I love this article on Awareness that I received from Gina Lake this week. It describes a simple and superb way of switching off and becoming quiet inside, one of the foundational aspects of what I teach when it comes to conscious sexuality:

NOTICING VS. GIVING ATTENTION

Noticing and giving attention to something are very different. When you notice your thoughts, you have stepped away from them and are no longer so identified with them. Noticing creates a space between your thoughts and you. When you notice something, you become aligned with the Noticer, or the real you. And that provides an opportunity to choose whether you’ll give those thoughts further attention or not. When you simply notice something, you are aligned with your real Self, or Essence. This Self is sometimes called Awareness. You are the awareness that is aware of, or notices, everything, including thoughts. You are not your thoughts or the thinker; your thoughts and the sense that you are the thinker is the egoic, or false, self.

Unlike noticing, attention is more like a spotlight that focuses on something to the exclusion of everything else and gets lost in it. When we give our attention to a thought, we become identified with it if our attention lands there long enough. Whatever we give our attention to becomes magnified in our awareness. Noticing, on the other hand, is more like a moving spotlight that doesn’t land in one spot. When we are aligned with Essence and noticing what we are experiencing, we are noticing lots of things: Our awareness moves from a thought, to a sensation, to an object, to a sound, to an intuition, to another sound, to a feeling, to a knowing, to another object, and so on. Our awareness jumps around so quickly from one thing to the next that we barely realize all the things it’s taking in. Noticing is what the real you, or Essence, does as it experiences life. It gives attention to what needs attention in order to function, and then it moves on. The state of ego-identification, however, is a state of giving attention to thoughts or feelings more than the other aspects of experience—and believing them. This ends up coloring our experience of life and interfering with experiencing it purely.

Continued HERE>