In Session 2, we introduced the second mindful attention regulation skill, which we refer to as allowing, as the next step in promoting attention regulation. Remember, the goal of attention regulation is to help achieve focused, flexible and sustained attention on emotional and motivational experiences. Orienting, the skill you were taught in Session 1, helps you stay in the present moment bringing your attention to your body and breath. Allowing builds on orienting by helping you sustain your attention to all parts of your experience, even when some of the objects of your focus might be emotional and you are feeling the urge to look away or disengage.
All of us encounter situations in our daily lives that bring up powerful emotions. Whether you are worrying over an upcoming exam, experiencing uncertainty at a family gathering, or waiting to hear back following a coveted job interview, the wish to escape or eliminate painful emotions is deeply human. Allowing does not mean we have to like or want our emotions or sensations. Rather, allowing involves embracing and attending to all emotions despite their intensity, whether they are positive or negative. Think of allowing as an action, rather than as an attitude or an intention. By engaging in allowing, you are engaging in the action of sustained attention. In ERT, we invite and encourage you to remain in contact with your emotions and attend to them, even when they signal difficult motivations or feel confusing and cloudy, so that you can come to understand and inform your actions by the motivational pulls present in this moment.
To help illustrate the concept of allowing, your therapist may have introduced the “the tree and the beautiful scene” metaphor, which asks you to visualize a beautiful nature scene with blue skies, birds flying overhead, rolling hills, trees with colorful leaves, and a winding stream. Then, while holding this picture in your mind’s eye, imagine a large, fallen tree off to the side—a large, rotting, putrid smelling tree, covered in slimy molds, bacteria, worms, and maggots. As you bring this image into focus, notice where your mind goes or wants to go: did it go to the image of the rotting tree? Did it pull away from the rotting tree, onto something pleasant in the scene? Now, try to imagine the entire scene as a whole as if you are seeing it in a painting or on a screen. Allowing involves this ability to notice and hold complex emotional states even when there are conflicting aspects of the experience. When we approach life with allowing, we gain the flexibility to view the current situation from every angle, rather than from a narrowed perspective that may ignore emotionally powerful parts of our experience.
During this week’s off-line practice, you have the opportunity to apply mindful regulation skills more explicitly to the emotional experiences that arise is your life. Building upon the orienting exercise from last week, the allowing exercise is aimed at cultivating the skill of sustaining attention on all aspects of experience even when emotions feel hard. As you prepare for your practices this week, remember to bring to mind a situation that pulls strongly for both security and reward motivations. Once you have this situation in mind, practice the allowing skill.
