What You Attend To, You Activate

The word attention comes from the Latin attendere: “to stretch toward.”

This is exactly what happens when you attend to something. You stretch your consciousness toward it. You make contact with it—and energy begins to flow.

Energy follows thought.

Your attention directs that energy. Among the countless possibilities present in any moment, it selects one and says:

This one. Give life to this.

Nature shows us how this works. A seed contains a possibility, but that possibility requires light, water and nourishment before it can become visible.

Attention works in a similar way. Everything you could experience exists first as a potential. When you repeatedly focus upon one possibility, you begin to activate it within yourself. Thought creates a vibration. Feeling strengthens it. Continued attention gives it substance.

What was once only possible begins to become real in your inner world. It changes what you notice, how you feel, what you expect and how you act. Gradually, it finds expression through your life.

This is how thought becomes form.

It is also why your attention must be guarded. Every time you return to a fear, grievance or limitation, you supply it with more energy. Even when you are fighting it, your attention remains connected to it.

The same law can set you free.

Give sustained attention to peace, and you activate the potential of peace. Attend to health, love, abundance or creative purpose, and you begin to build that vibration within yourself.

See what needs to be seen. Do what needs to be done. Then withdraw your creative energy from the unwanted condition and place it upon what you want to bring forth.

Your Seven-Day Attention Experiment

Choose one quality you want to activate in your life.

Each morning, hold your attention upon that quality for three minutes. Think about what it means. Feel its vibration. Imagine yourself expressing it naturally.

During the day, notice when your attention becomes absorbed by its opposite. Do not fight the thought. Withdraw your attention and return it to the quality you have chosen.

Each evening, write down one place where you saw that quality appearing—in yourself, in another person or in your circumstances.

Repeat this for seven days and observe what begins to change.

Your attention is continually nourishing something.

Before you give it away, ask: Do I want this to grow?

Matter must ultimately conform to the quality of focused thought. What you consistently attend to, you are calling out of potential and into form.

Deepen the Practice

If you would like guided support in gathering and directing your attention, work with our Soul Rhythm and Meditative Dance Journey: Concentration.

Begin the Concentration Journey