Over a decade ago, Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins published The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body. They popularized the approach known as ‘Open Focus’, and now Les Fehmi and Susan Shor Fehmi have just published a follow-up volume, The Open-Focus Life.

The authors make a bold claim: that changing the way you pay attention will change your life. It’s not an empty claim, being based on over forty years of clinical experience and research in which Dr Fehmi and his team have analysed how attention styles affect brain-wave activity, the nervous system and the way we experience ourselves and the world around us. This latest book signposts how ‘paying attention to attention’ can help a diverse range of areas including stress, physical pain, emotional pain, performance and relationships.

The authors summarize the problem of attention – and its solution – as follows:

Our natural way of being – our natural way of paying attention broadly, intimately, and fluidly to the world around us – has gradually been subverted by the speed and ever-increasing demands of the modern world, which has led us to a chronic and rigid narrowing of focus. By opening our focus through simple habits of attention, we can reverse the negative effects of this artificially created stress and live calmer, more contented lives in which we’re healthier, more optimistic, and more deeply connected to our hearts, minds and bodies.
Les Fehmi and Susan Shor Fehmi, The Open Focus Life. Shambhala Publications 2021.

The Alexander Technique also demonstrates how attending and intending in unique and specific ways leads to a diverse range of outcomes, and so this book provides a useful comparison. One helpful aspect is the authors’ description of four kinds of attention styles, and the assertion that it is of great benefit to be able to move more fluidly between them. This is what they call the ideal of ‘living in Open Focus’. Here’s a short summary of the four attention styles they identify:

Narrow attention – when we’re focusing intently on a particular task, event or emotion to the exclusion of everything else going on around us, and to the exclusion of the physical space we’re in. This attention style is essential to our functioning, but if it becomes our habitual response to every situation it has a number of negative consequences, including heightened stress levels.
Objective attention – when we detach or distance ourselves from things, ideas or people. This underpins reasoning skills, impartiality, clarity and wise decision-making; however, when applied to people, it objectifies and reduces them to ‘things’, and so lacks empathy or an ability to see them as whole human beings.
Immersed attention – when we merge our awareness with a project, person, or experience such that we lose our self-consciousness and feel completely absorbed in what we are doing. This experience is often liberating, and common examples include playing or listening to music, playing sport, viewing art or watching a movie.
Diffuse attention – when we are receptive to stimuli from all around us at the same time, such as when we enjoy being in all our senses at once on a walk in nature. This is the opposite of narrow attention, and as such can make it difficult to accomplish certain tasks.

One interesting point to note is that the kind of attention required for the Alexander Technique does not seem to fit neatly into any of these four styles. For one thing, an aspect that is missing from the above is the ability to attend holistically to one’s internal map of body parts, known as the ‘body schema’ (see here for further details). Interestingly, I don’t think the very popular concept of flow fits very well into the above taxonomy either. That said, the authors’ emphasis on identifying different attention styles, and cultivating the agility and flexibility to move between them, is something I very much agree with.

One description of attention that has for a long time fitted the bill amongst Alexander practitioners is the ‘Unified Field of Attention’. This was coined by Frank Pierce Jones who described it as follows:

When I concentrated either on myself or on the goal I wanted to reach, something happened outside my field of attention to frustrate my attempt. It was only after I realized attention can be expanded as well as narrowed that I began to note progress. … I had to expand my attention so that it took in something of myself and something of the environment as well. It was just as easy, I found, instead of setting up two fields – one for the self (introspection) and another for the environment (extraspection) – to establish a single integrated field in which both the environment and the self could be viewed simultaneously.
Frank Pierce Jones, Freedom to Change (1997, 3rd ed) p.9.

But whether the ‘Unified Field of Attention’ is really an attention style all of its own, or perhaps a fluidity between established styles, is probably an open question. That’s something for the scientists and not for me to pronounce on.