I’m writing this from Berlin, one of my favorite cities in the world.
I planned this trip many months ago. Sadly, it happened to coincide with Berlin Pride and the recent attack here, which has cast a shadow over what is normally such a joyful celebration. My heart is with everyone affected.
I have been to Berlin a lot over the years. I first came here in 2016, and it changed me.
The city felt strangely like home and, at the same time, like a completely different planet. I was amazed that such a place existed. I had never experienced a place where it was so ordinary for people to be unconventional—for differences to be visible, explicitly non-conformist, radical and unapologetic.
I’ve often wondered why Berlin has had such a profound effect on me. Part of it, I think, is the history that lives beneath the surface here. This is a city that has known unimaginable devastation, division, and collective trauma. It is also a place where a wall came down, where a country has wrestled publicly with its own history, and where creativity has become part of how people imagine new ways of living.
I think it’s because it on some level, the city symbolizes to me that a deep wound of separation can heal sufficiently enough that a raw, nourishing, creative fertility can evolve from it.
Every time I come here, I feel like I tap into my own creative defiance and inner sovereignty in new ways.
During this trip, I’ve been reflecting on my own creative process and asking myself what conditions allow my best work to emerge. What rhythms support it? What routines protect it? What environments help ideas come together?
One of my favorite parts of being here is spending time in a community that brings together artists for small-group conversations. I love asking people about their process—not just how they make what they make, but what routines or choices support the making itself.
Every artist answers the question differently and I find this fascinating. Each person has their own relationship with their attention and what they give it to, and what becomes possible through those intentional choices.
Some people need long stretches of solitude and others need conversation for the work to come together more fully. Some artists work comes in bursts of intensity. Others create through ongoing tending and consistency.
There isn’t one right way. It often takes many years for the process to refine itself. This has been true for me as a writer as well. I have my own reliable ways that help me tap into what wants to be written. And also I recognize and look for familiar sensations in my body that tell me when something has “clicked.”
I keep coming back to this point:
Perhaps one of the most important decisions we make each day is where we place our attention.
There are endless forces competing for our attention both internal and external. Internally, it can be our own rambling thoughts, our own beliefs or fears. Externally it can be the pull of social media, other forms of entertainment or distraction. It can also be other people’s expectations or the constant temptation to react instead of consciously create.
Much of my work over the past twelve years has explored sovereignty through the lens of Healing the Mother Wound—how we reclaim our inner authority after years of pleasing, over-functioning, and organizing ourselves around other people’s needs.
Lately I’ve begun to realize that sovereignty has another dimension as well: our relationship with attention.
We had to be passively accepting of toxicity if we were to survive dysfunctional families. We had no choice back then. Our attention was absorbed into hypervigilance and adopting best we could to the adult world around us. We needed to become the child our parents would approve of, in order to get our needs met. Back then, external validation WAS survival. If we experienced abuse or neglect of any kind, dissociation was helpful, but that meant leaving our bodies and going “below” attention to endure whatever pain we were experiencing.
In childhood, sometimes survival was dependent on NOT being present. To be present may have been simply too dangerous.
Now as adults, trauma is not directing our attention in the same way when were kids. But we live in a culture that is also competing for our attention in similar ways.
In our healing work we have had to answer the question: “Can I say no to my mother?”
And the attention economy forces us to answer the question: “Can I say no to an algorithm?”
Given how the attention economy today serves patriarchy and capitalism, not human flourishing, we need a certain, active defiance that protects our attention and pushes back against the algorithms that would drain us of hours of our one precious life (just as one example).
Why does attention matter to creativity? And to just living a conscious, creative life?
Because creativity asks of us something different and something very specific.
Creativity asks us to:
Tolerate not-knowing, and be OK without quick answers. To not abandon things in process. To live inside ambiguity.
Sustain attention across time, our attention being an open space that witnesses new things arise and fall away, so that connections can be made and insights come together.
Remain with an idea AFTER bids to distract us come up again and again, to keep coming back to the idea and let it develop.
Have space to be receptive, allow and listen to more subtle things, to temporarily turn away from louder things.
I’ve been circling this question of attention for the past year. But something about being back in Berlin has helped the pieces come together.
I’m truly fascinated by the question: What might become possible if I became even more intentional and discerning about what I allow to occupy my attention—and just as importantly, what I choose NOT to. And even deeper than that is the question:
This is an expression of personal sovereignty and discernment. And it’s an incredibly exciting question to ask at this time in history.
Attention is where our life force goes. What is worthy of my finite life?
The path of least resistance is to passively let our attention leak away. And it takes energy to make these kinds of choices. If we are exhausted, tired, depleted or burnt out, it’s harder to be make conscious choices around this. But I believe every time we take our power back from the attention economy we gain more of ourselves and our sovereignty in our lives.
I would say that there are 3 stages of personal sovereignty:
1. Sovereignty of your inner world: Choosing what you believe and learning to distinguish inherited voices from your own.
2. Sovereignty in relationships: Learning to embody that inner authority around other people.
3. Sovereignty over your attention: Consciously deciding what receives your life force every day.
Have you been asking yourself similar questions lately?
Where has your attention been going?
And is there anything you’re beginning to realize you no longer want to give it to?
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