Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Attention Liberation
What if your attention, not your time or money, is actually your most precious resource? This groundbreaking episode explores the neuroscience behind our focus and reveals why the currency of attention shapes everything in our lives.
Our brains physically change based on what we pay attention to. When we focus on chaos and problems, we strengthen neural pathways for reactivity. When we attend to healing and joy, those circuits become more dominant. This neuroplasticity happens constantly, whether we're aware of it or not, making our attention the ultimate determinant of our experience.
Modern life has created a crisis of attention. Between device notifications and trauma-reinforced hypervigilance, we've become experts at scanning our environment while losing touch with our internal landscape. This diminished interoception, our ability to sense and interpret bodily sensations and emotions, creates a mind-body disconnect that blocks access to our innate healing intelligence. The antidote? Deliberate inward redirection, asking ourselves "What sensation am I feeling right now?" without judgment.
But not all attention is created equal. The quality matters tremendously. When we ask disempowering questions like "Why is this so hard?", our brain-as-search-engine diligently finds evidence supporting that narrative. By shifting to questions that engage our right hemisphere—"What part of this isn't hard?"—we create cognitive flexibility and access to creative solutions. This explains why somatic practices are so transformative: they bypass rumination and directly engage the nervous system, creating immediate state changes.
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Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizable. Successful Now your host, dr Kamal Aftar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.
Speaker 1:I think by this time, in our journey through our podcast, you guys are at a point where you know that money is not the most important currency. It is an important currency, but it's not the most important one. But I also wish that I could permanently dismantle the belief that time is your most important currency. It's not what's even more valuable. What is even a more precious asset for you. More foundational is your attention. Your attention is more valuable than your time and your money, because even before you spend a single minute on a task, before you whip out your wallet and your cash or swipe your card, you've already made an investment in that task. With your attention, you've chosen where you mentally place your energy, your focus, your awareness, and that choice determines everything that follows. So think of attention as the original currency. Whatever you give it to, whether it's a problem, a person, a story, or whether it's a solution, that's what's going to begin to grow in your life. Your brain is neuroplastic and it doesn't take breaks from that, which means it's constantly reshaping itself based on what you focus on. If you're paying attention to chaos and conflict, you're wiring your brain for reactivity. You pay attention to healing, safety and joy, and those are the circuits that you're strengthening in your brain. Those are the states that are going to take a stronghold in you. So there are two points I'm going to make in this podcast, and that is we're wasting this currency because we're paying attention to the outside, and we're wasting this currency because of the quality of the attention we're paying, and we're wasting this currency because of the quality of the attention we're paying. So, like I said, your brain change is based on the neuroplasticity towards whatever you attend to.
Speaker 1:Trauma decreases the gray matter of the prefrontal cortex. It decreases the right and left brain connection of the corpus callosum, but neuroplasticity can increase both of these entities depending on what kind of healing work you decide to pay attention to. So the loss of the gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, the self-regulation area, is not a permanent change. Same thing, the loss of connection between the right and the left brain is also not a permanent change. Through your biggest asset, that is, your attention, you can change wiring in both of these areas.
Speaker 1:Now, one of the biggest impacts of technology currently is that your attention is mostly outer focused, it is focused on a device, it is focused on somebody else, something else and, as a part of trauma and trauma recovery, it is very commonly known that the brain gets attuned to outside focus, paying attention to the cues in the environment, both consciously and subconsciously. This is to constantly inform the body for your safety or unsafety in the situation when the mind and the body are working to pay attention to the external cues to keep you safe. When the mind and the body are working to pay attention to the external cues to keep you safe, which is a habituated response of previous trauma, when currently your environment might be perfectly safe, then you're missing out on interoception and that is your ability to attend to yourself inwardly. That is your ability to focus on your body's sensations and needs. That includes the physiologic needs of hunger or using the restroom, feeling tired. Also includes the needs of emotional cues like feeling angry, frustrated, calm, peaceful. When your attention is out of focus most of the time, thanks to the very addicting nature of the devices or your previous history of any trauma, you have less attention to spare inwardly and that creates a mind-body gap where you're mostly thinking and intellectualizing the solution to your problems rather than listening to your body, which is where most of your subconscious mind is housed. And this is exactly where your healing intelligence lies. And when you miss out on this big piece of information, you miss out on. And when you miss out on this big piece of information, you miss out on proper healing and you miss out on proper utilization of your currency.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about where your attention actually goes. Most of the time, it's not where you might intend to go, not where you plan for it to go, but where your brain defaults your attention to when it's on autopilot. If you're like most of the high-functioning, deeply capable women that I coach, your attention is constantly pulled outwards because that's the default. You're tracking notifications, scanning facial expressions, worrying about the emails, decoding the shift of tone in your spouse or your kids or your colleagues. This isn't because this is a bad habit or it's a lack of willpower in you. This is what the brain defaults to when it's learned to survive.
Speaker 1:When you've experienced emotional inconsistency or any kind of relational rupture, your brain learns to scan the environment obsessively. It asks is it safe? Am I in trouble? Did I disappoint someone? Is the vibe off? The outer directed attention becomes your normal. That drains your currency and the outcome is, if you're in this kind of circumstance, you spend a lot of time vigilantly tracking that environment. But if you decide to pay attention to this dynamic, this outward attention that has been demanded of you through the dynamics of your current lifestyle or your past, you can return that attention inwards and you can build the muscle of inward focus by just paying attention to your body. Your attention is your most important currency, whether you decide to think about it or not, whether you know it has a potential to change or if you don't know. And plus, thinking about something does not mean it will change positively. If you're paying negative attention, if you're aspiring negatively in your thoughts while thinking about a situation, then of course the outcome will be negative as well, which is the second point I'm going to make in this podcast.
Speaker 1:But first, what's the antidote? How can we fix this? How can we retrain the brain to direct attention inwardly? And that is by vigilant redirection. When you see and notice in yourself that you're paying attention outwards, you redirect it to pay attention inwards the skill of noticing your internal world, your heartbeat, your breath, the tightness, the heat in your face, the analyzing of your bodily sensations. You're redirecting your attention to listening to your body, Moment by moment, sensation by sensation. It's like learning a new language, because you are. One very important reflection question that I'm going to ask you to ask yourself is can I name one sensation I'm feeling in the body right now, and can you do it without judging it, without fixing it, just noticing, knowing that you're safe and there is nothing harmful coming from that sensation?
Speaker 1:Now, the second part of the attention that makes us believe that it's not a most important currency is that not all attention is created equal. When you pay attention to how difficult your exams are and you ask questions like why does it have to be so hard? Why am I having such a hard time with chemistry? Why can't I learn the new system? Why does parenting have to be so hard? Why can't I get it together? Why am I always the last one to get it? This is the type of attention that you're paying that's going to inevitably lead you to find answers that are not going to create a positive change.
Speaker 1:So, while your attention is the most important currency, even more important than that is what type of attention you're paying. You can pay a very low quality, negative attention to a situation in which case you're wasting your currency. Not only are you wasting it, but you're paying money to buy debt. Not all attention is high quality. How you spend it what matters. Where you spend it is what matters, but also what is the quality of attention that you're paying? You can focus on a problem for hours, days, even years, but if the quality of the focus is negative, hopeless, rooted in blame, you're not investing, you're digging a deeper hole. You're buying yourself more debt For all intentional purposes. You are focusing, yes, but you're reinforcing helplessness. In that case, that kind of attention feeds the problem loop. You are spending emotional energy, you're spending your attention, currency, but nothing gets resolved and, ironically, the problem continues to get deeper. You just end up more exhausted, more bitter and more convinced that the problem is bigger than you and that it can't be solved.
Speaker 1:So the type of attention absolutely matters, and the shift starts with the quality of questions you ask, because your brain is a search engine. It responds to the questions you give it. If you ask it garbage, it will return garbage. If you ask it something expansive, something that is possibility oriented, then it will give you the answer towards a solution. That's how you open new neural windows. So, instead of asking why this is so hard, try and ask what part of this is not hard.
Speaker 1:Instead of asking, why am I the last one to understand something? Ask yourself where am I not the last person to understand something? Ask yourself, where am I not the last person to understand something? These single type of questions nudge your mind out of fixed loop and into flexibility. It doesn't ignore the struggle. It just widens your lens to include more than just the struggle. By asking you to do all of this, I'm not asking you to ignore your reality. If your brain says that things are hard, that will be your reality. I am asking you to ask your brain what else is also possible. And that's where the magic begins, which is actually based in science.
Speaker 1:When a coach or your own inner wise voice asks a question like what is everything in this situation that I'm not noticing? Yet, in that split second, your right brain gets a chance to come online. That's the hemisphere that sees the bigger picture, that feels the context and the connection. It senses the safety instead of scanning for threat and suddenly you're not going to be trapped inside of your problem, you're going to be standing next to it watching it shrink in scale. Open-ended, high-quality, solution-oriented questions direct you towards the possibility that don't compute in your left brain. The left brain is responsible for logic, language, linear problem solving, which is exactly my point.
Speaker 1:The point is to involve your right brain as well. Creative, non-linear, experiential. It creates a brief moment of cognitive disorientation, a pattern interrupt is what they call it, and it loosens the grip of your anxiety and your helplessness. What fires together, wires together. That means the more attention you give to anxious thought loop, the tighter that loop becomes. The more attention you give to open-ended questions and high quality attention, the tighter those neural pathways become. All of this, and much more, is the reason why somatic practices, practices that involve the body, are extremely powerful. They bypass the endless loop of overthinking and they engage the parts of your brain and nervous system that regulate your emotional state. That's why body-inclusive coaching is more transformative than just traditional talk therapy alone.
Speaker 1:You're not just talking about change, you're embodying it, you're living it. Bring your body into the equation, pay high quality attention to it, bring in movement, whether it's shifting your posture, or standing up or walking across the room taking a deep breath. All of that signal your nervous system that change is happening and your brain follows your body's cues. And one reflection question that I'm going to ask you to ask yourself is when you're in a trapped mood, stand up, roll your shoulders, take a deep, intentional breath, ask yourself what shifts in your body, what shifts in your mood? What becomes available to you that wasn't available a few seconds ago?
Speaker 1:When you feel something overwhelming like anxiety, shame or fear, it often exists as a vague, all-encompassing cloud. It feels like all of these feelings. Is you not something that you're experiencing? That's because your emotion is still living in a mental construct full of abstract thoughts and associations that are ongoing. When your brain does not know where else to go, it just spirals. But the moment you interrupt this pattern, the moment you ask where do I feel this in my body, you give the emotion a location, you draw a boundary around it, you visualize it. You're shifting your attention from linear thinking to somatic experience. Now, instead of being in the anxiety, you're observing it, naming it for where it is tightness in my chest, flushing in my face. All of that automatically implies that there are other places where your emotions don't exist and you're able to separate yourself from these sensations. That act alone creates mental spaciousness.
Speaker 1:This is high-level attention, a very high-value currency, something that you have plenty of if you put it into practice. So so far, what I've talked to you about is that attention shapes your brain. That's neuroplasticity. Whatever you pay attention to will literally grow neural connections around it. Trauma reduces brain's capacity of regulation less gray matter, weaker left-right brain communication. But healing attention can restore all of it. So attention is what determines the architecture of your brain, not your past, not the future. A constant outer focus is a trauma habit which leads to defaulting to always being hypervigilant.
Speaker 1:Current modern life, like notifications, multitasking devices, all of that reinforce that trauma pattern. The result is you ignore your internal cues more and more, you lose the scale of interoception and you start to live out of sync of your needs and emotions. This creates a mind-body gap where you intellectualize more problems, and it widens the gap between the mind and the body. Here attention heals you, because now you don't have to pay attention to thinking harder, but rather pay attention to sensing more clearly. And then we talked about how not all attention is created. Equal. Negative, ruminative attention keeps you stuck in your problems. The quality of attention matters. Ask better questions to get better neural outcomes.
Speaker 1:Disruption in your thought patterns creates space. If you disorient the internal narrator, which is usually the left brain, logical talk and you bring it through pattern interrupt questions, open-ended questions then that gives your right brain space to work. This lets creativity and emotional regulation in. This is how your more expansive thinking takes over, little by little. Movement and body awareness absolutely support this shift, which is why an embodied cognition is the bridge. The body is not just along for the ride, it's doing the thinking for you and with you. Locating feelings in the body gives them boundaries, creates contrast and with that, every emotion and thought becomes a choice. All of this and much more are the reasons why your attention is your most important currency.
Speaker 1:I have highlighted for you the two most important points, but besides that, you will get to see, when you start paying attention correctly, what else works for you in this realm. With that I pray to Allah SWT. Ya Allah, guide my attention to what nourishes me, guide it to where healing lies, protect me from distractions that drain me. Make my focus steady and my awareness gentle that drain me. Make my focus steady and my awareness gentle. Ya Allah, guide my attention to a path to healing and closeness to you. Ameen. Ya Rabbul Alameen, please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.