Scattered: Five Ways to Find Your Way Back

So I was at Esalen driving through the one.

So when you go up from Santa Barbara up the one to Esalen, there's a period of time where you lose cellular connection.

It's like 45 minutes of driving without any cell connection.

And during that period of the time, I was driving up there with Jacqueline, my assistant, we noticed that the hillside was just covered in this jabata grass, which is how I grew up, we called it elephant grass.

And elephant grass has this long stem and these big pillowing kind of soft feathery tops.

And the nature of elephant grass is that, or this jabata grass, is that it can scatter its seeds without being pollinated.

So it ends up scattering all over the hillside and becomes this like invasive species.

And That's how I was feeling in my own mind.

I also experienced this with people that were there, that maybe this is what they were feeling too, of this sense of scattered attention, scattered in their feelings, scattered in their motivations.

And it's sort of like all over the place without real clarity.

And over the course of the weekend...

Things started to gather together.

So today I want to talk about five ways to find your way back when you feel scattered.

The first thing that we did when we landed at Esalen was to go to the teacher's house.

So Esalen has this long history.

It's up in Northern California.

And some of the teachers that have taught there are teachers like Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts.

And I was staying in this house that was right on the edge of the water.

and went down after dropping off the bags and all that went down to the water where these huge waves were crashing up and looking out over the ocean had this experience of where i was standing or where you were standing someone else stood here before and not only that where you're standing There's so much more to the space than what you're all caught up in.

To be able to get from a place of scattered to clarity, you have to start by expanding your space.

And there's some research in psychology about attentional restoration and the benefits of nature for doing this, where there's these four qualities associated with attentional restoration and your ability to get away.

from what is all scrambling up in your mind, to have this soft fascination.

So looking out over the water, there was all these little bobbing seaweeds.

And then there was also the bobbing heads of sea otters.

And it's just this soft fascination of what's out there.