Over the last two years my health and clarity of purpose have come from two main practices.
TRE, which I’ve written about extensively
Open-Focus Training, which will be the topic of this post.
People often ask, why the two together? Let me start there, because they’re deeply connected.
Your nervous system has two basic postures and you know them both from the inside.
Under fight-or-flight, our attention narrows onto the singular threat or stressor(s) in front of us. Our awareness of possibilities within our own environment narrows onto the ones that are immediately useful. Everything outside what’s needed for survival stops existing in our perception.
By contrary, in rest-and-digest, our attention widens and our “peripheral perception” comes back online. As attention becomes less fixed, the body relaxes and suddenly you can feel your whole environment. Instead of the singular threat or stressor(s) in front of you, you literally “take in” more of reality.
Too many people are running on narrow attention all day, and have been for years. It creates two separate, yet connected problems.
First, the charge stored in your body from every threat response that never got to finish. The charges remain stuck under smooth muscle and are loaded into the body through the fascial chain. Releasing them requires the fascial chain to discharge them in the inverse order of how they loaded.
Second, the habit of narrow-focus itself is a problem. It generates a never ending cycle of stress. It creates forward head posture and shallow breathing, always markers of future health issues.
So, TRE handles the first problem. It releases stored charges in the body.
Open-Focus Training addresses the second problem at its root.
When open-focus gets sold as a simple relaxation technique, it does the practice a great disservice.
The creator, Les Fehmi, was clear that open-focus training impacts way more than our ability to relax. It’s deep nervous system training, and in my opinion, the easiest way to strengthen the mind-body connection.
Fehmi wasn’t a wellness guy. He ran the Princeton Biofeedback Centre and chaired the first national gathering of biofeedback researchers in Aspen in 1968. His book, Dissolving Pain, tells you what open-focus aims at.
His core claim is that our attention has a pattern, and that pattern shapes our physiology.
If you change the pattern, you change your body.
His model focuses on two types of attention.
Narrow-objective attention is the default mode of modern life. It requires effort and activates our sympathetic nervous system. Narrow focus is great for reading a contract or doing homework, but it’s terrible for intimacy, connection, and bodily relaxation. Think of narrow attention like a flashlight. When we’re deeply focused, or in a threat response, our aperture closes and we can only see what’s in front of the flashlight’s beam.
Diffuse-immersed attention is the state described as “relaxed, but alert.” It’s something most of us only stumble into by accident, because it requires minimal effort. In diffuse attention (or open-focus) the brain produces alpha waves, and the nervous system downshifts on its own. Diffuse attention is great for intimacy, creativity, and letting pain dissolve. Think of it like a floodlight. When we’re at ease, our body is connected to our environment and our aperture opens. We start to see the full picture.
Narrow attention has real utility, but people get stuck there. For those of us who’ve experienced trauma, it’s likely this is our baseline.
When somebody says “I can’t relax,” what they’re really saying is “I’m stuck in narrow-attention.” Calm is still available, it just comes when we change our attentional pattern and create attentional range.
We need both the flashlight and the floodlight. Narrow-attention when your life calls for it and diffuse-attention when you’re sitting across from someone you love. Open-Focus trains the roundtrip, on demand, without getting stuck at either end.
I’ve had clients suffering from chronic pain who did 15 minutes of open-focus training only to report zero pain at the end. In my own struggles with PTSD and addiction, open-focus training has basically eliminated the shame. When triggers or uncomfortable sensations come up, I quickly recover into peace and joy using Fehmi’s open-focus skills. It’s useful for sleep, fatigue, focus, and creating an authentic connection to the heart and body.
Open-focus training begins with a series of questions centered around changing your body’s relationship to space.
When that relationship changes, your body starts metabolizing stress differently. Somewhere in the middle of the exercise, you’ll notice your shoulders drop and your breath deepen. That happens on its own once the aperture opens.
By the end you’ll walk away with more clarity and ease, knowing that “relaxed, but alert” is a state you can train for instead of wait for.
At the top of this essay is a 18-minute guided open-focus, for paid subscribers.
I’ve just added all six of my courses to the paid tier, and I’ll be publishing guided practices like this one weekly.
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