Our Attention is Our Currency

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Our Attention is the directing of our energy within the measure of time. It's our most valued asset and It is in fact the true currency of life.

As such, we give life to wherever we direct our attention, whether it exists or not, when we direct our attention on it we are giving vital life energy to it and therefore giving it life. You could go as far as to say that if your attention isn't on it, it doesn't actually exist. For now, let's keep it simple and stick to the topic, I'll save the quantum phenomenon for another time.

When we distill life down to our existence and our experience within that existence, the only thing we really have left is our body and our attention. From the moment we wake to the moment we fall asleep, we have the ability to choose how we are using our attention and who or what we are directing it towards. At least that’s the goal. In reality, it’s likely that you don’t always feel in control of where your attention is being drawn, instead you often follow it like a lead. And well, sometimes it leads you astray.

Where your attention goes, your energy flows and in direct correlation with the law of entropy, the more our attention is distributed or spread out, the more chaotic our experience. Have you ever noticed that people with simple lives seem less disturbed? This is in part because their attention is not scattered and not being hijacked by attention seeking forces.

This brings us to another characteristic of attention, wherever we are directing our attention we are essentially giving our energy over to whatever it is or whoever it is that we have our attention on. Whether we like that/them or not we are giving our attention which transfers our energy and gives life to whatever it is our attention is on. This is why becoming aware of your attention as currency is so important. Would you give your money away to a person or a cause you don't agree with, that's not in your best interest? of course not, so why on earth would you give them your most valuable asset, and then do it again the next day?

You can see how money itself is just one of many tools we use to 'store' energy that we or someone else at some point used their attention to acquire. Another 'store' of energy are skillsets, that's why our skillsets carry value. In this way, we can use our attention together as a group and share the money as a way to distribute and store the attention we gave away towards the shared goal.

In the same way, there is a whole subset of society who has figured out how to use other peoples attention for their own financial gain or energetic gain, whether they are doing it consciously or unconsciously doesn't matter, what matters is that we learn how to choose if we want to give them our attention or reserve our attention for something more meaningful to us, and this is why it's also important to know who we are and what we value, because these details help us make better choices that align with our personal goals and our inherent integrity.

You might be thinking where this has happened in your life, and it's not a comforting thing to see and you're getting upset with them and yourself. If you're not and you feel your life was pretty straightforward, you're either still in denial or you're way ahead of most of us, or you haven't realized that attention currency goes way beyond money and you've been hijacked in other ways.

that’s ok, we’re still learning how to harness this incredible power and we are simultaneously becoming more aware of who and what has been stealing our attention from us without our conscious knowing for most, if not all, of our life.

Yep. It’s unnerving. It’s disturbing. get angry. let yourself feel it, blame them, all of them, let it all out. Express what you’ve felt but haven’t been able to name, express it anyway you can as long as you don’t harm yourself or another life. Let this resonate within you until you feel the fire of lost time.

Don't put this fire out, it's your fuel for reclaiming your agency, the work now is to learn to turn it into a controlled burn.

Now, bring yourself back to you and take inventory of where your attention has been spent over the last week. month. year. decade…life... and with deep compassion for yourself, take full responsibility for where you choose to spend your attention from now on. And, from now on, with loving compassion for yourself and others, remember the cost of not taking ownership of your attention and remind yourself every day to re-member to take ownership of where you spend your attention and to show yourself unconditional love in the process.

I know, that's easier said than done, but we have to start here if we're going to get anywhere.

Think of your attention as a laser. This laser has to be powered by something and that something is your energy; the energy you naturally have each day - your vital life energy. You can direct this laser anywhere you’d like and control the amount of power you direct through it. You can even distribute this laser out to multiple targets at once and you can even ‘subscribe’ this laser to various causes, people, events, beliefs, etc.

Now that you’re following the reference of our attention as a laser, I bet your realizing that your laser has a mind of its own. Not only is it scattered in multiple directions, it also seems to control what it is directed towards, or worse, what it's directed towards seems to have control over your laser. This isn't because you're broken or were born with a dysfunctional laser, it's because your attention laser has been operating on autopilot this whole time and it's 'learned' bad habits through basic chemical feedback loops while you were disengaged from the controls and engaged in where it was directing your attention.

You can think of autopilot as a program that was installed in your core operating system to handle attention direction during the development phase, until we learned how to direct it ourselves and could take over the controls - simply put, like any autopilot, it was designed to get us to our destination safely. The trouble arises because that destination has long passed, but the program has continued to do its job the best it knows how, the autopilot is now on autopilot.

What we're all experiencing now is a realization that something else is in control and so we’re looking out through our two eyes to blame whoever we can, but that too is just the autopilot doing what it's learned to do. The real truth is that no one ever taught us how to take over the controls, or we were already too absorbed in what attracted our attention to care; more than likely it was both. So we went on with our lives letting our attention be grabbed and pulled in countless directions and when we didn't like those experiences we blamed the attention grabbers for what they were doing, or we blamed ourselves for making bad decisions; again, more than likely it was both.

Whether they were conscious or unconscious doesn't matter, what matters now is that we recognize that our attention is our currency and that we now have the knowledge to develop our awareness to begin learning how to consciously direct it in ways that align with our integrity, our values and our best interest, then once we get the hang of it, we can expand it to the best interest of family, friends, humanity and planet earth.

Now that you've become consciously aware of your attention as your most valuable currency, it's time to pay attention to your attention; direct your most valuable asset towards yourself. Give yourself what you've been giving away to others so that you can reclaim your agency and spend your most valuable currency in ways that light you up and bring you back to your authentic self.

Layer by layer by layer.

As we gradually re-engage with the controls and take ownership of what was always ours, we love ourselves with deep unwavering compassion for what we endured to get here.

While it may not feel like it right now, you have arrived - you're circling the airfield. Now it's time to regain the controls of your attention laser and begin to direct it consciously so you can land safely, unload the old programs, upgrade your systems and take back off to higher and higher heights.

So with energy as your vital resource and attention as your currency, how will you choose to spend it?