There are many different lenses we can use to explain why this works: from the scientific, to spiritual, logical & emotional.
Evolutionary Biology
Narrow attention keeps us stuck in stress, fear & anxiety
50,000 years ago, if there was a rustle in the bush, the ability to lock everything onto that one point of focus is what kept you alive and carried on your genes. This is called narrow attention and it's what the brain does when it feels in danger.
The problem is that, despite now living in objectively safer times, our brain hardware hasn't been upgraded. We still have the same brain. And so it is STILL constantly scanning for danger.
This is why a small social slip plays on repeat in your mind for days. It's why you lie in bed at night, completely safe, with so much cortisol coursing through your veins that you can't sleep.
Narrow attention = fight or flight state
Spatial Awareness is you learning to widen your focus. You become aware of the full 180° of your visual field, opening up the full aperture of your awareness.
This gives the brain the exact physical signal it evolved to read as “we are safe here” and it deeply calms the nervous system.
Wide attention = rest & digest state
Self-Inquiry
How looking directly at the space within & without collapses the distinction between the two
“Who am I?”
You’ve probably heard of this classic teaching from Ramana Maharshi. It’s the basis of all self-enquiry style practices. I tried this for years, and yet I never broke through.
It was this spatial awareness practice that finally changed everything for me.
The reason this worked for me, where so many other practices failed, was because through the practice you are looking directly into the truth of no-self.
Here’s how it works:
- You look within and see that it is just empty space.
- You look without and see that it is just empty space.
- Over time the distinction between within/without collapses
- It all just becomes empty space
- This helps us to directly look into the ultimate truth of no-self on a moment-to-moment basis
Emotional Release
The root cause of all our problems is our inability to deal with our emotional experience
Why are you scared to launch the business? Why are you scared to put content out there? Why are you scared to walk over and talk to that attractive someone?
Not because of the thing itself. We are scared of our own emotional reaction to these things. If being publicly shamed made you feel GOOD, you would be dancing naked on the street every morning!
We avoid doing these things because there is a “bad” feeling associated with certain triggers. And we spend our entire lives avoiding these “bad” feelings. Through alcohol, scrolling, sex, socializing, working, whatever your particular vices are.
Human transformation lies in changing how you relate to your emotions
Imagine if you LOVED the fact that grief, shame, or anger was arising in your experience… because it meant that it was now ready to be processed and released.
The mechanism works like this:
- Spatial awareness creates more relaxation and safety in the nervous system.
- This, in turn, makes you more sensitive to your emotions, like how relaxing a tense muscle suddenly makes you more aware of your whole body
- These suppressed emotions start to “bubble up” into your awareness
- Holding the spatial awareness allows you to stay open and non-reactive to them, which allows them to be processed and released, via shakes, tears, burps, convulsions, sweat, etc
- The more of these you release, the more incredible, beautiful, and present your everyday experience of life is.
High Performance
How clearing emotions helps to get rid of resistance and perform at your peak day-in day-out
You’ve probably heard of (and felt) the resistance. This “wall of emotion” that you come up against anytime you try to work, study, exercise…
Steven Pressfield named the mechanism in The War Of Art. But what he didn't answer was: why do we even experience resistance in the first place?
When I go to grab a glass of water: no resistance.
When I want to read a book in bed: no resistance.
When I try to work on the business: resistance.
When I think about going to the gym: resistance.
I tried powering through for years. And guess what? Every morning I would wake up and there would be the resistance again, ready for another fight.
Then one day I decided to do something differently. Every time I would feel resistance to a task, I would set a 3hr timer and would sit and do this spatial awareness practice. Over time, I worked through one resistance after another. And by doing this I turned tasks that I hated with every fiber of my being, like cold calling for example, into tasks that I genuinely enjoyed.
The more I sat with these emotions, the less resistance I felt. The less resistance, the less procrastination. The less procrastination, the more work done more efficiently.
The Science Of Brain Waves
How Spatial Awareness helps you live in “Synchronous Alpha”
Your brain runs at different frequencies depending on what it's doing.
Delta, 0.5 to 4 Hz. Dominant during deep, dreamless sleep and tied to physical restoration and immune function.
Theta, 4 to 8 Hz. Light sleep, the drift just before you nod off, deep meditation, and the loose associative state where you get ideas in the shower.
Beta, 12 to 30 Hz. Normal waking consciousness. Problem-solving, conversation, focused attention. The upper end of the range is associated with stress and anxious, racing thought.
Alpha, 8 to 12 Hz. Relaxed and alert. This is the state you feel when you sit in nature and feel totally at ease.
Modern life pushes almost everything toward Beta. Screens, notifications, decisions, deadlines.
Alpha is the one you want. Relaxation and calm alertness, awake and clear, but not braced.
Spatial awareness is a direct route into Synchronous Alpha, and because it’s an anchor we can use 24/7 throughout the day, it’s a way to stay in that state more and more. This gives us that “relaxed in conversation with good friends” feeling that all is well, that life is good, that we’re at peace.
Success
How “clarity” is more important than “hustle”
Modern society programs you that you need to grind 16 hours a day to become successful. This could be called the “Alex Hormozi” view on life and success. That's great for him, and it clearly worked to bring him material success.
But does that make it the only way to succeed? Or the most efficient? Or even the best way to achieve true success, which in my opinion is the joy, and the loss of self, that comes when we are fully immersed in the act of doing without attachment to outcome?
Let's look at examples of outlier success:
Warren Buffett spends most of his working day sitting in a chair reading and thinking. And he's said his results came down to a small handful of decisions across an entire career.
Peter Thiel invested $500k into Facebook in 2004 for 10% of the company. That one decision made him a billionaire.
Richard Feynman lost his appetite for physics entirely after the war, and decided he'd only play with things that interested him. Sitting in the cafeteria, he watched someone throw a plate in the air and became fascinated by the way it wobbled as it spun. He worked out the maths for fun. That led directly to his work on quantum electrodynamics that won him the Nobel in 1965.
Was that hard work? Grind? Or were these people open and attuned, and they simply moved quickly when a high-leverage opportunity was presented to them?
Clarity. Awareness. Openness to world-changing ideas that float in from the ether. These seem to be far more what matters to create outlier success.
And how does one get that? By clearing all of the stuff clogging the pipes (emotions, thought, identity) so that we are open, attuned, and living in the flow of life at all times.
Truth
It’s our interpretation of reality that causes us suffering
This is how we process information:
Objective Data → Our Distortion Filter (beliefs, thoughts, emotions) → Subjective Experience
The only way to see the truth is to get rid of the filter.
Think about this for example…
A man asks a woman if she wants to get a drink on Tuesday. She says she can't make it.
Depending on his level of distortion, that raw data, a text saying “no I can't make it,” may rattle around the stories in his head. I'm ugly. I'll never get married. I'll never be good with women. I'll never be like XYZ person.
That's not TRUTH. That's interpretation.
Someone who has cleared these distortions hears something else entirely. “She can't make it on Tuesday.” Cool, maybe I'll ask her if Thursday works. Or maybe she isn't interested and so I just move on with my life. There is no reverberation inside where this data bounces off various identities and beliefs. The raw data of reality is seen for what it is.
You cannot see reality as it is until you clear that filter. And every belief or emotion you clear with the spatial awareness technique is one more piece of that filter gone.
