As I said, the Denver CE Event was a smash. I remember a couple of you volunteered to take our video footage and edit it into a montage, but I can’t remember your names? I really want to share the experience with the rest of the CE peeps, so could you email me at emedhus@gmail.com? I’d appreciate it so, so much!

Today is the start of a two-part series (does 2 parts even qualify as a series) on our ever-shrinking attention span. Since I was a kid, my attention span has been the size of a gnat embryo, so it can’t afford to shrink any further. Of course my brain is shrinking, too, so maybe a proportional shrinkage makes it a wash.

I start out by describing how my Skype program got hung up and other technological problems plagued me.

Robert: Right before we got on the phone, Erik said he was going to prank us.

Me: Stop it, Erik!

Robert: As soon as I said that, your screen just flickered.

Me: Yeah, I think I saw that! So, Erik, my main man, what did you decide to talk about today? We can interview the 911 terrorist or talk about the topic of your choice.

Robert: He’s doing like this.

Robert jumps up and down, arms and legs flailing.

Robert: He’s dancing around. I don’t know what the crap he’s doing.

Me: Probably not as bad a dancer as me, but…

Robert: Well, he’s bad, but he was trying to be cool. He failed.

Robert laughs.

Robert: Did you see how he was moving?

Robert mimics Erik again.

Me: Oh my god. It’s flailing. He’s having a seizure or something.

Robert (chuckling): He might have been!

Me: So what do you think, Erik?

Erik: Well, let’s talk about what I was discussing with Robert earlier.

Robert: There were a couple of things, and I hope you remind me, Erik, because he and I were going back and forth. I was asking him all these questions. One thing he was talking about is that everybody is zip, zip, zip.

Me: That’s my life, man. That’s how I am.

Erik: You know what? It’s fucking with you.

Me: Yeah.

Erik: It’s fucking with a lot of people because you never give your body a chance to recover from it. Your brain is stuck in fast forward, and it starts to burn your body out. Then you can’t organize your thoughts, and everything is in this 5 second little period of time, and anything more than that, you can’t grasp. It’s a memory issue.

Me: I think our technology and the media just makes our attention span shorter and shorter and shorter. What is it, three minutes now?

Robert: Oh, I saw something on television about that.

Erik: This is one of the things that will perpetuate chronic pain for some people. For some people, their brains will be stuck in fast forward, and their bodies are in pain because the brain is never shut down long enough for the brain to do what it needs to do and calm those nerves down.

Me: Yeah.

Erik: What people need to do is look at what it is that’s provoking that in them. Some people have a predisposition. Some people are very kinetic, and they just have to keep moving, moving, moving.

Me: Yeah, I am.

Erik: But then they go overboard with it, not intentionally, but they’ll see all these things going on in the world, and there’s so much going on, but being kinetic, they want to keep up with it all.

Me: Right.

Robert: I can relate to what Erik’s talking about because I’m the same way.

Me: Me, too.

Robert: It burns me out.

Erik: You just need to slow down. I’ll give you an example that got me on the topic of this. This morning, Robert was doing his stretches, and he was doing one where he was raising his arms like this.

Robert moves his arms up and down in front of him.

Erik: Well, instead of doing it slowly, he was like—

Robert does the exercise at warp speed.

Robert: I wanted to get it over with!

Erik: I told him, ‘Dude, just slloooowww doooowwwwn.’

Robert: Then I was like, ‘Oh, yeah,’ because I was getting anxious, not realizing that it was because I was like—

Robert repeats the exercise, moving his arms really fast.

Me: So, how can we do that? It’s really hard for me to remember to slow down. I’m so caught up in the moment and my flurry of activity and thoughts that it’s difficult.

Erik: This goes back to an earlier session when we were talking about addiction. You just become addicted to it, and whenever you’re addicted to something, you lose your sense of awareness that it’s driving you. You just have to stop or, if you’re wound up in it, review what happened throughout the day. Then try to slowly implement being aware of how you feel throughout the day. If you start running around but then have a moment of awareness, stop and think, “Oh, yeah.” This is something I’ve done with Robert, personally. If he gets worked up, I go, ‘Dude, stop.’

Robert: I hear him so clearly. “Dude, stop.” Then he’ll say, “Okay, you need to take a deep breath.” For me what helps me relax aside from breathing is I will envision white and pink light over me. I mean, that’s so airy fairy.

Me: Well, if it works!

Robert: It works. Then I just relax. That’s just what he does with me. For every single person, it could be different.

Erik: But the thing that’s always consistent is that you have to stop and become aware of what’s going on. For you, Mom, and for some people, it can be difficult to do that throughout the day when you have a constant bombardment of other people—

Robert: For me, I’m just here with my dog.

Erik: You just have to practice. It’s still possible, because it really only takes a second. If you start to feel overwhelmed by things coming into your experience, there’s always going to be a break of at least a few seconds. Then you can stop, take a deep breath, use a visual if you need to, and allow your body to relax. You have to feel it. That’s what’s important.

Me: Okay.

Erik: When your body is relaxed, your emotions are going to be that way, too. Your body responds to how you feel, emotionally.

Me: Sure, but I’m constantly bombarded by Facebook private messages, emails from blog members and all that.

Erik: You still have the ability to set aside a block of time even if it’s just 5 or 10 minutes. You can close your eyes and do a little meditation.

Me: Okay.

Erik: Do that once or twice a day or more if you can. In fact, because human’s attention spans have evolved to be shorter, we have to adapt our lives around that. It’s not bad that our attention spans are shorter.

Me: Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask you. Is there any positive to it?

Erik: This has something to do with time, itself. It’s kind of a metaphor for how humans are evolving quicker and quicker. Our perception of time is evolving as well. It has to do with us being more gullible because we don’t see things further out.

Me: Oh, yeah.

Erik: If anything, we’re just getting wider chunks of bigger pictures. Think of a person who writes something that’s only a few sentences, but when you read it, it seems so much more expansive than that.

Me: True.

****

Here’s another wonderful endorsement for Erik’s book, My Life After Death. Get your own copy now: paperback, Audible, Nook, Kindle or audio CD. You may have to widen your browser window to see all of these options. 

Whether we’re willing to admit it or not, we all have interest, curiosity and fear about the ‘afterlife’. This book addresses all of these in such a way that it makes it hard to put this book down. I already am on my second read of it because I didn’t want the first read to end. The entire family of this young man, especially his mom, have allowed us to share in some incredibly personal parts of their lives. I feel humbled and grateful that they would be so very generous to include us into what has been, perhaps, the most difficult time in all of their lives. Thank you, Dr. Elisa Medhus, for spearheading the effort to share your son with us. You are such a lovely human being. I can see why your son refers to you as ‘the unicorn of all doctors’. You even may be the unicorn of all moms. Really. 🙂 It’s no wonder that your daily blog, ChannelingErik.com. is attracting such a large following of readers. Thank you for your courage and openness. And Erik, thank you, for choosing to devote so much of your new ‘existence’ to teaching the rest of us about why we’re here and how we can enrich our lives through the simplicity of more conscious living. Your straightforwardness and lack of pretense make this book wonderfully fun and lighthearted, but also intensely inspiring. And as you must witness, you are becoming quite the spiritual anchor for your followers. Your book is an amazing tribute to your mom, dad, and all your siblings. It is also an amazing message of hope and clarity for everyone who didn’t get to know you while you were living among us. Please continue your important work. I am a huge fan. I feel honored and priviledged that you are allowing me to come to know you. Please continue to guide us… collectively and individually …and as the spirit moves you….or as you move yourself, please write more books. Thank you. 🙂

–Pen Name