Sacred Attention as Reciprocity

Join host Rohini Walker into an exploration of sacred attention as a valuable resource and life-affirming offering. In a world consumed by distraction and speed, our attention has become commodified, fragmented, and pulled in countless directions. What happens when we reclaim it? When we slow down enough to offer our presence as an act of devotion, of relationship, of reciprocity?

Rohini explores the idea that attention is not only a sacred resource but also a portal - into connection, aliveness, and the animist understanding that we are in relationship with all things. She unpacks the somatic effects of fragmented attention, the difference between “getting” and “receiving,” and how the simple and foundational  act of pausing can repair and reweave the threads of our inner and outer worlds.

This episode is an invitation to consciously wield your attention with care and reverence, and to experience how doing so can open up space for healing, integration, and transformation. It’s about returning to a more relational, soulful way of being, where our presence is both an offering and a receiving.

Find out more about the online Sunday drop-in The Light Gets In, where you're invited to reclaim your energy and attention with somatic experiencing practice, nervous system tending and meditation.

This episode pairs well with a recent piece Rohini wrote for her Substack newsletter, Let Yourself Feel Dysregulated (without becoming dysregulated). Read it for free here.

If this episode resonates, please consider leaving a rating or review, it helps more folks find new podcasts like Root + Rise. 

Experience Rohini's Substack newsletter, The Immateria: https://theimmateria.substack.com/subscribe

Find out more about Rohini's work in the world at rohiniwalker.com

Connect with Rohini by emailing her at rohini@rohiniwalker.com or by messaging her on the Substack app here.

Intro & Outro Music: Coniferous Forest by orangery on Pixabay.

Transcript

Welcome Root + Rise, the space where we slow down and tune in to the deeper, vaster rhythms that govern and direct life, a space where we walk towards reclaiming ourselves from the disempowering assaults on the great mystery of this human experience from the dying, dominant culture. I’m your host, Rohini Walker. 

Before we begin the episode, I invite you to take a quick pause, to breathe deep into your belly and exhale with a sigh. Even if you’re doing something else like driving or walking or making a meal, just take a moment to pause, to breathe and drop into your body, into the lived experience of this moment. Invite yourself to land here now.

So today, I want to talk about something that I’ll probably be bringing up in future episodes, and approaching from different angles, and that is  the topic of our attention, arguably our most vital resource, alongside our time. Attention is something that we’re routinely paying with in our digital and information age. It’s something that’s always and ever more loudly demanded from us, to the point where we’re now living in the so-called attention economy.

And there’s so very much to say on that, which, like I said, will probably be spoken to in future episodes. What I wanted to invoke and talk about today is sacred attention, and the offering of it as an act of reciprocity.

So what do I mean by sacred attention? Well, on one level, sacred attention means being fully present with someone or something in a way that’s respectful, intentional, and heartfelt. It’s treating that moment, whether it’s a conversation, a task, or time in Nature, as something meaningful and worthy of our care and attention. In essence, sacred attention is presence.

On a deeper level, I’ve come to understand the cultivation and offering of sacred attention as a portal into an animist experience of the world. And I go into more detail on what animism is in episode 2. But a very brief summary for now, animism is about being in relationship with our bodies, our experiences, with our lives, with other beings, both human and more-than-human, with Nature and the world. And from this perspective, it requires a certain slowness from us, a willingness to open ourselves up fully to the now - or if not fully, if we’re not able to offer our full presence and attention in the moment, a willingness to offer as much of our attention and presence as we can. To make a silent commitment to that. It’s a willingness to call our attention back from unconscious and unnecessary interfacing with the screen and with scrolling, that devours so much of our time, another valuable resource, and to invest both time and attention into what’s here now, into our lived experience. Our attention, like I said, is an extremely valuable and powerful resource which we’d do well to offer and distribute wisely and with care. Just how valuable our attention is, is only too obvious when we consider all of the endless ways in which it’s grasped and grabbed for in our modern age. Our attention is valuable currency. What is that pointing to? Could it be to the great taboo of the materialist worldview, and to the essential truth  that esoteric wisdom traditions from around the world have pointed to throughout the ages, that we are expressions of, and inseparable from Source, from the Divine, from the Ineffable, from the Great Mystery, whatever name or label you prefer to give it. We are that, we are expressions of that. Which means that we already contain and we already have the potential to embody all of the treasures that we seek in the external world, and that the external world is a channel and a mirror, reflecting back to us those things within us that we consciously and unconsciously identify with and hold to be true, individually and collectively. And it’s our attention that enlivens and activates unmanifest potential into form and experience, as in the observer effect in quantum physics. It’s our attention that feeds and nourishes what’s here. Our attention is sacred because it has the potential to be a creative, life-affirming, life-sustaining resource. So what are we feeding and affirming with it? What is the quality of the attention that we’re offering?  We know this with early childhood development, for instance. An infant can have all of their basic physical needs met like food and shelter. But if the appropriate forms of love and emotional nurturing are absent, which are delivered via loving attention and presence, the child will suffer from neglect, and is likely to experience growth and developmental issues, complex PTSD, and immune response problems, among a host of other things.

Our attention is sacred. Who or what we’re offering it to, as well as the quality of it, can be a creative or destructive process. What are we creating, and what are we destroying with our attention?

Another thing I’d like to speak to is the systematic, systemic fragmentation of our sacred attention. Like almost every one of us alive in the world today - my attention regularly becomes fragmented, and I don’t even use social media anymore. Just having a cellphone is enough. What I’ve started noticing with more and more clarity is how my fragmented attention feels in the body, and how my nervous system responds. My breathing becomes shallower, and there’s a general experience of a sort of narrowing in my system, a felt-sense of scarcity and an underlying hum of urgency. When my attention is fragmented it feels far from sacred. In fact, it doesn’t feel like it’s even mine, and that it’s being siphoned away from me without my consent. 

I feel like I’m embodying scarcity. I’m not in relationship with anyone or anything around me, let alone myself. Instead, everything starts to feel transactional and urgent. What can I get from this and how quickly? Because my attention is fragmented, it’s scarce so unless I can get a quick dopamine hit from something to soothe that experience, I’m not interested. 

And if there’s one thing about offering sacred attention, it’s that it’s not the place to get our quick fix dopamine hits. The practice of allowing myself to feel the rupture of my fragmented attention in my body and system has organically guided me into repairing that rupture. Rupture and repair, a necessary and regenerative back and forth that gives the human experience depth and dimensionality. 

But we don’t want to get stuck in the rupture. And getting stuck in the rupture is something that has been increasingly normalized in our dominant culture and in our nervous systems. The culture of this is just the way things are. When in truth, it really doesn’t have to be. We’ve all just made unconscious agreements, and we’ve been forced the make these unconscious agreements, that create this dehumanizing consensus reality and experience. In truth, we all deserve way, way better. For me, the repair arrives with the radical practice of pausing, of taking a breath, of softening into the present moment. With breathing my energy and attention back into myself, and remembering that I get to choose where to offer my attention, which is a powerful resource that requires me to wield it with care, and with wisdom and responsibility. When I pause, and breathe, and allow my shoulders to drop, and call my energy and attention back, my body and system settle and open into the felt-sense experience of my innate abundance, and the innate abundance of the present moment, via the deepening of my breath. My experience of the world broadens and opens from being a transactional one, into a slower, relational one. The need to self-soothe with quick-fix dopamine hits goes away, as does any false sense of urgency that my nervous system was orienting to. When we consciously and intentionally reclaim and redirect our sacred attention in this way, it opens us up to viscerally feeling the aliveness of the present moment. And in this opening, gradually, something profound has the potential to happen, as our nervous systems slowly develop the capacity, the spaciousness, to receive the abundant aliveness of the present moment. We begin to feel and know that we’re participating in something vast and mysterious, something that’s both deeply personal and transcendently transpersonal. Life starts to shimmer and glimmer with meaning. And I’m not exaggerating when I say that it has the potential to be a psychedelic experience, especially when we think of the etymology of the word psychedelic, which means soul-revealing or soul-manifesting. The Anima Mundi, or the World-Soul is revealed. And it is so deeply, vibrantly alive waiting for our sacred attention so that it can commune with us and be in relationship with us. And we don’t have to worry about driving or operating heavy machinery with this sort of substance-free psychedelic experience. We’re so deeply present, and our attention is completely here, without any fragmentation. And this is also a portal into accessing the flow state.

We’re receiving the present moment fully, or as fully as we’re able to,  free from distraction. Free from any compulsion to get anything. 

Feel into the difference between receiving and getting. For me, it’s that same sensation of openness and of spaciousness when I’m receiving, of feeling and being with the experience free from any sense of lack or urgency. And with getting, I feel that same narrowing, that lack of breath, and presence. That somatic experience of scarcity. It’s not about better or worse, but about allowing ourselves to feel into the experience of each state, to feel into the difference between the two. And this is a way to become more embodied, and to make our experiences more conscious, so that we can exercise more choice and agency. Your somatic experience of receiving and getting may be different from mine and I’d love to know what you felt and what you feel. So back to this receiving of the psychedelic, soul- revealing aliveness of the present moment, of being in relationship with it, and experiencing ourselves as participants in a vaster unfolding, when I’m able to drop into this, there’s a natural, uncontrived arising of deep, humbling gratitude for everything that’s here, including the unpleasant or undesirable or uncomfortable aspects of myself and my life. The parts of myself and my life that I judge or negate and push into the shadows. I’m able to hold space for it all, including these heavier experiences of my humanity. I’m able to witness it holistically, as a whole, without the fragmentation and compartmentalization of judgment and rejection. And my unscattered attention feels simultaneously like it’s in reciprocal relationship with, and inseparable from, this vaster unfolding of the abundant present moment. My attention, when it’s offered in this way, is an act of reciprocity, as part of a back and forth, an inhale and an exhale, each one nourishing and arising from the other to create the complete and unbroken cycle of the breath. In return for experiencing the glimmering aliveness of the present moment, I offer my sacred attention, and in return, the world reveals more of itself, of its soul, of its numinosity to me, and so it goes. The observer and the observed in a dance of reciprocity, seemingly separate in order to experience each other but in essence, inseparable. This also organically creates the space for alchemy, for transformation and transmutation to take place. Those parts of my life and myself that I had been rejecting, and shaming, and judging and pushing into the shadows, like neglected children, they get to be seen and restored back into the whole. They had been existing in a state of unbelonging, as contractions in my psyche, in my nervous system, in my body and my energy field. And now, in their own time, they have the space and sunlight of my sacred attention to sigh open, to release, to resolve and transmute. In their own time, they get to be integrated, without any fixing or forcing from me. Any doing that I do comes from a place of listening, of feeling and responding, from caring and tending, rather than from controlling, and dominating and fixing. I’m creating an internal culture of power with rather than power over.

Ultimately, my responsibility is to cultivate and strengthen my capacity for offering my sacred attention, for carving out big and small pockets of time in my daily life to do this, until eventually, this nature-aligned, life-affirming experience becomes normalized in my system. And those moments when my attention will inevitably be fragmented become less habitual and reflexive, and start to feel so unnatural in my system that the repair of that rupture of fragmentation begins to take place organically and almost effortlessly. Self reclamation becomes a dynamic back-and-forth process where each repairing return becomes an opportunity to deepen and expand my capacity for offering sacred attention as an act of reciprocity. This is not about perfection. It’s about curious, compassionate and playful exploration with this resource of our attention, and ultimately of feeling and understanding just how powerful and sacred it is. That’s all from me for today. Thank you for listening, thank you for your sacred attention - I truly appreciate it. If you’re interested in deepening into this sort of work, I facilitate an online drop-in on Sundays called The Light Gets In at 10am Pacific. The link to find out more and register is in the show notes. I’d love to hear from you if you have reflections, questions and insights - the links to connect with me are all in the show notes.

And if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you took a moment to leave a rating or a review - it also makes it easier for others to find the podcast, which I’d hugely appreciate as a new podcaster!

As we close, I invite you to tune back into the body. Without engaging the thinking mind, let the wisdom of your system release anything that you’ve listened to in this episode that’s not correct and not resonant for you. And allow what is resonant for you to settle, to root, to be remembered - because it’s all already within you.

Until next time.