I'd love to hear your thoughts in this podcast
You can read more about the Embodied Artist Course here. We start on October 26th.
https://www.lorenlewiscole.com/pages/the-embodied-artist
I've been reading the work of mystic Simone Wiel this weekend. She writes profusely about the weight of attention on our spiritual experience.
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
I can't put down this idea of 'unmixed' attention.
As a person with an interest driven brain that our strange culture calls ADHD, I find myself battling with my multi layered attentional networks every moment. The only rest I experience is after I've done intense exercise, am in some kind of intensely stimulating, slightly dangerous experience, with my darling son, or making my work. Mostly, in the day to day, I have to will myself to stay with things that bore me. Most of what people call life bores me.
I don't care what some person I've never met thinks about something I've never done, or politics, or anything that I can't actually feel in my body. I often feel the weight of my challenging brain and my inability not to do things I desire to do. It actually hurts my body not to do something I desire to do or create. It also feels painful to be bored and in any environment I find predictable and boring. It's a challenge, if you are on any spectrum you'll get me entirely.
Yet, I also have this incredible gift called hyper focus. it feels like a portal to another dimension where the holy lives, and I get to converse with this holy.
The place I've most found myself in this pure state of attention my entire life is in creative play. Using my hands, working things out. it's a dimension that exists with different laws, I don't get tired even if I don't have sufficient sleep.
Last night I was observing my energy and lightness in my body at 10PM after a whole day in the studio, working on things that make me squeal with delight.
It is focus that keeps the channel open. Diluted focus makes my brain hurt, and not being able to focus makes me feel dizzy, and bad about myself, fractured and disconnected, as if I can't catch the pulse I need to and organise my energy in my body.
In this way, I wholeheartedly agree with Wiel. Our undiluted attention is sacred, and it is prayer.
Art is prayer and it is gratitude. Prayer is not to get what we want, it's actually to give thanks for this life by praising being a human being.
This undiluted attention redirects the energy of worry into beauty and hope, and it's what human beings have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.
I hope you can nurture the sacred place in you where your attention becomes prayer. That is the place to follow, to take seriously. We have been given clues in this life, and the place we naturally pay the deepest and most subtle, absorbing of attention, is the place where the holy lives in you.
In this way, artistic practice is prayer.
