This relates to the bio of biofocusing. How quickly neuronal impulses move has been measured, and we all in a general sense live at sixty seconds a minute, and sixty minutes an hour, but how quickly we think, respond, decide and act is relative from person to person. In Blink Malcolm Gladwell checks out how quickly awareness moves in distinction to consciousness. In my view, awareness is immediate and consciousness is more deliberate. You can be aware without knowing what you're aware of. As I walked out of the supermarket one day I began to think of someone I knew. I wondered why this person had come to mind. Something had triggered the image, but what? I stood just outside the door and looked around, up and down the road. There it was, quite far away, and I certainly had not consciously seen it, but had clearly noticed it in my awareness: his car. One morning as I brushed my teeth in the bathroom, I began to feel a little depressed for no reason. I got cross with this and slowed down to check out what my brain was doing. It's a strange thing that if you want to find out what's going on, nearly always you can. My cream-coloured towel was lying on the floor where I had tossed it. The random folds had created a face that I now saw more consciously, a rather evil face. I kicked the face that wasn't there away, invited my brain to think again, and the mild depression lifted. Perceptions. We create so many each moment, some stick, the vast majority flow on, but our moods are felt, filed and stored to help create what comes next. Your ego, that mad hatter that you have created consciously and unconsciously is slow, really slow compared to the rest of your awareness and consciousness, but very stubborn. You have to decide to go with the quickness rather than the stubbornness. Many academics are quick thinkers and slow participants. They sit, read, write, think and write again. They can argue quite brilliantly but put them in a business context where they have to respond to what emerges on a minute-to-minute basis, and they'll flounder. The businessman who can't begin to argue on a conceptual basis but who anticipates next week's obstacles and overcomes them before they hit his desk is quick enough to create financial survival and growth
Much of coaching is cutting to the quick. Getting to the alive places and paying full attention to what's happening there. The alive places are usually fun places, yet certainly they can be sore and painful and even traumatised if you've taken shocks and beatings along the way. The sense of truthfulness lives in the alive places, yet people often prefer this sense to be more fixed than fluid because of insecurity. It can't be done: aliveness isn't owned, dogma can't sort it once and for all. Aliveness is shared although eating livingness to continue living is the name of the game on planet earth. To be radical, what's the difference between eating a cabbage and a lamb, really? Both are just as alive as each other.
On a more personal level, it's easy to catch yourself, although you have to be quick to do so. The ponderous hands of thought are no match for the lighter finger-tips of immediate sensing. It's just a question of where you focus awareness minute by minute. Even if you focus on making awareness more conscious, you're going to be too slow. In biofocusing, the "you", the ego, is put down in a completely different part of the equation. No longer the "b" of bodmas, it's more like the "a". You don't prioritise yourself, but you remain in the equation.
Awareness of livingness is humbling and challenging. Your quickness is related to your body but not ultimately bound to it. There's a lot happening around the sub-atomic, atomic, cellular, molecular and physiological structures of the body, and awareness is a dim grasp of these happenings. Coaching quickness will amplify awareness so that zooming, panning and whatever action of consciousness you want becomes possible. Imagination has no boundaries.
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