Dear beloved reader,
What is your attention attuned to these days?
What are you noticing that you notice?
A couple of weeks ago, I kept seeing fairies.
Not actual fairies themselves (disappointinglyor perhaps, yet!), but references to fairies. I had a conversation with a friend about more-than-human magic and fairies came up. Another friend held a solstice day festival with her children (yes, I have a lot of friends on the fairy wavelength - get yourself friends who talk about fairies :). Then Daphne and I did some fairy welcoming activities in our indoor garden as part of my application ritual for the We Will Dance With Mountains course-festival. A few days later I found out it was International Fairy Day. And on and on. Fairies were popping up everywhere.
“I feel like there’s a name for this phenomenon,” I told my friend.
Upon doing some research, the closest thing I could find is the Baader-Meinhof phenomemon, also known as frequency bias or frequency illusion, which is described on Wikipedia as a “cognitive bias referring to the tendency to notice something more often after noticing it for the first time, leading to the belief that it has an increased frequency of occurrence.”
But that’s not it, I thought as I read about it.
I don’t think I am seeing something more than it actually exists. It is not a false belief in its increased frequency - it is a revealing of its already present frequency. It is more like it was already present in my day-to-day experience, and my attention has just become more attuned to it.
Furthermore, what I am talking about is more than just about frequency.
Another example: I was chatting with another friend about the shade of bougainvilla she was wanting to plant at her house. Then suddenly, I became deeply attuned to the bougainvilla around me (there is a lot of it in these parts) and the many shades there are. They were always there, they are already frequent, I notice them, but I had not been paying close attention to the wide range of color. After this conversation, my attention became attuned to them and the depth of the range of color in a way it had not been before.
As I was trying to find a way to describe this phenomenon or experience, I came up with attention attunment.
Attention attunement is when something comes into your awareness, and your attention becomes attuned to it in such a way that you notice it more than you did before. It is not an illusion or delusion. It is an increased awareness and sensitivity. It is an opening to what was already present but you that you had been previously less aware of. It is bringing something into sharper focus that was already there.
Attention attunement is also about noticing what we notice, and why. And perhaps, even delighting in this noticing, as I have been delighting in the wide spectrum of shades of bougainvilla as I go about my days.
Have you heard a term to describe this phenomen? Or have a better idea to describe it? I would love to hear it :)
Attention attunement is remnicent of or aligned with the Emergent Strategy (adrienne maree brown, 2017) principle: what you pay attention to grows. Where we place our attention is what we are going to see more of in the world. So:
What do you want to see grow?
What do you want to attune to?
I have learned a lot through meditation practice, but perhaps one of the most liberating lessons is that we can choose what we pay attention to. We can choose to focus on the breath. We can choose to focus on the sensation in our body, the sunset, the bougainvilla, the flower growing in the crack on the sidewalk. We can’t always choose what is happening, but we can choose where we put our attention, where we focus, and there is so much liberation in that.
Which isn’t to say this is easy. There is so much in the world competing for our attention at all times (including this post! Thank you for putting your precious attention here :). It can be a struggle to make this choice. And yet, the choice is there, and it is a practice to actively choose where we put our attention. That, in a nutshell, is what meditation practice is, and how we can practice when we are not just practicing formal sitting meditation.
On a related note, my dear friend Yumi Sakugawa just released a new edition of her fantastic text, There Is No Right Way to Meditate. I highly recommend adding it to your collection!
I am always attuned to dreams, and since our community dreamwork article was published last week, I have been noticing other items about dreams, which has been exciting. Two standouts from this week:
This Time magazine article on how climate change is changing how we dream (thank you to my friend AD for sharing it with me!).
This week’s For the Wild podcast interview with Toko-pa Turner on Dreams of Belonging.
I recommend checking them both out. Also, related to climate change, I highly recommend the article on Earth Justice and Earth Holding that two of my dear dharma sisters, Chaya Ocampo Go and Maira Fernandes Melo wrote.
Have you had any dreams about climate change? I welcome you to post them (or any others!) on the dream thread earlier this week. I plan to keep posting a weekly dream thread as a little experiment, so I plant the seed with you that if you have a dream you want to share, to please hop over there :)
Wishing you sweet dreams as we head into a new week :)
Stephanie
PS - there is still time to sign up for the WWDWM Vunja! course if you want to join us! We begin in September. I am sure I will be writing a lot about it, directly or indirectly.