In this Week's Mojo Monday, Carly Taylor delves into how our attention affects mental wellbeing, exploring the concept of peripheral consciousness through Morita Therapy. Carly explains that peripheral consciousness allows us to focus on one thing while remaining subtly aware of our surroundings. Using anxiety as an example, she contrasts the Western approach of symptom reduction with Morita's view that emotions are natural and should be left to take their course. Rather than focusing and trying to control these feelings, Carly suggests allowing emotions to exist in the background and continue with purposeful actions. This approach, developed by Japanese psychiatrist Shoma Morita in the 1920s, emphasises accepting emotions and shifting attention to necessary tasks, fostering a healthier relationship with one's feelings.
00:00 Introduction to Mojo Monday
00:40 Understanding Peripheral Consciousness
01:26 Anxiety and Misdirected Attention
01:55 Morita Therapy's Unique Approach
04:05 The Paradox of Controlling Anxiety
05:43 Allowing Emotions to Exist
07:28 Morita Therapy in Practice
08:51 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hi everyone, it's Callie Taylor here and welcome to you.
This week's My Joe Monday. So this week I want
to take a deeper dive into how our attention can
influence our mental well being, and we'll do this through
the lens of Marita Therapy. So one of Marita's key
insights was around something called peripheral consciousness. So stick with
(00:31):
me on this one because it's actually really fascinating and
it is quite a unique way of looking at consciousness.
So let me explain it. Peripheral consciousness is this idea
that while we focus on one thing, we still hold
an awareness of other things in the background. So, for example,
you might be absorbed in a book but still be
(00:53):
vaguely kind of aware of the sound of the birds outside,
or the hum of the fridge, or maybe the smell
of your fear. And these background impressions sit on the
periphery of our consciousness, so they're not front and center,
but they're still there, and although we may not be
thinking about them, we're kind of still aware of them.
(01:14):
So here's where it gets really interesting, because we can
talk about this in the context of our emotions and
our feelings and our thoughts. So let's take anxiety as
an example. So in the West, it is very common
that we see anxiety as a problem to fix. So
before I can get on with my life, before I
(01:35):
can do the things that are important to me, I
must fix this. So the dominant approach is symptom reduction.
So we try to calm the body and control our thoughts,
control our breath, and when we feel better then we
can get back to life. But Marita's view was radically different,
(01:56):
so he didn't see emotions like anxiety as anything to
be fixed or controlled or tampered with. He saw the
problem as what he described as misdirected attention. So he
teaches us that feelings and emotions and thoughts are all
natural occurrences, so a natural part of being human. And
(02:18):
if we just left them as they are, so if
we stopped kind of control them and allowed them to
take their natural course, so when they arrive, they may
peak and then they kind of taper off a bit
like a wave, but that's only if they are left alone.
So let's get back to anxiety. The issue wasn't the
(02:42):
anxiety itself, but the way we narrow our focus onto it.
So we bring our attention onto it, and by doing that,
we're bringing the anxiety into the foreground of our lives,
and then we're pushing everything else, so our could be
our relationships, our hobbies, the things that are important to us,
(03:04):
like our values, our goals, we're pushing it into the background,
so the anxiety becomes the conscious focus. And for those
of us who are emotionally sensitive, because we are all
different the way we respond to our emotions, and some
of us, especially if you're more introverted, are more sensitive
(03:26):
to emotions than others, and this what can happen is
this narrowing can happen really really quickly, so you might
notice your the physical effects of anxiety, so racing hard,
at tight chest, shaky hands, and then suddenly your entire
world it's like it collapses into these sensations, and the
peripheral awareness can shut down, so all the things that
(03:51):
are happening around you, you're actually not aware of them,
because all you're focused on is this internal discomfort that
you have. And of course, naturally it's very normal that
you want this feeling to go. But the paradox of
that is the more we fixate on trying to control
the anxiety, the more power it gains, and so Marita
(04:14):
teaches us that or he explains that this is what
he calls obsessive inward attention and it traps us into
what he calls shiss or normal. Jon, I hope I
pronounced that right. I have talked about this in previous episodes.
But what it is is the contradiction between how we
want to feel and what we actually feel. So you
(04:39):
think about it. When you feel an emotion, that is
the truth on how you feel. But when it's really
uncomfortable and it's painful, we don't want to feel like that.
We want to feel something different. So you can see
there's this gap there between the truth of how I
feel and how I want to feel, and then we
start resisting it. And that's when the the more we resist,
(05:01):
the more we analyze our symptoms, it's like why am
I feeling like this? The more we can get stuck.
And the neuroscience now backs this up. So what it's
telling us is that what we repeatedly pay attention to
becomes reinforced in our brain. So when we give anxiety
or other emotions constant airtime by talking about it, trying
(05:23):
to control it, we're literally wiring it in. And of
course there are avoidance strategies like scrolling through social media
or episodes of Netflix, or a couple of glasses of wine,
which give us temporary relief, but often the anxiety comes
back with vengeance. So what's the alternative. Well, because Marita
(05:44):
teaches us that feelings are natural. He wants us to
feel how we feel, not fight how we feel, and
allow ourselves to feel these emotions without resisting them and
allow them to take our net that to take their
natural course. And this completely goes against the grain. But
(06:06):
the goal is not to get rid of our emotions,
which is what we kind of divert to you, because
that's what everything's uncomfortable, so we want to get rid
of them. But what Marita Therapy teaches us is to
allow them to exist in the background, allow them to
be as they are while we move forward with purposeful action.
(06:31):
So that means allowing the anxiety to be a part
of your experience, not just the whole story. So you
can still feel your heart racing and put your shoes
on and go out for that walk, and you can
still feel the nerves and hit send on that email,
or just like the bird song outside your window. The
(06:52):
anxiety doesn't have to disappear, but it just doesn't need
to be the thing that you're staring out, the thing
that all your attention is on. And when we expand
our awareness to include both the discomfort and the world
around us, it's kind of like we're reclaiming our freedom.
(07:14):
And that to me is a really powerful thing, because
we don't need to feel good to do good. We
just need to stop making emotions. The main character of
the story, and what I find fascinating is Marito. He
was a Japanese psychiatrist in the nineteen twenties, very prominent
psychiatrist and scholar. And just imagine that a psychiatrist who
(07:40):
doesn't focus on the symptoms of his patients. His patients
suffered from what he called shinkitsu, which now can be
kind of aligned with anxiety disorders like generalized anxiety disorder,
obsessive compulsive disorder, and a range of other disorders. But
he didn't focus on symptoms. Through his therapy, he allowed
(08:04):
his patients to feel how they feel, and to almost
through experience, they started to become aware of the nature
of their emotions, their relationship with their emotions, changed. So
these strong emotions that were showing up were no longer
the enemy to try and get rid of, but they
(08:26):
were able to allow them to be, and they then
turn their attention to purposeful action of what needed to
be done. And Marita described this as pure mind, and
we know it also as Arrogamama is making room for
our emotions, allowing them to be, and then shifting our
(08:48):
attention to what needs to be done. So I hope
this has been helpful. I hope it's been interesting. It
certainly food for thought. It is a bit of a
shift in adue towards our emotions. It's something that I
practice every day. It's been incredibly helpful for me, and
(09:09):
of course you are more than welcome to reach out
to me. If you have any questions at all about
Marino therapy or anything else, you can go to my
website at Culi Taylor Coaching dot com dot au. I'd
love to hear from you, and thanks for listening. I'll
catch you next week. See ya,
Hi everyone, it's Callie Taylor here and welcome to you.
This week's My Joe Monday. So this week I want
to take a deeper dive into how our attention can
influence our mental well being, and we'll do this through
the lens of Marita Therapy. So one of Marita's key
insights was around something called peripheral consciousness. So stick with
(00:31):
me on this one because it's actually really fascinating and
it is quite a unique way of looking at consciousness.
So let me explain it. Peripheral consciousness is this idea
that while we focus on one thing, we still hold
an awareness of other things in the background. So, for example,
you might be absorbed in a book but still be
(00:53):
vaguely kind of aware of the sound of the birds outside,
or the hum of the fridge, or maybe the smell
of your fear. And these background impressions sit on the
periphery of our consciousness, so they're not front and center,
but they're still there, and although we may not be
thinking about them, we're kind of still aware of them.
(01:14):
So here's where it gets really interesting, because we can
talk about this in the context of our emotions and
our feelings and our thoughts. So let's take anxiety as
an example. So in the West, it is very common
that we see anxiety as a problem to fix. So
before I can get on with my life, before I
(01:35):
can do the things that are important to me, I
must fix this. So the dominant approach is symptom reduction.
So we try to calm the body and control our thoughts,
control our breath, and when we feel better then we
can get back to life. But Marita's view was radically different,
(01:56):
so he didn't see emotions like anxiety as anything to
be fixed or controlled or tampered with. He saw the
problem as what he described as misdirected attention. So he
teaches us that feelings and emotions and thoughts are all
natural occurrences, so a natural part of being human. And
(02:18):
if we just left them as they are, so if
we stopped kind of control them and allowed them to
take their natural course, so when they arrive, they may
peak and then they kind of taper off a bit
like a wave, but that's only if they are left alone.
So let's get back to anxiety. The issue wasn't the
(02:42):
anxiety itself, but the way we narrow our focus onto it.
So we bring our attention onto it, and by doing that,
we're bringing the anxiety into the foreground of our lives,
and then we're pushing everything else, so our could be
our relationships, our hobbies, the things that are important to us,
(03:04):
like our values, our goals, we're pushing it into the background,
so the anxiety becomes the conscious focus. And for those
of us who are emotionally sensitive, because we are all
different the way we respond to our emotions, and some
of us, especially if you're more introverted, are more sensitive
(03:26):
to emotions than others, and this what can happen is
this narrowing can happen really really quickly, so you might
notice your the physical effects of anxiety, so racing hard,
at tight chest, shaky hands, and then suddenly your entire
world it's like it collapses into these sensations, and the
peripheral awareness can shut down, so all the things that
(03:51):
are happening around you, you're actually not aware of them,
because all you're focused on is this internal discomfort that
you have. And of course, naturally it's very normal that
you want this feeling to go. But the paradox of
that is the more we fixate on trying to control
the anxiety, the more power it gains, and so Marita
(04:14):
teaches us that or he explains that this is what
he calls obsessive inward attention and it traps us into
what he calls shiss or normal. Jon, I hope I
pronounced that right. I have talked about this in previous episodes.
But what it is is the contradiction between how we
want to feel and what we actually feel. So you
(04:39):
think about it. When you feel an emotion, that is
the truth on how you feel. But when it's really
uncomfortable and it's painful, we don't want to feel like that.
We want to feel something different. So you can see
there's this gap there between the truth of how I
feel and how I want to feel, and then we
start resisting it. And that's when the the more we resist,
(05:01):
the more we analyze our symptoms, it's like why am
I feeling like this? The more we can get stuck.
And the neuroscience now backs this up. So what it's
telling us is that what we repeatedly pay attention to
becomes reinforced in our brain. So when we give anxiety
or other emotions constant airtime by talking about it, trying
(05:23):
to control it, we're literally wiring it in. And of
course there are avoidance strategies like scrolling through social media
or episodes of Netflix, or a couple of glasses of wine,
which give us temporary relief, but often the anxiety comes
back with vengeance. So what's the alternative. Well, because Marita
(05:44):
teaches us that feelings are natural. He wants us to
feel how we feel, not fight how we feel, and
allow ourselves to feel these emotions without resisting them and
allow them to take our net that to take their
natural course. And this completely goes against the grain. But
(06:06):
the goal is not to get rid of our emotions,
which is what we kind of divert to you, because
that's what everything's uncomfortable, so we want to get rid
of them. But what Marita Therapy teaches us is to
allow them to exist in the background, allow them to
be as they are while we move forward with purposeful action.
(06:31):
So that means allowing the anxiety to be a part
of your experience, not just the whole story. So you
can still feel your heart racing and put your shoes
on and go out for that walk, and you can
still feel the nerves and hit send on that email,
or just like the bird song outside your window. The
(06:52):
anxiety doesn't have to disappear, but it just doesn't need
to be the thing that you're staring out, the thing
that all your attention is on. And when we expand
our awareness to include both the discomfort and the world
around us, it's kind of like we're reclaiming our freedom.
(07:14):
And that to me is a really powerful thing, because
we don't need to feel good to do good. We
just need to stop making emotions. The main character of
the story, and what I find fascinating is Marito. He
was a Japanese psychiatrist in the nineteen twenties, very prominent
psychiatrist and scholar. And just imagine that a psychiatrist who
(07:40):
doesn't focus on the symptoms of his patients. His patients
suffered from what he called shinkitsu, which now can be
kind of aligned with anxiety disorders like generalized anxiety disorder,
obsessive compulsive disorder, and a range of other disorders. But
he didn't focus on symptoms. Through his therapy, he allowed
(08:04):
his patients to feel how they feel, and to almost
through experience, they started to become aware of the nature
of their emotions, their relationship with their emotions, changed. So
these strong emotions that were showing up were no longer
the enemy to try and get rid of, but they
(08:26):
were able to allow them to be, and they then
turn their attention to purposeful action of what needed to
be done. And Marita described this as pure mind, and
we know it also as Arrogamama is making room for
our emotions, allowing them to be, and then shifting our
(08:48):
attention to what needs to be done. So I hope
this has been helpful. I hope it's been interesting. It
certainly food for thought. It is a bit of a
shift in adue towards our emotions. It's something that I
practice every day. It's been incredibly helpful for me, and
(09:09):
of course you are more than welcome to reach out
to me. If you have any questions at all about
Marino therapy or anything else, you can go to my
website at Culi Taylor Coaching dot com dot au. I'd
love to hear from you, and thanks for listening. I'll
catch you next week. See ya,
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!