Attention is NOT just in your head.
In the Feldenkrais Method®, we understand that attending — what most people call “attention” — isn’t some disembodied, abstract, mental thing happening only in your brain. In this video, Attention Is Something You Do — Not Something You Have, I explain that attending is not separate from your body. It is a movement, an action, a physical process. You do it. With yourself– your whole self.
Video timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:39 – Attending is not separate from your body
01:02 – Try this for yourself
03:36 – How you move influences how you attend and vice versa
06:13 – Why you want to refine the process
Video Transcript
What if attention isn’t something you have or pay… but something you do?
That subtle shift might change everything about how you experience yourself and your life.
Hey there. If you saw the previous video I shared about inclusive attending — welcome back to this rich and amazing topic! And if you didn’t, that’s totally fine — I’ll link to it if you want to check it out later.
This one stands on its own, but it builds on a core idea:
That attending — what most people call “attention” – isn’t some disembodied, abstract, mental thing happening only in your brain. It’s not separate from your body.
Attending is a movement, an action.
It’s a physical process. You do it. With yourself – your whole self.
Think about how you move your arm. It’s not some nebulous idea that lives only in your head—
you organize yourself to do it.
Muscles coordinate, joints respond, breath subtly adjusts – your whole system participates – often without your conscious awareness.
Attending works the same way.
When your attending shifts – say, from listening to me to a sound outside, a sensation in your body or a passing thought – there’s a physical process unfolding. Tiny changes in your musculature, your posture, the orientation of your eyes or head… Your breath might change.
It’s not dramatic, but it is happening. These micro-adjustments are part of how your nervous system organizes movement… And they’re part of how you organize attention as well. So attention isn’t just something happening on high in your brain – it’s enacted. It’s embodied. And like any movement, attending can be:
Habitual… or intentional.
Constrained… or fluid.
Contracted… or expansive.
You may have noticed I often use the word attending instead of attention. That’s on purpose. Because it really is an action, not a thing or an object like a “prescription” or a “contraption”. It’s something you do. It’s a process. An activity. Something you participate in with your whole self.
Using a verb – “attending” makes that clearer.
Try this now to see for yourself:
Attend to your left hand.
Not to analyze it or do anything — just include it, clearly, in your field of awareness.
Then shift, and attend to your right foot.
Now to the space behind you.
And then back here, to the sound of my voice.
Can you sense what changed as you attended to one area and then moved on to another? Take a moment and go through those again, pausing at each place.
Can you sense any subtle shifts that accompany those changes?
A change in the tone of the muscles of your eyes?
Or wee little changes in some muscles of your neck or jaw?
Sense – actually drop into your sensations and notice your eyes when you go from attending to your right foot to the space behind you… Maybe your breathing altered slightly — or your sense of contact with the ground? These aren’t things we usually pay attention to. But they’re part of how we pay attention.
These are movements – small, often imperceptible – that reflect how your nervous system, indeed your entire being, is orienting itself. It’s not abstract. It’s concrete. Embodied. And with practice, you can begin to sense and refine this process. Just like you would with any movement.
And when you become more aware of that process, you gain more freedom in how you participate in your own experience.
Now, just like I’d mentioned in the last video, none of this is a one-way street. You see, how you organize yourself for movement influences how you attend, just as how you attend influences how you move. They are both interacting and influencing each other in a beautiful, complex, non-linear dance.
Better musculoskeletal organization (meaning postures and movements) can lead to better attending. And better attending can lead to better postures and movement.
Next week, I’ll be sharing a gentle, guided audio practice to help you explore this more directly — in a deeper, more spacious way… To feel attending as motion, and notice what that opens up for you. It’ll be free and easy to access. I’ll come back and post the link here once it’s live (if you’re watching this after it’s dropped), or you can head over to my site to sign up and get notified when it’s ready.
If this got you curious – or if it helped you feel something new – feel free to like the video. It lets me know this kind of content is landing for you. And if it didn’t land? That’s useful too.
Let me know in the comments what you’d like more of or less of. I do listen – this is a co-created process.
So again – attention isn’t just in your head. Attending is something you enact with your whole self. And when you begin to sense how you’re attending – how attending is action – you open up a whole new world of choice, presence, and ease.
Great having you hang out here with me!
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Until next time…
Have fun!
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