Attention, we can say, is a form of energy. When we put our attention on people, or things, or animals, or ideas, we are feeding those things energy. And just like adopting a stray animal that wanders onto your back porch, once you offer it food (attention) it will return for more. So it is with the elements of our life. When we try to change our behavior, sometimes those things we are now ignoring scream at us for attention (and the energetic food it brings). Depending on what we are trying to accomplish, certain aspects of our life might need to be gently weaned, but some will have to be starved (but we’ll need the inner strength to hold firm). (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)
John: In the next dream I’ve gone over to an apartment complex to talk to someone who lives there. I notice a cat that has wandered over to this area from the home area that is near where I’m at, or where I come from. It’s not my cat though. And the cat is going into the apartment of a very friendly woman who is winning the cat’s trust.
So when I go back to where I am from, I suddenly see this cat again. And the woman who owns the cat is someone that I start talking to, who has just been taking this cat for granted, because she feeds the cat, the cat comes to her, she owns the cat so to speak, she thinks that everything is okay.
She’s not aware, she just feels the cat is bonded to her, and it’s not within the fabric of her way of looking at things to think that this cat could have a precocious nature based upon her failure to be as attentive to the cat as someone else can be.
So when I tell her about what I saw earlier, she is shocked. She would never have guessed that such a thing was possible. In other words, the cat should be paying attention to her and staying away from strangers. Cats are kind of like that.
The meaning is that I am feeling stigmatized and estranged, energetically, from things in my life that I have not been attentive to; attentive to like I had been in the past. Now the question is, when you feel like that, does that mean that you should get more attentive to it again? Not necessarily.
Maybe it’s stuff that has to be let go, but you don’t let go of it graciously because somehow or another your mind flashes back on it as something that is in your life and it has this malingering quality to it, or stigma.
This dream is indicating that when I am like this the connective focus I have, that I might be able to open or connect to differently, gets blurred by this drain; affected by something that had been connected, but isn’t as connected. And my attention has gone off and has lost the kind of connection that it used to be – and it can’t get it back. It can even leave you in a state of despair.
The purpose of the dream is to cause me to recognize that because we are connected to the environment we are in, that wherever we place our attention there is an effect. If we let go of our attention, or take for granted that a flow will continue when we unplug from how it is that we have been focused, that is when connections are subject to going off in their own way.
What is really hard on the heart, and my state of well being, is when I lose a focus and attention, and the heartfulness, thinking that everything can continue on its own. When I glance back at things from time to time that is when I get really shocked as I see myself as having lost a flow.
Even if it is something that needs to fall away, it is still a blow when I haven’t replaced it with some other activity that I deem to be more important. Even if I have replaced it with another focus and attention I deem more important, but if I don’t know where that is going I have the same heavy-hearted bewilderment.
We do that right? You notice that? That’s a type of despair. What is missing is a knowingness that is joyful. What has happened is I have gotten divided against my higher self and don’t know how to change that motif. By divided it means it’s not open to me. It may be working, it may be in the bones, but it isn’t out there in such a way so that it sweeps you up. You just feel that it is steady pressure or something.
And when you feel it like this it’s like being lost or stigmatized, both at the same time. But is it really lost and stigmatized? It’s just that the other hasn’t arrived. Something is askew. In other words, business as usual can’t be business as usual anymore. In fact, it won’t even flow. You can’t even make it flow.
To download this file, Right Click (for PCs) or Control Click (for Macs) and Save: Lost Affection
