why do we ignore?

It is something quite extraordinary to give anything your full attention. We give full attention to the things that matter most to us… our children, our work, our finances, our partner, our friendships, our artistic/creative/meaningful pursuits, our spirituality… What about: our selves, our bodies, our thoughts, our stories? There is a good chance that you give your full attention to at least one thing in these two lists… but I am guessing that there are also at least three or four (or more) that you do not. And I am also guessing that a good percentage of what you don’t give your full attention centers around… you..

Why do we ignore? Maybe more importantly, why do we ignore ourselves?

Sometimes ignoring is a mechanism or by-product of finite attention. We can only give our presence to a limited number of things in a day or an hour or a minute. We cannot give our full attention to our kids and our finances at the same time. One needs to take precedent for any given period. This is why, if we have managed to do so, carving out quality time for anything that is important enables us to actually tend to it. But how often do we make quality time and space to attend to our experience?

I thought for a long time that my yoga and meditation practice was “time for me”… but after further inquiry I discovered that these practices were actually a guise for further ignoring myself. How can this be so?

What I have encountered as I dig deeper and really encourage myself to slow down and stay with my experience through contemplative movement, breath and sitting practice is that I was most often simply going through the motions. Frequently, I was taking in instructions from others without allowing those instructions to land inside my actual lived and felt experience. I could mimic the instructions I was given very well, but what of it was actually helping me to understand and listen to myself?

So much of my work in recent years has been a process of looking more acutely at what I am doing and feeling and then asking if what I experience is the same as what I have been told by others to do or feel. Often what I am told and what I experience are very different; at times my internal awareness of a pose, a movement, a breath is in full contrast to the instructions or stories that have been shared with me.

I do see how it is much harder to give my full attention to myself, it is not always comfortable or easy. It can often feel lighter and simpler to take in what is shared or given by others and lay that paradigm over my lived circumstances without looking deeper. But when I do look again, there is a wisdom there that is not found in other people’s words or directions. There is, instead, insight.

Instead of using yoga and contemplative practice as a way of ignoring and covering over my actual experience, I now use it to dive further in.

We ignore for many reasons. I mentioned finite attention, finite time. But there is also the truth that sometimes we cannot allow ourselves to feel deeply, it is too painful. Or it is too uncomfortable. Or lonely. Or there is too much uncertainty at first and we prefer to be sure and stand on solid ground. All of these reasons are ok until they are not. There is a time and place to ignore and this allows us space for whatever we need the space to hold. And then, when we are ready… there is absolutely a time when ignoring prevents us from knowing ourselves. It prevents us from seeing ourselves clearly or looking more deeply at our patterns, our thoughts, our blind spots.

We often can sense when we are ignoring something that rather needs our attention. Sometime life forces us to come face to face with it, or else… we ignore until we trip and fall and land in the mess we had hidden away in a corner. We are then covered in it. And what a blessing it is for life to offer us this opportunity! But even when we haven’t yet come to this point, we can change direction when we notice our tendency to look away. We can take a step in and look closely at what is uncomfortable or painful or boring… and simply be with it.

Sometimes that pause, the allowing… sometimes this is all it takes for a transformation to begin.