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The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body by Les Fehmi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
When we are under stress, our focus narrows. When we are in pain, our focus narrows. When we are staring at a computer screen all day, our focus narrows. Contrast that with the feeling you get from exercising hard to exhaustion or having a long and hearty laugh with friends or going for a walk in silent nature or watching your children open something they love on Christmas morning. Open, spacious, relaxed, happy, and accepting. I know which I prefer!
The key to peace is getting out of your head! Our thoughts are wonderful servants, tools for choosing directions and solving problems, but they are terrible masters when we are caught in angry, anxious, or depressed thinking that things should be different than they are.
Les Fehmi developed a method of meditation (there I said it, even though the word is scarcely in the book) that is rooted in research on observing the effects of changing human attention on brain waves. Through this, Fehmi developed Open Focus techniques to shift attention out of this narrow focus in our head and shift to a place of relaxed attending.
I come to this from the perspective of Buddhist meditation. Buddhist meditation typically takes two forms: Shamatha (fixed-point) meditation, in which the meditator focuses on her breath (most commonly) or some other object or Vipassana (insight) meditation, in which the meditator works with her sensations, thoughts, and feelings in order to see that they aren’t real but are rather the products of habit, mood, circumstance, etc. Open Focus skips trying to manage or evaluate the content of thoughts and, instead, relaxes into an attention that is unconcerned with content while still allowing thoughts to occur. With practice, we can retrain attention, so that this open focus is our way of attending to life, including our work and even stressful situations.
(Parenthetical comment: I see some people saying they feel like this book is an upsell to things on Fehmi’s site. This book is a complete set of exercises for every type of situation imaginable. You can go to workshops or buy audio recordings at Fehmi’s site. But there isn’t anything that he is leaving out to upsell to readers later.)
I believe this is an important book. For those who are interested, it has some commonality with Advaita or Dzogchen and other non-dual meditation approaches. But it is not rooted in any Eastern philosophy and has no metaphysical assumptions or language but is, rather, rooted in Fehmi’s research into happiness.