Before I draw the model in detail I want to explain about Concentration, Awareness and Attention. What is concentration? Concentration is mental control. Concentration is fixing the mind on one object for 12 seconds. The object of concentration: Breathing Fix your mind on your breath. As you breathe in, feel your breath entering your nostrils. As you breathe out, feel your breath leaving your nostrils. At first you may find it is hard to keep your mind focused on one object, but with practise you will hone your mind down to a finer focus. The secret of success lies in practise. For the next 40 days without loosing a day of practise, do your breathing exercises for five to ten minutes at a time: Firstly, before your breakfast Secondly, before your lunch Thirdly, before your dinner Fourthly, before your bedtime After 40 days of practise you will find yourself well established in observing your breath. This exercise will make it easier for you to observe your thoughts or your beliefs, and it will result in you having a more concentrative mind. Similarly, you will practise awareness of your thoughts, feelings and emotions. What is Awareness? A key to conscious thought control, it motivates us to focus. What is Attention? It is Focused Awareness. It is the focused awareness that can alter the experience of yesterday’s pain into today’s new understanding and tomorrow’s new joy. Attention is really a focused state of awareness. Whatever we pay attention to is processed and transformed from mere sensory signals extracted from the external world into perception, thought and experiences. Attention is the bridge across which information travels from the external world to the subjective world of consciousness. Through awareness and attention, you can develop effective responses. Such responses can help us not to react aggressively when people behave badly towards us or even when our emotional responses are negative. Deeply internalise the principles of awareness and attention, making them part of your daily life or part of your everyday approach to time, your body, to other people and to daily activities. Let us take anger as an example: See how we could apply awareness and attention to it. Firstly, reduce the anger to a manageable feeling, how? Acknowledge and accept your anger thoughtfully. It is extremely important to calm the body and mind with focused breath awareness (FBA). Breathe in for the count of five. Keep breathing thoughtfully until you experience the anger fading away and a feeling of calmness arising. Remember to use FBA the next time you make yourself angry. With it you will discover that you have neither expressed your anger nor suppressed it. You have transformed it into calmness and as a result you have clarity of thought. FBA has helped you and your body. Remember: Firstly, acknowledge and accept your feelings, and breathe thoughtfully. Secondly, stop and reflect Thirdly, take action to complete your feelings as incomplete feelings give rise to resentment, bad feelings and more anger. Anger is one of the most difficult emotions to control and the most disturbing emotion. At one extreme, it expresses itself in violence, hatred, hostility and rage. It also expresses itself in lesser ways such as resentment, bitterness, jealousy, faultfinding, nagging and destructive criticism. It is widely known that anger is an exhausting force without the mental power needed to control it. It is only by stilling your mind that you will ultimately experience the stillness of pleasure, which you are seeking. The moment of change occurs when, in my own awareness of the present moment, I decide that I am not going to act with anger anymore. Every time I act with focused awareness, I learn something new about myself. I also know now that nothing can protect me better than my own awareness. Focused awareness enriches my perception of the event, situation or person and helps me to question the consequences for myself and its effects on others. Does it promote personal well being and the well-being of others? Next time you burn with anger, are possessed by greed, jealousy, hatred or exhausted by an emotional struggle which sometimes seems uncontrollable, and then you need to stop, breathe and take action to complete your feelings. The key to a happier and more successful life lies in the training of your mind diligently with • Breath Focused Awareness • Focused Awareness • Reflection · Reasoning It is in your power to develop exceptional Attention Awareness & Attention and Reflection & Reasoning powers. Assuming that you have been training your mind with Awareness & Attention, you would have developed exceptional awareness of yourself. Let us say, the mind is like a mirror. The very nature of our mind is to reflect the content back to us. So whenever in the mirror of your mind a thought or a feeling of anger happens to be reflecting, you should immediately become aware of it and give your optimal attention to it. In that attention, it is transformed into a manageable feeling, the mind becomes peaceful or you enjoy the serenity of letting go. What was yesterday’s hurt is today’s new understanding and tomorrow’s new joy. The power of Awareness & Attention can better: • yourself • your health • your relationships with others • protect you from illness • protect you from emotional struggles and emotional exhaustion