The Practical Uses of Attention & Awareness

"My jaw keeps getting tense."

How many times have you been presented with that?

He was a student at a workshop I gave for trainees recently. My first step was to gather information:

- When does it happen?
- Where does it happen?
- How often does it happen?
- Who are you with when it happens?
- What are you usually doing when it happens?

Gathering information in this way suggests experiments on how to gather more. At this point, I am not trying to solve a person's situation; I want it to unfold in a way that we can build awareness of what is happening from a perspective that is deeper, wider and clearer. That's my first step.

It was Alexander's first step too — why was he getting "hoarse"?

In the case of the "jaw getting tense" scenario, it turns out his tension was associated with arguments, especially when questioning rules.

This information suggested that a conventional Alexander approach might not work. He was a trainee; he knew how to organise himself, but this situation persisted. Of course I could have used my touch, got him to move and this would have helped — but I guessed he was wondering: is something deeper at work here? Why does it keep happening?

In the first Daily of this TIA series, I asked: why did we pull down in the first place?

Sometimes it doesn't matter, and sometimes it does. In this case, it does.

The skill in Trauma-Informed Alexander (TIA) work is to guess which one you are dealing with. In my personal experience, trauma seems to fall into two categories:

1. Trauma we don't understand, but keep re-experiencing (like migraines).
2. Trauma we understand, repeat and cannot stop (like addiction).

Whether it's Trauma 1 or Trauma 2, clients come because they are ineffective in changing their behaviour. Simply understanding behaviour is not a pathway out — we all know that. This is because there is a vast amount of subterranean information that is unidentified and consequently ignored.

We must shine the spotlight of attention into this darkness.

Therefore, I set up an imaginary situation where the trainee had to argue with his "supervisor" about some silly rule in the company. Very quickly, his jaw got tense.

At this point, conventional Alexander says: let's help him reorganise his coordination. However, I didn't want him to come out of the tightness he was experiencing; I wanted him to explore it further...

"What else are you experiencing in your body?"

This opens up your Alexander session beyond proprioception/kinaesthesia, i.e., "body position/movement" information, to include interoceptive information, more aligned with the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS): internal organs and susceptibility to defensive reactions.

He started to describe a tightness in his tummy and other sensations.

So I asked him: "Do those sensations remind you of any other situation?"

After a moment, he answered: "Yes, with my father. I can remember being like this with my father."

***

With 25 people watching, a slight panic enters me. I have no idea what will happen now. Do I continue down this road? No, I will stop now. This is using TIA titration — do a little bit, take a small step, then leave a person with the insight to process on their own.

His trauma was shifting from something he wasn't aware of to something he was, and we got there by using "bottom-up" attention on his inner sensations. Here, the breakthrough came simply from asking him to be attentive to the sensations that situation itself was generating.

***

"Bottom-up" attention is one way that cognitive neuroscience classifies attention, and it was this attention that opened his awareness of his father's involvement.

Attention and awareness, as it turns out, are treated very differently scientifically. No one disputes that we start with a phenomenal amount of sensory data. But is that awareness? It pulls us into the AI debate, but at the moment no serious framework treats data volume alone as sufficient for awareness.

So what is awareness, and how is it different from attention?

NEXT: How Top-Down & Bottom-Up Attention Work in TIA

Stay Tuned.

NOTE
This is the 8th in a series of 12 emails as a prelude to my Trauma-Informed Alexander workshop in London (August 23rd) and New York (October 25th). You can book at the link below. Email me for a discount if you are an AT trainee or financially challenged:

www.atsuccess.com/workshops-2026