Mairela Reiki Healing Retreat
Holistic Healing Holidays in a Natural Healing Space to Cleanse Body, Mind & Soul

Look at an object right in front of you.
Give it 100% of your attention, so that it fills your eyes and the whole of your vision.
For example: take a water bottle and put it across your eyes. This bottle represents your trauma and drama clouding your vision and being 100% of all you know in that moment. It represents a life that appears to be 1005 trauma and drama.

Then put the bottle down on the table in front of you. Now the bottle is still quite close and taking up a lot of your vision and attention, and thereby your conscious awareness but there is also a little of something else present. You are gaining perspective and the trauma and drama no longer represents 100% of all you know and live in.

Next soften your focus again to take in a little more of the room and the rest of the table etc. The bottle (trauma and drama) still exists exactly the same size as before but its presence in your reality/your world/your life is shrinking, becoming less influential, less important and less able to draw you in. Peace and safety return to your perspective. The bottle (trauma and drama) is no longer the gigantic monster threatening to consume you.

Soften your focus again to take in the window behind the table and the walls to the side. All things are present in your field of focus and you are still aware of the bottle (trauma and drama) but it isn't taking your attention.

In fact nothing is actually taking your attention, everything is just existing there and being noticed by you. This is a beautifully calm and serene place to be.

Keep softening your focus until you are aware of the bottle, table, walls, window and the entire landscape outside all in one expanded and soft observation.

This exercise uses our primary sense of sight (seeing is believing is one of the most powerful and erroneous beliefs in our society) and shows us what is possible to achieve just by doing something as simple as softening our focus.

When you begin this exercise you don't need to be able to recognise the correlation between the bottle and your life trauma and drama. If you can that's great but if at first you can't it doesn't matter.

If you want to go further with the expansion exercise then open your ears and nose to the sounds and smells of your environment in the same softly focused way. Just allow sounds and smells float to you, there is no need to analyse them, you can just let them be present.

Recognise how your mind doesn't need to analyse bird song in order to recognise it as bird song. If a sound arises which isn't recognised, it needn't be analysed, merely noted as an unrecognised sound.

Once you become accustomed to this kind of exercise you can practice it anytime and anywhere.

Sitting at the traffic lights we can still see when they turn green but we can also observe the entire pedestrian scene around the road too. This actually makes us safer drivers because we become more aware of previously unseen hazards.

It also highlights the difference between softening our focus and switching off our brains into zombie mode!

With a softened focus observing all things but not actively zooming in on any one object we actually increase our awareness, heighten our senses and become more alert (alert as in mindful and aware and not on standby for an imminent disaster!)

If we just zone out so that the object in front of us blurs into insignificance then we have become very unaware!! This is not expansion, this is zombie land! This state will never help anyone redirect or focus their life!!