You are ALWAYS practicing something. Why not Open Focus?
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Practice changes your brain – both its structure and its functioning. And just as with paying attention, it’s not what you practice, but how you practice. Deliberate practice is perfect practice done with intention, but without tension. That’s how you change the brain.
Notice what you are practicing right now. Maybe it’s distracted reading, or impatient waiting to be done, or background worrying – whatever it is, your brain is wrapping that neural pathway with insulating white matter so it runs faster next time, and is easier to choose. Soon it becomes your go-to, then it just feels like you. Over time you may not notice that there are other ways of seeing, being, or feeling, or notice them but be unable to enact them.
Practicing Open Focus is a twofer: You’ll learn how to insulate new neural pathways and you’ll build and insulate one that lets you stay alert without tension, and heals the mental and physical effects of stress.
And you’ll accomplish this by deliberately practicing effortlessness.
Open focus practice involves responding to a series of questions by imagining an experience, without using any effort. That’s it.
Guidelines for OF practice
- • Sit or stand with an erect posture. This has two benefits: 1. You’re more likely to stay awake, which allows you to reap the benefits of flexible attention, and 2. It will make it easier to transfer open focus to the rest of your life.
• Respond to the questions with your imagination. You’re not meant to answer the question out loud, or think of a number or other abstraction, but to imagine an experience. Whatever comes is fine. You’ll have 10-15 seconds after each question for this.
• Expand your attention to include everything. If your mind wanders, neither push it away or encourage it. Instead, broaden your attention to include it while continuing to respond to the question. This goes for thoughts, emotions, sensations, distractions, or concerns that you’re doing it wrong.
Your practice will deepen over time
At first, you may have weak or vague experiences. In fact, you may wonder if you are experiencing anything at all. You may have trouble staying awake or be extremely drowsy. In time, you will stay in the alert, but relaxed state that’s the hallmark of alpha synchrony, and your experience will become richer and deeper.
Transferring Open Focus to everyday life
As your experience of Open Focus deepens, you’ll find it easier to access in the flow of your life. Your erect posture when practicing is another aid to accessing Open Focus in your day-to-day life. Another aid to experiencing Open Focus wherever, whenever, is practigin with our eyes half or fully open. When you feel ready – typically after 3-6 months of daily practice – you can begin to play with opening or half-opening your eyes while you practice.
Our podcast episode goes into greater depth:
Or, you can read the transcript:
Kat Oak: In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller:
Ferris Bueller: Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.
Kat: Is there an art or a science to stopping and looking around once in a while?
Liz Williams: I’m Liz.
Kat: I’m Kat. This is Beyond Resilience. When Liz and I met during the COVID-19 pandemic, we discovered that we shared a passion for exploring accessible ways of experiencing and incorporating trance into our daily lives. In particular, we were interested in how different trance-inducing practices might promote physical, mental, and emotional healing, enhance creativity, and inspire liberation.
In the first season of Beyond Resilience, we explore Open Focus, a practice developed by Les Fehmi that helps us retrain our brains to access all the different types of attention available. Please join us as we explore Open Focus and learn about the benefits of daily practice. Hi, Liz.
Liz: Hello, Kat.
Kat: How are you doing today?
Liz: We’re back. We’re back to talk about more Open Focus and the background of this practice in my life. I’d love to hear about it in yours as well.
Kat: Yes. Last week, we talked about the origins of it. Today I’d like to talk about how you came to incorporate it into your life. Then also, we’ll end it with the, how do you do it, the actual mechanics of it. Tell me everything, Liz.
Liz: I’m going to tell you everything. Everything that there is to say is going to be told now. Back in I think 2007, when Les Fehmi first published his book, I can’t remember how I heard of it, but I was totally intrigued. I really, really wanted to learn more about it, so I devoured the book, and I started practicing. I got all of his recordings. There were 16 or something, or maybe 18, and I started practicing every day Open Focus, listening to them a couple of times a day, and got into it.
That was 2007. Then, like things tend to happen with me, [laughter] I got distracted by life and it fell off. I had other things that I was doing that were really helpful at that time for managing my stress levels and stuff. I was working out a lot. I was eating really well. I was doing seriously well. Fast forward 12 years to COVID and none of that was happening. I wasn’t exercising. I was afraid to go to the gym.
I just fell apart during COVID. Didn’t have any of the mechanisms that I was used to available to me. It was becoming more and more apparent that an offhand comment that my primary care physician had made when I was going through menopause was starting to seem like, “Wait a minute,” because she said, “Sometimes during perimenopause, women, that’s when they discover they have ADHD.”
I read the book Delivered from Distraction, and thought, “Well, that describes me.” This is going to be a terrible summation of that book. At the time, it was like, “Okay, you’re a genius if you have ADHD. You should have a wife who will keep you organized.” I’m like, “I’m sorry. That is not–” [laughter] “A, that’s not my experience. B, that is–” My partner at the time was like, “No.” I’m like, “Yes, totally not. That’s ridiculous.” I just discarded it.
Along comes COVID, then all the ADHD symptoms roar back to life. My work falls apart because it’s primarily consulting to health care. They were not interested in meeting facilitation. They were in emergency mode. They were like, “Can you give us extra things to make people more resilient?” I’m like, “What?” Hence the name of the website, Beyond Resilience. Some things are just really difficult.
It’s not about how can I ratchet up my performance to meet this new horror, for me, I needed to reset and find a whole different level to be in the world with. I wasn’t interested in just throwing more pasta at the wall. Then I reengaged with Open Focus, and for the first time, it helped me. We’ve talked about the practices, you and I, just offline that really helped me to feel peaceful again and to feel relaxed and to be able to think clearly. Those were the Vagus Nerve Reset that Michael Rosen– Steve Rosen– I can’t remember his name now.
In his book about the vagus nerve, it’s a really simple eye movement that you do. Within two weeks, I was actually finding a stress-free, peaceful feeling again, which I had lost touch with. Then Open Focus allowed me to deepen that. Then the practice of negative gratitudes where you’re accepting. You accept everything, every experience you’re having, every emotion, every feeling, and you’re grateful for it. Those were the things that got me through the pandemic.
During that time, I noticed, for the first time, typical of ADHD, “Oh, look.” [laughter] “Looks what’s been here all along.” You could become certified as an Open Focus coach. I did that. I went through that training with– Les Fehmi had passed away, but his wife, Susan Shor Fehmi, who had worked with him for decades in this realm, certified me in Open Focus coaching, which was a delight.
I did that during COVID. Then we met. I don’t know if we should talk about how that happened. We met, and here we are. I started Open Focus Fridays to get the practice doing it and to start to build a community of people who wanted something that would enhance what they were already doing. I’m very weary of people who say, “I learned this thing, it’s going to change your life, and you only need this.” That’s just ridiculous. That’s like saying you only need to drink water because it’s so amazing for you. No, you don’t. You need a whole bunch of things.
That’s not my experience. This is not a miracle cure. It’s not a panacea, but it does enhance everything. I love its utility. You don’t have to practice it for 20 years to get the benefit. The benefits are immediate. Like meditation, you’ve got to practice for a while, then you learn to just be in your experience as experience and not get attached. That’s great, or you can add space, effortlessness, embodiment and get there immediately.
Building a habit always takes time. Your mindfulness practice will be enhanced by this. Your meditation practice will be enhanced by this. Your relationships. The anecdotal evidence is that it helps with ADHD, which was part of my interest during COVID. That’s a long-winded response to your question. Again, exhibiting another symptom of ADHD get me started on a topic I like and just [unintelligible 00:07:59]
Kat: Just keep going. Wind her up and watch her go.
Liz: [laughs] I know. Who needs [unintelligible 00:08:08]
Kat: You mentioned the negative gratitudes kinds of things. I don’t know if I was sharing with you this– Some random post that I read where this woman was sharing. People were talking about things I wish I had known then that I know now. One of them was, I encourage people to reframe rejection as gratefulness that somebody didn’t make you waste your time trying to be or do something that wasn’t the right fit for you. When a job rejects you or a relationship doesn’t work out, be grateful that they didn’t try and make you pretzel yourself or be somebody different.
They reminded me of what you said, the negative gratitude, being grateful for even things that we are told are bad things that we shouldn’t be happy about, right? Nobody wants to be rejected. When you look at it from that– Then she ended it with, try and spend more of your time finding where you belong and not trying to fit in. I think that is such a great concept, right, of that gratitude practice.
Liz: It’s interesting, you don’t even need to do that turnaround, although that is wonderful. That reframe technique is fantastic. That’s a different technique than this. That’s reframing, and it’s very powerful. I use it all the time too, because every no, there’s a yes on the other side of it, right? If there’s no to this, then what can I now say yes to? They’re inextricably linked. If I say yes, what am I now saying no to?
In the example that you just gave, if I get accepted into something that is not a good fit for me, I’ve just said yes to that and no to good fit, no to something that actually fits me. Always being aware that there are two sides to that coin is fantastic. Negative gratitudes are a little different. You may get there through the negative gratitude. In fact, you probably will get there, but this is when you’re really caught in one of the six basic emotions that Eklund–
Is that Paul Eklund or Eckman? I never know what his name is, but you’ll know. The movie Inside Out is based on his thought that there are six basic emotions that are just factory installation items. You just come with them. They’re here for a reason. You need all six of them. If you’re feeling one of those, sadness, fear– I love it that the starter said, sadness, fear, anger. What? Disgust.
We came with these. There’s a reason for them, and then joy and surprise. We came factory installed. This is part of the package that we need to survive here. Sadness, fear, anger, disgust are the ones we typically push away. Surprise can embarrass us, so we can push that away too. Joy, we’re so busy pushing the other five away that it might be a little tough to embrace joy. If I’m feeling sad or fearful or furious or disgusted, negative gratitude is, yes, thank you, I can feel the emotions that I came installed with, that came with the package. I get to feel all of these emotions.
I was able to put that to the test. I won’t get into any of the details, but I was feeling anger to the point of hatred, and disgust to the point of hatred. My Judeo-Christian upbringing is the same as probably so many people’s, certainly in the United States or in the Western world. Those are bad. That’s wrong. Those are sinful thoughts. You can’t do that. No, they’re just thoughts. Thoughts are like feelings. They’re not sinful. They’re just built in.
I let myself feel all of the fury, disgust, and hatred, and I use that word, and I just let it rip. I would write it in my journal, I hate this and I hate this and I hate this. Because I was doing it, not because I wanted to blame or judge the other person, I was just saying yes to my own feelings. I wasn’t doing that thing where I’m making myself angry all over again. I was doing that, yes, I accept this. I feel hate. How much hate do I feel? It’s all about me.
It completely shifted after, I don’t know, about a week of just saying yes to it. Yes, I feel grateful that I can feel this feeling. I’m not going to edit it out because it’s on the bad list. I’m going to say yes. I did, and it turned around. What happened was I had the clearest boundary I’ve ever had with the behaviors of that person. Not anything I needed to put energy into having, not anything I needed to want myself up with anger or agitation about, it was just like, “No, that’s a no. Now I’m calmly going to go on with my day.” It was transformative for me.
A lesson in just accepting it, when we talk about accepting ourselves, it’s like, “I’m going to accept the acceptable stuff.” “No, I’m going to accept everything. I’m not going to act it out, but I am going to say yes to the feeling. I was factory-installed with the feeling. Not an excuse to act out, but I’m not going to push myself away either.”
Kat: I guess that’s the thing, right, is the choice of how you use that. My son said to me a while ago, he’s like, “You’re so kind, Kat. You’re so nice to people.” I was like, “Well, it takes the same amount of energy and sometimes less to be kind than mean.” He’s like, “No, it doesn’t. It’s super easy to just tell somebody to shut up.” I was like, “Really? What happens then when you say shut up? Do they actually shut up?” He’s like, “Well, no.” I’m like, “What happens? You guys get into an argument and then you have all this strife and you spend all this time being angry with each other. Was it easy at the end of the day? Yes, in that moment it was flippant, right?”
Like what you’re talking about in terms of like, I want to inject these feelings. Is that judgment? Is that moral with the bad feelings, right? You said, just feeling them and just let it be, and not making judgment about it. It doesn’t mean anything. I think that’s what we get so wrapped up in often is, “You made me feel this way,” right?
Liz: Yes.
Kat: You made me feel this way. Sometimes somebody’s got to pay, whether it’s you. You internalize and you’re like, “They made me feel this way, so I’m just going to go take my toys and go home,” or “I’m in the lash out at them.” I think that, to your point, where it builds to this level of not being able to manage it is where you do see people lashing out in circumstances that are like, “Okay. Really?” The grocery store checker ran out of receipt tape during and you totally lose it on them. Something else is going on here, right?
Liz: That’s right. [laughter] It’s got nothing to do with them.
Kat: [laughs] Exactly. It’s going to come out one way or the other. The practice you’re talking about sounds like a more controlled process of letting them come out, feeling them, and releasing them into the wild.
Liz: Into the wild.
Kat: [laughs]
Liz: Yes. If I can’t accept my emotions, then I got no business. I sound like Yoda talking about this. I’m not. I am not. I think of myself as a rank beginner with this practice. I’m intrigued by it and it’s been helpful with some really stressful stuff. Any of the things I tend to push away. If I’m not willing to digest them myself and accept them myself, what am I doing putting them out there? What am I doing? It’s like, “Ugh.” I’ve had some successes with this. I’ve had some notable failures.
[laughter]
Kat: I’m even more of a neophyte. I still struggle with actually doing the practice on a regular basis and, to be honest, not moving into a meditation, falling asleep mode.
Liz: We’re talking about Open Focus specifically now?
Kat: Yes, Open Focus. To me, it feels like it’s a muscle development process. Through the practice of those, incorporating it more daily into my life versus– I feel like that’s something I should do. To your point with the magic bullet thing, there are so many things, “You should do this. Mindfulness and meditation.” I think they’re all valuable, but it’s trying to find that, I guess the passport into the moment in a way, right?
Liz: That’s a great way to put it actually, right? How can I actually be here now? We should, we could at this moment, talk about that, that exact thing, because that always is the problem. The thing that makes it maybe a bit easier than so many practices is we’re always paying attention to something, if we’re awake anyway, if we’re in one of the three brain wave states when we can do that, or four. Gamma, beta, alpha, theta, we’re paying attention to something in the world. Delta, we’re asleep. Maybe we’re attending to something but I don’t know what.
The way we’re paying attention is something that we have voluntary control over. We’re always doing it, so changing how you pay attention, which is what Open Focus is all about, is available to us every minute of every day. I want to distinguish between taking Open Focus out for a walk, taking it into your life, using it all the time, and the practice of sitting through a 5, 10, 20-minute, or even 30-minute Open Focus session. If you’re doing it in your daily life, you’re helping yourself not to accumulate stress, not to get your mind in a tangle, not to have stress hormones affect your body. That is great.
You can do that all the time, anytime immediately without practicing at all. The other thing of doing an Open Focus session, which I’ve spent a lot of time doing, is the more you are in Open Focus, the more you will heal. You will heal the effects of stress. You will learn the habit of not going immediately into emergency mode for everything. Those two things work together, just doing it in your daily life, but little things, noticing what’s in your peripheral vision. Even as we’re talking right now, I’m noticing that there’s a weird electronic buzzing thing that I hope is in the headphones and not in my brain.
[laughter]
Who knows?
[laughter]
Maybe it’s even outside. I don’t know. I’m also noticing that not only am I looking at you on the screen, I’m noticing the whole outline of my monitor, I’m noticing the camera above my monitor and the wall behind that and then the speakers out to the side, and then as I take in more of my peripheral vision, I feel myself settle down. It’s that simple, just adding space in relationship to my body without any effort. I’m not like [unintelligible 00:21:51] Not that. I just relax so that my vision expands a bit. I’m still centered on you and what I’m doing but I’m taking in the other stuff.
Any of my five senses will do so I can notice what my feet are doing and feel into that. I can notice how the chair feels against my back, how the air feels on my skin. Notice that this little headphone cup that I have on is creaking on my ear. Not in a way like, “I have to get rid of that.” Just like, “No, come on in. Let’s make this space bigger so that it can all be here.” Make the space big enough so that anything I’m feeling emotionally can be here.
If I’m having a train of thought that’s roaring through like the anxiety express or the worry express or the “Oh, I want to laugh out loud but I shouldn’t express,” whatever it is that’s happening on that track, it can be here too. It’s like multitracking. You’re multitracking with your attention. You’re just letting it all be here at once, but not switching tracks. You’re just letting it all be here the way you would an orchestration.
Kat: That’s the flexible attention that you were talking about last week. It’s not prioritizing any of the different types of attention. It’s like, “You have access to all of these, so let’s choose the right–” Choose your own adventure. The best tool for the job, right?
Liz: Exactly. Yes. Our tendency is to go narrow and objective, narrow and separate. That’s the royal road to the stress response, to fight, flight, or freeze. That’s just habitually how we pay attention to everything. Certainly, as someone with ADHD, that’s how we get things done. That’s how I get things done. “Let me make this an emergency.” That’s very focusing. That’s also very stressful.
For me, Open Focus has been incredibly healing. The kinds of physical tension I carry because of that, the kinds of mental fog that I can get into, because that’s not where my brain wants to be. According to the Fehmi’s research, an ADHD brain wants to be in theta, that dreamy, halfway sleepy, going into sleep or coming out of sleep. It has a surfeit of that. It’s just too much to really get into that task mode. We have trouble doing that. Open Focus helps me find my way out of that without driving myself into an emergency response to everything.
That’s why I like it. I found that if I can just start moving, using my body, my body is really key to shifting how I pay attention. It’s like, “Oh, now I’m moving. Oh, I’m moving through space. Oh, space.” The more you do the Open Focus sessions, the more the word space is like, “Oh, space.”
Kat: [laughs]
Liz: The more the word effortless is just like, “Huh.” I don’t have to try. I don’t have to force. I don’t have to concentrate. [unintelligible 00:25:17] I don’t have to do that. I can just open my attention. I can flex it. I can broaden my attention. I can allow myself to be immersed yet still broad. In ADHD hyperfocus is you’re immersed. Everything else is gone. How do you broaden at the same time as being immersed? It’s good for all of us to be in that broad, immersed attention. That’s what heals us.
Your experience that you were talking about of falling asleep, that’s normal when you’re beginning a practice of Open Focus, very common. That’s why we ask you to sit erect because otherwise, you’ll just drift off to sleep. That’s delta. That has its own benefits, but not what we’re shooting for. Theta has very serious benefits. That’s also very common when you’re doing Open Focus, and not a problem. As you practice more, alpha becomes more available to you. Theta less so.
You don’t need it as much because you’re helping to heal those things, heal and change neural pathways that you’ve been firing, you’re learning to fire other ones so that you can be in alpha, as you’re going about your business, relaxed yet alert, getting things done, relaxed and alert, going into low beta, really focus on a task and get it done, without excluding, getting into a narrow but immersed flow state.
If you can be broad and objective, if you’re facilitating your teaching, having to pay attention to a lot of inputs at once and still be– You’re attending very broadly, but still having to pay attention to what you’re doing, and make sure that that happens. You’re teaching a class, you’ve got to get through the curriculum. You can’t get so broadly focused that you’re not moving things forward. Those are all the kinds of attention we need.
Kat: Should we talk through the how to do it? In future episodes, we will actually delve in and do some Open Focus sessions, but the nuts and bolts of the technique, I guess.
Liz: Yes. It’s super simple. Just as a reminder, what we’re about is building a refuge in our minds from which you can experience everything. You can do all kinds of experiences and handle them without that emergency mode attention. The Open Focus practice trains our brain to have flexible attention. That’s what we’re doing. The thing that’s really cool about this is that key to that is effortlessness.
All you’re going to do, this is the whole thing, you’re going to imagine ideas and experiences with no particular effort. Imagine means pretend, make things up. There’s no right or wrong, you’re going to make it up. Your imagination is designed for this. This is what it does without any effort. It doesn’t need to be trained to do it. It knows how. That’s it. The actual practice is responding to a series of questions.
We’ve already gone over the posture. You can sit or stand, erect posture. Closing your eyes is very helpful in the beginning because the visual cortex is such a huge, powerful– The whole fight or flight situation is very visually based. We see something, we go right into, “Oh.” Closing your eyes really helps to Open Focus in the beginning. Eventually, you’ll practice with eyes sort of, maybe light coming through the eyelashes. Eventually, you’ll be able to practice with your eyes wide open throughout your life.
You respond to a series of questions. There’ll be a question, then there’ll be a 10 or 15-second pause so that you can let your imagination flow in response to the question that’s being asked. I’ll say, an example is, “Can you imagine the distance between your eyes?” Just wait. At first, when you’re first practicing, you might be thinking, “Well, let’s see now. If I got a tape measure, I think that would be about,” or “I’m going to picture that distance. [unintelligible 00:29:49] picture that distance.”
Picturing it, the sense of sight is one of the five senses. You can use all of the five senses. Can I hear the space between my eyes. Can I feel? Can I have a visceral experience of the space between my eyes? The more senses we use, the more we automatically flex our attention and open our focus. You don’t need to come up with a number or any other abstraction. That’s not what it’s about. It’s can you imagine? Let me remind you can imagine anything. That’s what it does.
[laughter]
Kat: I think that’s in a way what gets me into snoozy. It reminds me of my daydreaming as a child. Just laying there and just imagining for hours. I think that’s what it triggers in me. Why I get into the close to a dream or be like, “I should be sleeping now.”
Liz: It’s that theta experience. It’s so delicious, isn’t it? That’s one of the things I think a lot of us miss about being an adult and not being a kid. It’s just, I remember that, just those dreamy hours that we would spend. Our bodies and mind love that experience. That kind of rest is so delicious to us. That is what we’re going for. It takes us right into theta. The more you practice, we’ll say it again, the more you practice, the more quickly you’ll heal and the more quickly alpha becomes available to you, both in the practice and just all the time. It’s the way we’re designed, like the cat lying in the patch of sunlight, and then they hear something and then it’s like they just go back to being a boneless cat.
Kat: I know. I just had that with my dog where I was trying to record something and she was totally passed out at my feet. I’m like two seconds into recording and all of a sudden she jumps up, [barking sound] running down. I’m like, “What happened?” I don’t sense anything. She had to go down and lecture the neighborhood through the window. She went from like, “I’m dead to the world,” to like, “Let me protect the household,” in like half a second.
Liz: Probably all in her imagination.
[laughter]
Kat: Exactly. Whereas I’m like me, I’d be laying in bed and be like, “Do I need to get up? [crosstalk]
Liz: Right. Exactly.
Kat: Did I hear something? I don’t think– was that a dream? I don’t think so.
Liz: That’s a great example, the difference between theta and alpha. She’s an alpha state and just could go effortlessly between relaxation and alertness. She has it at the same time and she could choose either. Whereas when we’re in that theta state, it’s like, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just stay here forever.”
Kat: We do sit erect and we are eyes closed to begin with. Then we start imagining being led through questions to imagine different things. The questions are different based on where you’re trying to focus. I know a lot of what you originally explored and what, if I recall correctly, Les Femi’s work focused on was how open focus can be used to dissolve pain. That seems like that’s– and I know in our own open focus sessions, there is often an intention behind the sessions. How do you come up with those questions? Is it just that it was part of your training?
Liz: Yes, it was part of my training. The reason I was trained in how to specifically ask these questions is that when Les Femi was developing this, he hooked people up to this neurofeedback mechanism that he devised and he tested questions. He tested sentence stems and he tested if you get too much into suggesting things. The way to phrase the questions starts with either, can you imagine, or is it possible to imagine? Can you imagine takes all the pressure off? Can you imagine? I don’t know. Let me try. Is it possible to imagine? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s not, imagine.
Kat: Versus, imagine this. A directive.
Liz: Right, it’s like, [screams] or concentrate and imagine, and “Mm”
Kat: It’s like an invitation.
Liz: Exactly. It’s like, can you? I don’t know. It softens it and tends towards that broadness of attention. That was part of the training. The other part of the training is not to be too heavy-handed or suggest things. You don’t add things to the open-focus experience that might disrupt it because what we’re trying to do here is very subtle. We’re not trying to have therapy in a 20-minute open focus session. It’s not about that. It’s simply about shifting your brain into an alpha brain wave state and letting that do the work it does. We don’t need to add to that.
The tricky part, and the fun part for me of open focus Fridays, which is every noon Pacific time is we come together as a group and then talk about what we’ve been doing for the week, what’s been going on, and where it’s worked to have open focus. We talk a lot about in-the-moment open focus in that group and what’s up for people right then. That’s where those topics come from. My job is to listen to what people say and take the principles of open-focus practice and see what I can come up with that fits with effortlessness, embodiment, and space without adding stuff.
We’ll sometimes stray off the reservation slightly, but I feel it. I feel when I do it and I bring it back. Right now, what we’ve been doing in open focus Fridays is, we’re dissolving pain. We’re dissolving emotional experiences. We don’t want anything that is distressing to us can be dissolved. Femi came to this because he had kidney stones. I’ve never had those, but I understand they are agonizing and he was agonized and he thought, “I wonder if I can just add space to my experience and immerse myself into, can I take broad attention and help with pain?”
It did work that he was able to get out of pain from the kidney stone and it lasted three days. Then he did it again and it lasted another three days. He could keep open, focusing his way out. Pain, you think about pain, it’s super grabby of attention. It’s like it fills your whole experience. Suddenly there’s nothing but pain, especially when it’s severe and/or scary. Then of course the prediction of future pain messes you up even more. You’re having pain and then you start to fear the next experience of it.
It’s very amenable to open focus. It’s ditto with any kind of emotional experience. If you can find it in your body, in particular, you can dissolve it. You can treat it as a physical phenomenon, which it is, and you can dissolve it. If you can find, the way a thought hits your body and the way in anxiety or a feeling of depression that you don’t want, if you’re getting stuck there and it’s starting to affect you or drive your behavior, drive your thinking, you can dissolve those things. We’ve strayed a little bit off the reservation lately with if you can dissolve pain and immerse yourself in it, that immersed attention is what we want. Add space and immerse yourself in it. Can you also find joy in your body?
Kat: You feel like that’s straying off the reservation? I think that that’s really powerful I guess, in seeing this as a technique that is multifaceted, that it’s not just about– if people are like, “I don’t have any pain. I don’t need that. I’m good.”
Liz: I’m good.
Kat: That it’s something that can help you embody joy, embody more experiences, or really feel everything. You feel like that is not necessarily part of the original theory or–
Liz: I need to pay attention to what I’m doing so that I don’t start leading people to have an experience of joy. I just have to keep that weightiness off it. So far it’s been good. What we’ve done, we started just with that. Then we started like, “Can you imagine that your entire body is full of space?” Which is we’re leaping ahead in open focus practice. Now, normally we build up to that. Imagine that it’s in your thumb and index finger, which are the easiest places to feel space because they’re the most highly innervated parts of your body. Meaning that the nerves are mapped to your brain more than your entire back.
There’s more brain mapping for your thumb and index finger for your entire back. It’s a great place to experience things. When you normally build up to, can you imagine your entire body full of space? Then we locate a spot in the body for pain or joy. We give it a shape, we fill it with space, we allow the boundary of that space we’ve just defined, that shape we’ve just defined to disperse, we immerse ourselves in it. We expand space out into the universe. All this is stuff that you learn to do with some practice. Why not also expand the feeling of joy? We can find that in our bodies. Happiness, pleasant anticipate.
There are a lot of things that we can find in our body, all the subsets of joy, the different ways we experience that, why not expand that first, and then allow the pain to be there too? Fill that with space, do the same thing, finding your body, give it a shape, fill it with space, allow that boundary to dissolve into space, and let yourself immerse in it. These are just experiences that we have. We can add space to all of them. I’m experimenting with what that is. I think that the thing about joy, I want to say is that the way we experience joy or happiness is very often we experience the happiness of having something or getting something or seeing something.
Then immediately, what comes in as a thought is, “Oh, how can I hold on to it?” Oh-oh, boom. It’s a whole concept of in Sanskrit and then Vedantic teaching. This is now a little Hinduism we’re going to throw in here, sorry, our Vedantism. There’s a thing called Sukha and Dukha. There’s pleasure and pain. Sukha being pleasure, Dukha being pain. In that thought, Sukha, pleasure is considered the birthplace of pain, because either we get something we want, and then we want to figure out how to hold on to it, or we get something we want, and we no longer want it. We have to figure out how to get rid of it.
Kat: [laughs] I love it. It can’t just be– it’s like pleasure against pain, against pleasure.
Liz: In the whole Vedantic ideas, how do we just return to the ground of being essentially where pleasure and pain arise and move and don’t get overly attached either? It’s a little bit of a shorthanding to that experience using open focus. I don’t know if we’ll be successful, but everybody has really been enjoying it.
Kat: I think that, to me, it creates, I guess, like I said, a more comprehensive tool, so that it’s not so focused on, you have pain cat, you have these things you’re trying to, not let rule, but saying it can be a positive thing as well in terms of embodiment. I think when we talk about your history and where you came from, and embodying and feeling emotions and things like that is something that is somewhat new for me personally, and I’m assuming a lot of people in American society. That’s what I will speak to since that’s what I’m from. Compartmentalization is a really big survival skill.
Keep your emotions, you don’t have time to feel, you don’t have time to deal with this, you just got to put it to the side and keep it moving. Survival and, not a lot of us have– unfortunately, it’s seen as a luxury to be able to feel our feelings. That has a lot of consequences for us as a society. That’s one of the things I really like about my introductory. Even though we’ve been doing it off and on for the last couple of years, I still feel very new to the whole practice is that it creates that space to feel and to be with the emotions and to be with the senses and to feel them in my body, and not to make them be anything other than the fact that they are there.
Liz: That they are happening in space. This is to me the brilliance of this whole thing. If you realize that everything is more space, even an emotion in your body, you’ve got to have a thought to trigger that. That’s a neuronal connection in your brain, it just something fires or that something reacts in the brain. Then you have this physical experience. It is a physical phenomenon, it’s all a physical phenomenon. This ridiculous separation of mind and body that happened at some point. I don’t know who we can blame for that.
Kat: Descartes.
Liz: If I ever find out.
Kat: We can blame Descartes.
Liz: All right, let’s blame Descartes.
Kat: I think so. I think therefore I am.
Liz: Yes, exactly. It’s like, “What?” There are so many thoughts that have been sparked by what you just said, that I’m struggling to stick with just one, but I just want to say yes. All that. I think the brilliance at the center of open focus is that every atom is– that the nucleus of an atom, the little cells like the nucleus with protons and neutrons at the center of the atom, and then there are these electrons that rotate around it, then atom, the nucleus of the atom is 200,000 times smaller than the diameter of that atom.
It’s mostly space, every atom, which, the tiniest particle that make up everything, or everything in our bodies, everything we see or touch, everything our senses perceive, it’s really mostly space, way more space than particle. The way we attend to it, the how of how we pay attention is we look at the particles, and we privilege them with our attention. We are not paying attention to most of what’s here, which is space. When we shift our attention in that way, when we include space and immerse ourselves in it, broaden our attention to include our senses, which are three-dimensional, they’re happening all around us.
I hear not just what’s right in front of me, I hear what’s behind me, and all around me, I can feel the air that’s everywhere. When we attend to space, we’re just getting more in touch with reality. There is all this spaciousness around all physical phenomena, all mental phenomena, all emotional phenomena, all of it. We get to it through our bodies. We get back to it at this point, through our imagination, using our bodies. It’s just so much fun. It’s like, “Oh, what can we do now? Let’s try this.”
Kat: It’s like, it’s our newest Swiss Army knife, right?
[laughter]
Liz: It’s like, “What can I do now? What’s this for? Let’s try that.” It’s so simple. At its simplest, it’s that.” If I’m looking at an object like I’m looking at my computer again, I’ll use that as an example. All I have to do is broaden my vision to include my peripheral vision that reminds me that there is space everywhere around me, then I can remember there’s space everywhere in what I’m looking at, touching, feeling, smelling, tasting, hearing.
Kat: It reminds me though, when I was a little girl, it must have been in a book or something, I saw a rendering of Pluto. I was maybe like six or seven. This is when Pluto was considered a planet, right?
Liz: Right. Exactly. Before it got downgraded. [chuckles]
Kat: The disrespect. I don’t know if it was just naturally where I was at to in my own sense of identity development. The idea of Pluto out so far in space terrified me.
Liz: Oh, God. Yes.
Kat: I think I have these deep memories of– my existential crisis, I’m almost 50 now, it’s been going on for my whole life, basically. [laughs] It started in those early days of how expansive the universe really is, and that if that is what is in between this– because this is my known universe, at the time, my little tiny town that I grew up in was my known universe, but there’s all this space, and it was terrifying. I would wake up and have these panic attacks. I used to just freak out totally because of space. I think it maybe speaks a little bit to my own personal development between six years old and almost 50, that I’m not freaking out about space anymore. I guess there has been some improvement.
[laughter]
Liz: I can relate to that. It’s because it’s all unknown. It’s like, I feel alone. It’s funny how that does shift over time. Then you’re starting to need more. It’s like, “I would really love some space between all the things. I would like that. I could use just a little time and stuff would be great.”
Kat: [laughs] Just give me a little space. Give me a little time.
Liz: That’s right.
Kat: Yes, especially because we have such a rapid-fire, highly uber-connected society now. It feels artificial now. I have to set– people who say, “I’m spending one day a week and I’m not doing this social media or whatever.” I think about in my childhood and my social media at that time was pen pals.
Liz: Exactly.
Kat: I spent all my, all my time, all my space trying to reach out. Now I’m like, “There’s too much.”
Liz: Right. Exactly. Great. That’s enough.
Kat: You’ve talked about how we can start incorporating into our day-to-day peripheral and thinking, but when you engage in a session, open focus Fridays, or some of the recordings that we have on the website, or even what we’ll start doing in this podcast, generally, how long is a session, a guided open focus session to help train your ability?
Liz: If you’re going to do a session, we’ve got some that are 10 to 12 minutes, probably 20 is more the norm. Then every once in a while, we get really into it, but maybe 15 to 20, actually, we get into it and they can be 25 and even 30. Which is very similar to what Les Femi’s recordings are as well, which by the way are available on openfocus.com. I don’t want to steer anyone away from that. If you want to dive in, dive in.
Kat: Absolutely.
Liz: Why not? You can get discs or you can stream those. 10 minutes a day. What Femi said was that if you can do two sessions a day, so that would mean two 10-minute sessions a day, that really exponentially increases the healing. If you could do three sessions a day, then you’re just on– it’s like a rocket to being able to flex your attention without any effort. You can learn it as quickly as you want to. You can be as immersed as you want to. On the website, we’ve got at present, three recordings and that’s enough. You could do that. What I try to do in open focus Fridays, we’ve done minis, so eight to 10-minute sessions, three of those in a typical open focus Friday.
Then we sometimes just go for depth and immersion, or just total rest and as much healing as we can get out of a session. That’s the variation. I think probably the shortest is 10 minutes that I’ve encountered myself and been able to create myself.
Kat: When he was talking about, if you can do it twice a day or three times a day, is it just like, fit it in where you can get it in? Is it ideal for you to do in the morning or before sleep? Is there a particular time that it’s most beneficial or anytime is fine?
Liz: Anytime is fine. Always when you’re doing something new, if you can tack it on to something else, that’s really beneficial. Just if you’re the kind of person who can just schedule it on your calendar, that’s great, schedule it and then do it and then have everything prepared so you just can, but tagging it onto something else. A lot of times people will do it as part of their morning routine. Some people do it as a break in the mid-day because that’s what works for them. There’s that whole thing about anything you do first thing in the morning, you’re likely to keep doing, but that’s followed by the caveat of, you can only do one thing first thing in the morning.
[laughter]
Kat: I don’t know. I do 25. I have a long list.
[laughter]
Liz: Yes, exactly. Some people have been successful at creating a whole morning ritual. I know I work at that all the time. It’s like, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this.” Then we have the kids have time and then that’s completely shot. It’s like, “We’re doing this now. Okay?”
Kat: The road to hell, right?
Liz: The road to needing to practice open focus every minute. That is what happens. It’s like, “How can I do this in this moment? How can I find a tiny space in time?” The thing that’s so cool about this is that you find the time to practice and then you start looking for the time to use it. How can I take this little moment? Literally a pause in a conversation, breathe, and notice the space. It’s such a tiny shift and it makes such a big difference. This is such a subtle practice. It really can be done anywhere. Yes, the more time you spend, the more quickly you heal. Unlike other forms of meditation or mindfulness, if your mind wanders, excellent. Expand your attention to include those thoughts.
You don’t have to push anything away. Just welcome them into the space. You can include all your thoughts and all your physical phenomena in open focus. Unlike forms of meditation I’ve studied, where it’s like thinking, it’s like, you’ve been labeled thinking now, go. I’ve never been able to successfully do that without feeling like I’m shaming my thoughts a little bit. Thinking, we’re not thinking here, we’re meditating. I know that’s not quite the case. I know I’ve had that wrong from the beginning. As you practice and get better at this, you can expect, you’ll have small and vague experiences in the beginning.
You may get into theta and be tempted to fall asleep into delta, but that’s okay. Keep going. Your imagination will get super good at this and your experiences will deepen as you practice. They will become something that you can rely on. That refuge really does get built. As you practice and the experiences deepen, you start practicing with your eyes half closed or open. That aids the transfer to your daily life. It happens as quickly as you want it to happen. Femi used to use an interval timer, which now you can get on your phone, right? There are lots of interval timers out there, which go off every 15 minutes.
He would ask himself, how am I now paying attention? Have I gotten narrow and objective? Is it the right match for what I’m doing? Not like, “Oh, now I have to do this.” No, but how am I now paying attention? I’m going to pay attention to how I’m paying attention.
Kat: I know when you first told me about that, where he was like, he had a timer on, my visualization of that was that he had an egg timer go off. He’s like, “Now I must do an open focus session.”
[laughter]
I was like, “That’s hardcore.” Every 15 minutes? Oh my gosh. It makes more sense that it was really just him going like, “Let me check in and see. Am I aligned?”
Liz: What am I doing right now? Can I just broaden my peripheral vision? Mid-conversation, mid-something else. Am I getting that narrow thing happening or not? I don’t need to be building stress in my body right now. I’m not running into a burning building to carry out the children. I’m not, most days. On a good day, there are no burning buildings. There are never any burning buildings in my life. Really. What emergencies do I have? What life-or-death situation have I encountered lately? Then why am I acting like they all are?
Kat: Run from the tiger. Keep running from the tiger, Liz.
Liz: That’s right.
Kat: Keep running from the tiger.
Liz: Tiger’s not going to get me.
Kat: All right. I think we explored it, your history and how you discovered it, and the practice. I think we’re good. We’re just ready. We’ll dive in next week to an actual session and go from there.
Liz: I’ve certainly gleaned a lot of topics from open focus Friday, so we can pick one of those and we’ll pick one of those and talk about it just very briefly. The bulk of the podcasts going forward will be an actual open focus session but contextualized in a real-life experience.
Kat: For this season and then the next season,-
Liz: For this season. Exactly.
Kat: -we’re going to go in a completely different direction.
Liz: We’re going to go completely insane next season. Taking as our broader topic, trance and its uses.
[laughter]
Kat: All right, Liz. Thank you very much. I learned a lot.
Liz: Yes. Good. Thank you. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.
Kat: Are you interested in learning how you can incorporate open focus into your daily life? Consider joining us for our weekly open focus Friday group session at 12:00 PM Pacific on Zoom. Registration details and more information on open focus are available on our website, www.beyondresilience.io.
[music]
Thanks for listening to Beyond Resilience, which is hosted by Liz Williams and Kat Oak and produced by Liminal Nation. Neither Liz nor Kat are trained medical or mental health professionals, and all of the ideas, techniques, resources, and tools we explore in the podcast reflect our own personal perspectives. Special thank you to Stephen Carey for our musical ambiance and to John Hughes and Paramount Pictures for the excerpted audio of the preeminent philosopher of late-stage capitalism, Ferris Bueller. All rights where appropriate are reserved. Until next time, stay open.