Attention and ER (from ATP02: A Trackless Path (retreat) 01:07:05.00 - 01:10:42.00)(download into iTunes)
There's one other piece I want to touch on here. I even made notes.
Bringing attention to precisely what we're experiencing in each moment does three things ... One thing it does, it frees us from emotional reaction. Emotional reaction is always dependent on a sense of past and future, hopes and fears about the future, disappointments and longings or aversions from the past. When we bring attention to precisely what we're experiencing now, the past and the future disappear, and so we're free from emotional reaction and can relate to what is arrising right now.
Second thing is that bringing attention to the present moment brings the freedom to act. If you look at situations in which you couldn't act, you're inhibited in some way, I think you'll see that there was always some sense of the past or the future again. But when you're right in the present moment, by bringing it down to that you make it, in a certain sense, so small that you can actually do anything with it. It's quite interesting, that.
This technique is used in psychotherapy sometimes. Bringing the attention closer and closer to what people are experiencing they discover a freedeom in that because they're letting go of all the associations, fears, consequences and so forth.
