
.
You are spending emotionalenergy, you're spending your
attention, currency, but nothinggets resolved and, ironically,
the problem continues to getdeeper.
You just end up more exhausted,more bitter and more convinced
that the problem is bigger thanyou and that it can't be solved.
(09:24):
So the type of attentionabsolutely matters, and the
shift starts with the quality ofquestions you ask, because your
brain is a search engine.
It responds to the questionsyou give it.
If you ask it garbage, it willreturn garbage.
If you ask it somethingexpansive, something that is
possibility oriented, then itwill give you the answer towards
(09:47):
a solution.
That's how you open new neuralwindows.
So, instead of asking why thisis so hard, try and ask what
part of this is not hard.
Instead of asking, why am I thelast one to understand something
?
Ask yourself where am I not thelast person to understand
something?
Ask yourself, where am I notthe last person to understand
something?
(10:07):
These single type of questionsnudge your mind out of fixed
loop and into flexibility.
It doesn't ignore the struggle.
It just widens your lens toinclude more than just the
struggle.
By asking you to do all of this, I'm not asking you to ignore
your reality.
If your brain says that thingsare hard, that will be your
(10:30):
reality.
I am asking you to ask yourbrain what else is also possible
.
And that's where the magicbegins, which is actually based
in science.
When a coach or your own innerwise voice asks a question like
what is everything in thissituation that I'm not noticing?
Yet, in that split second, yourright brain gets a chance to
(10:54):
come online.
That's the hemisphere that seesthe bigger picture, that feels
the context and the connection.
It senses the safety instead ofscanning for threat and
suddenly you're not going to betrapped inside of your problem,
you're going to be standing nextto it watching it shrink in
scale.
Open-ended, high-quality,solution-oriented questions
(11:19):
direct you towards thepossibility that don't compute
in your left brain.
The left brain is responsiblefor logic, language, linear
problem solving, which isexactly my point.
The point is to involve yourright brain as well.
Creative, non-linear,experiential.
It creates a brief moment ofcognitive disorientation, a
(11:42):
pattern interrupt is what theycall it, and it loosens the grip
of your anxiety and yourhelplessness.
What fires together, wirestogether.
That means the more attentionyou give to anxious thought loop
, the tighter that loop becomes.
The more attention you give toopen-ended questions and high
quality attention, the tighterthose neural pathways become.
(12:05):
All of this, and much more, isthe reason why somatic practices
, practices that involve thebody, are extremely powerful.
They bypass the endless loop ofoverthinking and they engage
the parts of your brain andnervous system that regulate
your emotional state.
That's why body-inclusivecoaching is more transformative
(12:26):
than just traditional talktherapy alone.
You're not just talking aboutchange, you're embodying it,
you're living it.
Bring your body into theequation, pay high quality
attention to it, bring inmovement, whether it's shifting
your posture, or standing up orwalking across the room taking a
deep breath.
(12:46):
All of that signal your nervoussystem that change is happening
and your brain follows yourbody's cues.
And one reflection questionthat I'm going to ask you to ask
yourself is when you're in atrapped mood, stand up, roll
your shoulders, take a deep,intentional breath, ask yourself
what shifts in your body, whatshifts in your mood?
(13:10):
What becomes available to youthat wasn't available a few
seconds ago?
When you feel somethingoverwhelming like anxiety, shame
or fear, it often exists as avague, all-encompassing cloud.
It feels like all of thesefeelings.
Is you not something thatyou're experiencing?
(13:32):
That's because your emotion isstill living in a mental
construct full of abstractthoughts and associations that
are ongoing.
When your brain does not knowwhere else to go, it just
spirals.
But the moment you interruptthis pattern, the moment you ask
where do I feel this in my body, you give the emotion a
(13:53):
location, you draw a boundaryaround it, you visualize it.
You're shifting your attentionfrom linear thinking to somatic
experience.
Now, instead of being in theanxiety, you're observing it,
naming it for where it istightness in my chest, flushing
in my face.
All of that automaticallyimplies that there are other
(14:14):
places where your emotions don'texist and you're able to
separate yourself from thesesensations.
That act alone creates mentalspaciousness.
This is high-level attention, avery high-value currency,
something that you have plentyof if you put it into practice.
So so far, what I've talked toyou about is that attention
(14:37):
shapes your brain.
That's neuroplasticity.
Whatever you pay attention towill literally grow neural
connections around it.
Trauma reduces brain's capacityof regulation less gray matter,
weaker left-right braincommunication.
But healing attention canrestore all of it.
So attention is what determinesthe architecture of your brain,
(15:00):
not your past, not the future.
A constant outer focus is atrauma habit which leads to
defaulting to always beinghypervigilant.
Current modern life, likenotifications, multitasking
devices, all of that reinforcethat trauma pattern.
The result is you ignore yourinternal cues more and more, you
(15:23):
lose the scale of interoceptionand you start to live out of
sync of your needs and emotions.
This creates a mind-body gapwhere you intellectualize more
problems, and it widens the gapbetween the mind and the body.
Here attention heals you,because now you don't have to
pay attention to thinking harder, but rather pay attention to
(15:44):
sensing more clearly.
And then we talked about hownot all attention is created.
Equal.
Negative, ruminative attentionkeeps you stuck in your problems
.
The quality of attentionmatters.
Ask better questions to getbetter neural outcomes.
Disruption in your thoughtpatterns creates space.
(16:04):
If you disorient the internalnarrator, which is usually the
left brain, logical talk and youbring it through pattern
interrupt questions, open-endedquestions then that gives your
right brain space to work.
This lets creativity andemotional regulation in.
This is how your more expansivethinking takes over, little by
(16:25):
little.
Movement and body awarenessabsolutely support this shift,
which is why an embodiedcognition is the bridge.
The body is not just along forthe ride, it's doing the
thinking for you and with you.
Locating feelings in the bodygives them boundaries, creates
contrast and with that, everyemotion and thought becomes a
(16:48):
choice.
All of this and much more arethe reasons why your attention
is your most important currency.
I have highlighted for you thetwo most important points, but
besides that, you will get tosee, when you start paying
attention correctly, what elseworks for you in this realm.
With that I pray to Allah SWT.
Ya Allah, guide my attention towhat nourishes me, guide it to
(17:13):
where healing lies, protect mefrom distractions that drain me.
Make my focus steady and myawareness gentle that drain me.
Make my focus steady and myawareness gentle.
Ya Allah, guide my attention toa path to healing and closeness
to you.
Ameen.
Ya Rabbul Alameen, please keepme in your du'as.
I will talk to you guys nexttime.
Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast.
Apply tools that you learn inthis podcast and your life will
be unrecognizable.
Successful Now your host, drKamal Aftar.
Hello, hello, hello everyone.
Peace and blessings be upon allof you.
I think by this time, in ourjourney through our podcast, you
guys are at a point where youknow that money is not the most
(00:25):
important currency.
It is an important currency,but it's not the most important
one.
But I also wish that I couldpermanently dismantle the belief
that time is your mostimportant currency.
It's not what's even morevaluable.
What is even a more preciousasset for you.
More foundational is yourattention.
(00:45):
Your attention is more valuablethan your time and your money,
because even before you spend asingle minute on a task, before
you whip out your wallet andyour cash or swipe your card,
you've already made aninvestment in that task.
With your attention, you'vechosen where you mentally place
(01:05):
your energy, your focus, yourawareness, and that choice
determines everything thatfollows.
So think of attention as theoriginal currency.
Whatever you give it to,whether it's a problem, a person
, a story, or whether it's asolution, that's what's going to
begin to grow in your life.
Your brain is neuroplastic andit doesn't take breaks from that
(01:30):
, which means it's constantlyreshaping itself based on what
you focus on.
If you're paying attention tochaos and conflict, you're
wiring your brain for reactivity.
You pay attention to healing,safety and joy, and those are
the circuits that you'restrengthening in your brain.
Those are the states that aregoing to take a stronghold in
(01:50):
you.
So there are two points I'mgoing to make in this podcast,
and that is we're wasting thiscurrency because we're paying
attention to the outside, andwe're wasting this currency
because of the quality of theattention we're paying, and
we're wasting this currencybecause of the quality of the
attention we're paying.
So, like I said, your brainchange is based on the
(02:11):
neuroplasticity towards whateveryou attend to.
Trauma decreases the gray matterof the prefrontal cortex.
It decreases the right and leftbrain connection of the corpus
callosum, but neuroplasticitycan increase both of these
entities depending on what kindof healing work you decide to
pay attention to.
So the loss of the gray matterin the prefrontal cortex, the
self-regulation area, is not apermanent change.
(02:34):
Same thing, the loss ofconnection between the right and
the left brain is also not apermanent change.
Through your biggest asset,that is, your attention, you can
change wiring in both of theseareas.
Now, one of the biggest impactsof technology currently is that
your attention is mostly outerfocused, it is focused on a
(02:56):
device, it is focused onsomebody else, something else
and, as a part of trauma andtrauma recovery, it is very
commonly known that the braingets attuned to outside focus,
paying attention to the cues inthe environment, both
consciously and subconsciously.
This is to constantly informthe body for your safety or
(03:17):
unsafety in the situation whenthe mind and the body are
working to pay attention to theexternal cues to keep you safe.
When the mind and the body areworking to pay attention to the
external cues to keep you safe,which is a habituated response
of previous trauma, whencurrently your environment might
be perfectly safe, then you'remissing out on interoception and
(03:38):
that is your ability to attendto yourself inwardly.
That is your ability to focuson your body's sensations and
needs.
That includes the physiologicneeds of hunger or using the
restroom, feeling tired.
Also includes the needs ofemotional cues like feeling
angry, frustrated, calm,peaceful.
When your attention is out offocus most of the time, thanks
(03:58):
to the very addicting nature ofthe devices or your previous
history of any trauma, you haveless attention to spare inwardly
and that creates a mind-bodygap where you're mostly thinking
and intellectualizing thesolution to your problems rather
than listening to your body,which is where most of your
subconscious mind is housed.
(04:19):
And this is exactly where yourhealing intelligence lies.
And when you miss out on thisbig piece of information, you
miss out on.
And when you miss out on thisbig piece of information, you
miss out on proper healing andyou miss out on proper
utilization of your currency.
So let's talk about where yourattention actually goes.
Most of the time, it's notwhere you might intend to go,
not where you plan for it to go,but where your brain defaults
(04:42):
your attention to when it's onautopilot.
If you're like most of thehigh-functioning, deeply capable
women that I coach, yourattention is constantly pulled
outwards because that's thedefault.
You're tracking notifications,scanning facial expressions,
(05:04):
worrying about the emails,decoding the shift of tone in
your spouse or your kids or yourcolleagues.
This isn't because this is abad habit or it's a lack of
willpower in you.
This is what the brain defaultsto when it's learned to survive
.
When you've experiencedemotional inconsistency or any
kind of relational rupture, yourbrain learns to scan the
environment obsessively.
It asks is it safe?
(05:25):
Am I in trouble?
Did I disappoint someone?
Is the vibe off?
The outer directed attentionbecomes your normal.
That drains your currency andthe outcome is, if you're in
this kind of circumstance, youspend a lot of time vigilantly
tracking that environment.
But if you decide to payattention to this dynamic, this
(05:46):
outward attention that has beendemanded of you through the
dynamics of your currentlifestyle or your past, you can
return that attention inwardsand you can build the muscle of
inward focus by just payingattention to your body.
Your attention is your mostimportant currency, whether you
decide to think about it or not,whether you know it has a
(06:08):
potential to change or if youdon't know.
And plus, thinking aboutsomething does not mean it will
change positively.
If you're paying negativeattention, if you're aspiring
negatively in your thoughtswhile thinking about a situation
, then of course the outcomewill be negative as well, which
is the second point I'm going tomake in this podcast.
(06:29):
But first, what's the antidote?
How can we fix this?
How can we retrain the brain todirect attention inwardly?
And that is by vigilantredirection.
When you see and notice inyourself that you're paying
attention outwards, you redirectit to pay attention inwards the
skill of noticing your internalworld, your heartbeat, your
(06:51):
breath, the tightness, the heatin your face, the analyzing of
your bodily sensations.
You're redirecting yourattention to listening to your
body, Moment by moment,sensation by sensation.
It's like learning a newlanguage, because you are.
One very important reflectionquestion that I'm going to ask
(07:12):
you to ask yourself is can Iname one sensation I'm feeling
in the body right now, and canyou do it without judging it,
without fixing it, just noticing, knowing that you're safe and
there is nothing harmful comingfrom that sensation?
Now, the second part of theattention that makes us believe
that it's not a most importantcurrency is that not all
(07:36):
attention is created equal.
When you pay attention to howdifficult your exams are and you
ask questions like why does ithave to be so hard?
Why am I having such a hardtime with chemistry?
Why can't I learn the newsystem?
Why does parenting have to beso hard?
Why can't I get it together?
Why am I always the last one toget it?
(07:57):
This is the type of attentionthat you're paying that's going
to inevitably lead you to findanswers that are not going to
create a positive change.
So, while your attention is themost important currency, even
more important than that is whattype of attention you're paying
.
You can pay a very low quality,negative attention to a
(08:18):
situation in which case you'rewasting your currency.
Not only are you wasting it,but you're paying money to buy
debt.
Not all attention is highquality.
How you spend it what matters.
Where you spend it is whatmatters, but also what is the
quality of attention that you'repaying?
(08:39):
You can focus on a problem forhours, days, even years, but if
the quality of the focus isnegative, hopeless, rooted in
blame, you're not investing,you're digging a deeper hole.
You're buying yourself moredebt For all intentional
purposes.
You are focusing, yes, butyou're reinforcing helplessness.
(09:02):
In that case, that kind ofattention feeds the problem loop
.
You are spending emotionalenergy, you're spending your
attention, currency, but nothinggets resolved and, ironically,
the problem continues to getdeeper.
You just end up more exhausted,more bitter and more convinced
that the problem is bigger thanyou and that it can't be solved.
(09:24):
So the type of attentionabsolutely matters, and the
shift starts with the quality ofquestions you ask, because your
brain is a search engine.
It responds to the questionsyou give it.
If you ask it garbage, it willreturn garbage.
If you ask it somethingexpansive, something that is
possibility oriented, then itwill give you the answer towards
(09:47):
a solution.
That's how you open new neuralwindows.
So, instead of asking why thisis so hard, try and ask what
part of this is not hard.
Instead of asking, why am I thelast one to understand something
?
Ask yourself where am I not thelast person to understand
something?
Ask yourself, where am I notthe last person to understand
something?
(10:07):
These single type of questionsnudge your mind out of fixed
loop and into flexibility.
It doesn't ignore the struggle.
It just widens your lens toinclude more than just the
struggle.
By asking you to do all of this, I'm not asking you to ignore
your reality.
If your brain says that thingsare hard, that will be your
(10:30):
reality.
I am asking you to ask yourbrain what else is also possible
.
And that's where the magicbegins, which is actually based
in science.
When a coach or your own innerwise voice asks a question like
what is everything in thissituation that I'm not noticing?
Yet, in that split second, yourright brain gets a chance to
(10:54):
come online.
That's the hemisphere that seesthe bigger picture, that feels
the context and the connection.
It senses the safety instead ofscanning for threat and
suddenly you're not going to betrapped inside of your problem,
you're going to be standing nextto it watching it shrink in
scale.
Open-ended, high-quality,solution-oriented questions
(11:19):
direct you towards thepossibility that don't compute
in your left brain.
The left brain is responsiblefor logic, language, linear
problem solving, which isexactly my point.
The point is to involve yourright brain as well.
Creative, non-linear,experiential.
It creates a brief moment ofcognitive disorientation, a
(11:42):
pattern interrupt is what theycall it, and it loosens the grip
of your anxiety and yourhelplessness.
What fires together, wirestogether.
That means the more attentionyou give to anxious thought loop
, the tighter that loop becomes.
The more attention you give toopen-ended questions and high
quality attention, the tighterthose neural pathways become.
(12:05):
All of this, and much more, isthe reason why somatic practices
, practices that involve thebody, are extremely powerful.
They bypass the endless loop ofoverthinking and they engage
the parts of your brain andnervous system that regulate
your emotional state.
That's why body-inclusivecoaching is more transformative
(12:26):
than just traditional talktherapy alone.
You're not just talking aboutchange, you're embodying it,
you're living it.
Bring your body into theequation, pay high quality
attention to it, bring inmovement, whether it's shifting
your posture, or standing up orwalking across the room taking a
deep breath.
(12:46):
All of that signal your nervoussystem that change is happening
and your brain follows yourbody's cues.
And one reflection questionthat I'm going to ask you to ask
yourself is when you're in atrapped mood, stand up, roll
your shoulders, take a deep,intentional breath, ask yourself
what shifts in your body, whatshifts in your mood?
(13:10):
What becomes available to youthat wasn't available a few
seconds ago?
When you feel somethingoverwhelming like anxiety, shame
or fear, it often exists as avague, all-encompassing cloud.
It feels like all of thesefeelings.
Is you not something thatyou're experiencing?
(13:32):
That's because your emotion isstill living in a mental
construct full of abstractthoughts and associations that
are ongoing.
When your brain does not knowwhere else to go, it just
spirals.
But the moment you interruptthis pattern, the moment you ask
where do I feel this in my body, you give the emotion a
(13:53):
location, you draw a boundaryaround it, you visualize it.
You're shifting your attentionfrom linear thinking to somatic
experience.
Now, instead of being in theanxiety, you're observing it,
naming it for where it istightness in my chest, flushing
in my face.
All of that automaticallyimplies that there are other
(14:14):
places where your emotions don'texist and you're able to
separate yourself from thesesensations.
That act alone creates mentalspaciousness.
This is high-level attention, avery high-value currency,
something that you have plentyof if you put it into practice.
So so far, what I've talked toyou about is that attention
(14:37):
shapes your brain.
That's neuroplasticity.
Whatever you pay attention towill literally grow neural
connections around it.
Trauma reduces brain's capacityof regulation less gray matter,
weaker left-right braincommunication.
But healing attention canrestore all of it.
So attention is what determinesthe architecture of your brain,
(15:00):
not your past, not the future.
A constant outer focus is atrauma habit which leads to
defaulting to always beinghypervigilant.
Current modern life, likenotifications, multitasking
devices, all of that reinforcethat trauma pattern.
The result is you ignore yourinternal cues more and more, you
(15:23):
lose the scale of interoceptionand you start to live out of
sync of your needs and emotions.
This creates a mind-body gapwhere you intellectualize more
problems, and it widens the gapbetween the mind and the body.
Here attention heals you,because now you don't have to
pay attention to thinking harder, but rather pay attention to
(15:44):
sensing more clearly.
And then we talked about hownot all attention is created.
Equal.
Negative, ruminative attentionkeeps you stuck in your problems
.
The quality of attentionmatters.
Ask better questions to getbetter neural outcomes.
Disruption in your thoughtpatterns creates space.
(16:04):
If you disorient the internalnarrator, which is usually the
left brain, logical talk and youbring it through pattern
interrupt questions, open-endedquestions then that gives your
right brain space to work.
This lets creativity andemotional regulation in.
This is how your more expansivethinking takes over, little by
(16:25):
little.
Movement and body awarenessabsolutely support this shift,
which is why an embodiedcognition is the bridge.
The body is not just along forthe ride, it's doing the
thinking for you and with you.
Locating feelings in the bodygives them boundaries, creates
contrast and with that, everyemotion and thought becomes a
(16:48):
choice.
All of this and much more arethe reasons why your attention
is your most important currency.
I have highlighted for you thetwo most important points, but
besides that, you will get tosee, when you start paying
attention correctly, what elseworks for you in this realm.
With that I pray to Allah SWT.
Ya Allah, guide my attention towhat nourishes me, guide it to
(17:13):
where healing lies, protect mefrom distractions that drain me.
Make my focus steady and myawareness gentle that drain me.
Make my focus steady and myawareness gentle.
Ya Allah, guide my attention toa path to healing and closeness
to you.
Ameen.
Ya Rabbul Alameen, please keepme in your du'as.
I will talk to you guys nexttime.
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