Tonight's talk is on using attention to regulate anxiety and fear and boy have I been using that this week?

Today I meditated for two hours just using some of these tools.

So there's two settings for attention.

One or two forms of attention, I should say.

One form of attention it determines on what you focus your awareness on and whether you focus your

awareness at all. So that form of attention can be either really spot lit or can be like a floodlight.

You can focus in on an object and separate it from everything around you where you can expand your awareness and take in an entire scene.

When you go into a party and there are people dancing, there's music, there's lights, you probably first become aware of the Gestalt, the setting, the context, the whole environment. the

whole environment and that's your right hemisphere and that's your right hemisphere and that's your flood lights

like in the theater where you see the entire stage.

And then you probably go into your spotlight

and look for specific individuals

that you might want to talk to or interact with.

And that's left hemispheric and that is something that emphasizes and makes you more

reactive to specific stimuli or specific objects or people or places.

That's one way that attention works. It can focus attention or it can expand awareness to an entire situation and essentially not contract awareness. And the other way that attention works is it kind of mixes

how much what's called interreception how much you feel your body, how much you see the world around you,

and how much you hear your thoughts.

So that's interoception, exteroception, and cognition.

And in most of our lives, we are balancing those three factors.

Now, the first kind when we're focusing attention,

that determines how much emphasis we give upon a thought or a person or an object.

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