Читать книгу Enneagram For Dummies - Jeanette van Stijn - Страница 82

The word attention probably makes you think of getting attention or paying attention — paying attention to your children or your work, for example. People are more or less conscious of this paying attention or getting attention on this level. It’s important to pay attention to things that mean something to you. Just think about what happens when you don’t pay attention to certain things sufficiently — often, something goes wrong, from the failure of a professional project to problems in a relationship. This is attention in action — be attentive, pay attention, get attention — these are all things people actively do.

The attention I talk about with the Enneagram and in this book refers to the attention inside you — attention at a deeper level. You aren’t conscious of it if you don’t discover it inside yourself. This attention lies on the level of your hidden drivers — your underlying driving forces and motivations. Here you find the things that you subconsciously and automatically direct your attention toward because you consider them important, even if you aren’t aware of the importance you place on them. Exploring this attention and the unconscious goals it focuses on is one of the most important aspects of the Enneagram. One pillar of Enneagram practice is training your attentiveness — also referred to as mindfulness nowadays.

Monks who observed themselves throughout decades of meditation and discovered a lot about their interior mechanisms have conveyed the following information:

 You can’t not direct your attention toward something. Human attention always has a target. People aren’t aware of this — it just happens. The “something” that your attention is directed toward is the object of your attention.

 Your attention is always directed toward a single object. Neurobiological research confirms the observations by the monks: In the best-case scenario, you can quickly jump back-and-forth between things so quickly that it looks as though you were directing your attention toward everything at the same time. However, brain research shows that people quickly switch around — you’re always directing your attention toward a single thing at a time.LOVE IS PAYING ATTENTION; PAYING ATTENTION IS LOVEPaying attention is a way of expressing love. If something or someone is important to you — so important that you can call it love — then this something or person will also be the focus of your attention. The love you express for something or someone can be expressed by specifically paying attention in the form of doing something for the object or person. Sometimes, it’s less the activity itself than the way you direct attention to this thing or person. For many people, their own children are certainly the best examples. Studies have shown that a mother can recognize the crying of her own baby among a number of crying children. In the turmoil of a schoolyard, parents immediately find their children. Paying attention consists of truly seeing and truly hearing your child. As a result, the child in turn feels seen and heard. This is love that is expressed in paying attention, and from this attention, you can see the love.With the Enneagram, this is considered the pure attention that arises from persons being connected to themselves and connecting with others from that position of strength. That's attention on a different level — not doing, but being (conscious attention, in other words). Every healthy person can learn to train the conscious self by developing and paying conscious attention. The first step consists of seeing where your attention is unconsciously directed. Recognizing inside yourself which Enneagram type best describes your patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting offers you a foundation from which to observe the unconscious objects of your attention. Those objects designate the place on which you focus your attention — the place that causes each respective type (and person) the most worry.Love is paying attention; paying attention is love.

 Your attention automatically wanders from one object to the next. You might have noticed that it seems extremely difficult to keep your attention focused on one object for a prolonged period. As soon as the next object appears, your attention automatically flies toward it. People are distracted — when you keep your attention on one object for a prolonged period, it’s called concentration — and it requires real training. When you can hold an object (a thing or a person) in your thoughts, and maybe even visualize it, it’s called object constancy.