Pay attention to what you pay attention to and document it.
This sounds simple, but trust me, it’s one of the most profound ways to mentally bring you home to yourself and start to align with your inner compass, InnSæi and intuition.
InnSæi is the Icelandic word for intuition, and in my work (with many great people) we’ve opened it up for its threefold meaning, which you wouldn’t find in the dictionary.
InnSæi means:
The sea within
To see within
To see from the inside out
To see within means to see inside yourself, to become self-aware. You become more able to know your biases, fears, prejudices, wishful thinking and discern those from good intuitions.
Also, with more self-awareness you can become more able to put yourself into other people’s shoes, relate to other people and the world around you.
Self-awareness and attention are keys to our ability to harness and empower our intuition and InnSæi.
This is important, because InnSæi and intuition are fundamental to our intelligence. We need good intuition to reason well. Without intuition there wouldn’t be much innovation. Our wellbeing, agency and energy depends on our connection within, to our InnSæi and intuition, to ourselves.
One of the most powerful ways to enhance self-awareness is to pay attention to how we pay attention and document it.
Attention journaling helps us understand InnSæi and how best to harness it. I go through this process thoroughly in my book, but here’s a short starter:
We pay attention to many things during the course of an hour or a day.
But we mostly do not notice what it is we are paying attention to, both consciously and unconsciously. (I know, its crazy!)
When you put your intention on paying attention to what you pay attention to, you are broadening your vision or scope of conscious perception. You are putting your spotlight of attention on things you would not normally notice. You begin to make new connections, you notice ‘glimmers’ that make you smile, perhaps feel a sense of awe, you notice strangers and their humanity.
Most of the information and sensory data which our body, including the brain, and senses pick up, is unconscious. In other words, we’re not consciously aware of this information.
However, this information and sensory data till shapes our perceptions, thoughts and actions. Unconscious attention shapes how we show up and navigate the ocean of life. The more we can become aware of this, the better we are tuned into ourselves, our InnSæi and intuition.
Allow your attention to be what it is
Paying attention to what we pay attention to, brings us in closer contact with our mental habits, biases, and our InnSæi and intuition. Journaling about what we pay attention to, and making sure we don’t judge what we notice is important.
Simply jot it down and allow it to be what it is, it helps you witness yourselves more fully and the role InnSæi and intuition play in your life.
When we also journal about HOW we pay attention, that is to say, how we notice with all our body, this exercise becomes more powerful. This is because we’ve started tapping into our whole body, not just a part of the brain, because intuition, our unconscious, is informed through our whole body, cells and senses.
Witness yourself and your InnSæi
This exercise also helps us ‘light us up and bring us more to life’ because it activates our creativity, our original ways of seeing life unfold before our eyes, our sense of wonder and we become more self-aware.
Try it out, and pay attention to what this brings out in you. I’d love to hear how you experience it.
With love & respect,
Hrund
