How Do We Navigate the Spoken Social Sphere with Greater Coherence and Compassion?

Awareness and Attention: Sovereignty, Dominance & Shared Realities

I woke up this morning thinking about a recent interaction where a well-meaning person simply couldn't stop sharing anecdotes and dominated the conversation, even after I mentioned we were trying to focus on something else.

The truth is, we can all likely recall instances where we were so bursting to share that we may have overridden cues, and we've certainly all had experiences where others couldn't contain themselves.

When this happens, the speaker assumes others' attention is available because they’re physically there. This creates discomfort in the social setting because of a few typically unnamed power dynamics that may feel impolite to address directly.

In another moment, someone may shut down when asked a valid question because their nervous system is already overloaded. The other person is left to deal with it if Elsewhere, people in a closed room make decisions that affect others who were never given a voice.

On the surface, these can seem like unrelated social tensions.

But underneath them is a shared theme: awareness, attention, permission, and power.

The new article I just finished, Awareness and Attention: Sovereignty, Dominance, and Who Gets the Talking Stick, explores the subtleties between self-governance and consciously or unconsciously attempting to govern others. It examines how typically unnamed conversational overrides happen, why neutral consent to receive input matters, how words shape a shared field of reality, and why nervous-system capacity can shape our growing ability to have mature conversations that honor and respect the visible and invisible energies in the room.

This discussion rests on a foundation of awareness and attention.

Awareness is the larger field that can include more than just our own desire to share, internal and external history, triggers, capacity, and point of view. When we "make our world bigger," we can energetically include others' perspectives and validity energetically, even if we disagree on a personal level.
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​Attention is where we choose to let our energy flow, which can eventually create a real experience. Where attention goes, energy flows.

From the Point of View of feeling overridden by others in a conversation, compassion does not require surrender. A person can have compassion for what may be happening in someone else and still choose not to feed the interaction, absorb the speaker's emotional energy, or participate in a reality frame they do not consent to co-create.

The other side of the coin is that we can utilize the higher experiential knowledge of compassion to create more 'coherence in the field' of my conversation, therefore uplifting the entire situation energetically through our benevolent intent.

The article also looks at brass-tacks strategies for dealing with over-talking and ungranted permission, as well as when not wanting to listen or engage could be a subtle form of control: “I’m not available right now” can be a healthy pause in one moment, and a subtle avoidance pattern in another, especially in ongoing relationships where shared responsibilities still need a path back to conversation.

In other words, this is not just about overtalking, interrupting or setting boundaries.

It is about:

• Consent in ordinary conversation.
• The social power of speech and framing.
• The unspoken burden requested of anyone when people won't stop sharing even after social cues are given.
• The need to respect different nervous-system capacities.
• The difference between a sovereign boundary and a dominance move.
• The kind of mutual respect a more collaborative culture will require from all of us.

This feels like an important thing for us to look at as a collective of awakening humanity. We begin here to name dynamics many of us feel but do not always have language for.

Naming it when the Emperor has no clothes emerges from the innocence of the child-like nature, seeing what is as itself, with neither judgment nor submission.

Enjoy the full article here, and please feel free to let me know how it lands:

Awareness and Attention: Sovereignty,
Dominance, and Who Gets the Talking Stick​

With compassion, grace, and the willingness to co-create more coherence in the field of our collective awakening,

Chiraya Dharma