Jonathan Allin

A nice afternoon spent writing and then practicing . ,

Here's a VERY partial excerpt from the first of three books that I'm writing about our relationship to our central nervous system. I'm still in the early throes so I'm excited to see where this takes me, and hopefully others. 🌩

The weather emoji (🌤) is a central theme from the first book, "Default State" .

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Chapter 7 - Noticing Before Fixing [partial]
The Compulsive Regulation Trap
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The Breath
Here's the part that surprised me most when I started paying real attention to it, both in my own practice and in years of watching students reach for tools.

Reaching for a breathing technique or a meditation app from a place of panic does not calm the nervous system. It often does the opposite. This isn't because the technique is bad. It's because the urgency behind the reaching is itself a signal, and your nervous system reads that signal loud and clear. If you're lunging for a tool with real desperation, some part of you has already concluded that something is genuinely wrong, and that conclusion, that verdict of danger, doesn't get undone by the breathing exercise you're now performing on top of it.

The urgency confirms the very thing the technique was supposed to resolve.
I call this the "compulsive regulation trap", and I want you to actually recognize it, because it's likely cost you more peace than the original activation ever did. It looks like reaching for the app the instant you feel the first flicker of tension. It looks like a rigid, anxious insistence on doing the breathing exercise correctly, right now, as though getting it wrong would be dangerous. It looks like using a genuinely good tool as a form of white-knuckled control rather than as an invitation.

The tool isn't the problem, but the panic wrapped around reaching for it is.
I've watched this happen in students who are, by every measure, doing everything right on paper. They've learned a beautiful breath practice. They use it the instant they feel anything at all, with a kind of gripping urgency, checking their own progress mid-breath, wondering if it's working yet, growing more frustrated with each exhale that doesn't immediately deliver relief. The breath itself is fine. What's actually happening is a nervous system now managing two problems at once: the original activation and the anxious performance of trying to fix it both correctly and quickly enough.

That's strictly worse than one problem, even though it looks, from the outside, like someone doing all the right things.

This is precisely why noticing has to come first, uncoupled entirely from fixing. You have to be able to see the activation clearly, without immediately grabbing for a solution, or the solution itself becomes just one more thing your nervous system has to manage under pressure.

Getting to work on the first book of a 3-part series... Long day, time to take a break and practice my own

Here's a chunk of Chapter 1.
🧠
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CHAPTER 1 - The Hum You Stopped Hearing

I was mid-cue, walking the room during a yoga class I've taught a hundred times, when I noticed my own shoulders were hunched up near my ears.

I'd LITERALLY just told a student, gently, to let hers drop. “Roll them back and down”, I said, “let them fall away from your ears.” She did. I watched her exhale and settle a half inch lower into the pose, and I kept walking the room. It took me another full breath to notice that I hadn't taken my own advice in longer than I could even put into words.

This wasn’t tension in the way you'd notice if someone startled you, and it wasn’t the kind of tightness that loudly announces itself.

This was much quieter than that. It was the kind of holding you only catch by accident, the way you catch your own reflection in a mirror and think, for half a second, that's not how I picture myself standing, or when you hear your own voice recorded and you’re not quite certain who it is. Nothing about the class was terribly difficult. I knew the room, I knew most of the students, and I knew the cues and where we were going next. There was no reason for my body to be doing what it was doing.

And still, somewhere underneath all of it, I'd been braced the entire time.

So I automatically did the thing you do when you catch something like this. I tried to trace it back. Had something happened that morning? No. That week? Nothing I could point to.

I kept teaching, kept my voice even, and ran back through the last few years in the part of my mind that wasn't cueing the next pose, and I couldn't find the moment my shoulders climbed up and decided to take up residence there.

There wasn't a single moment.

There wasn't an event I could blame it on. It had simply become where they lived now most of the time, the way a houseplant grows toward whatever window gets the most light… so slowly that you never catch it moving, and only ever notice, one day, that it's permanently leaning.

That's the moment the idea for this book started. It wasn’t the shoulders themselves. It was the realization that something had been running in the background for so long that I'd stopped registering it as anything at all, even in a room where noticing exactly this kind of thing is supposed to be my job. It didn't feel like an event. It felt like any other class.

And that's exactly the problem with it. If it had felt like an event, I would have dealt with it the way I deal with events. Noticed the tightness, taken a breath, let it go.

We're reasonably well equipped to handle things that announce themselves. What we're not equipped to handle—because nothing or no one ever teaches us to look for it—is the thing that never announces itself at all, the thing that quietly becomes the background hum of an ordinary day, indistinguishable from the sound of my own voice cueing someone else's shoulders down while mine stayed exactly where they were.

When your book is going to American Samoa to be incorporated into the buyer's (who is also a respected island Physician) HeartMath training. Not bad for simply being the writing exercise that I started a year and half ago.🔥

Not a terribly big deal, but definitely validation and I'm here for it.

Point of the matter: that thing that you want to do and can't stop thinking about—and that you think no one will even care about—is probably exactly the thing you should be doing with your time. 🏆

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"Nice....buying a book. Congratulation & Cheers Jon! Definitely will add the lessons to enhance the Heartmath training I'm engaged in since last month."

There is something meditative about painting flowers this way, letting the petals blur into currents of color until they stop looking like flowers and start looking like how I'm feeling.

"Still Waters Blooming" is meant to ask what a garden looks like from underwater, or from inside a memory.

Which bloom pulls your eye first: the magenta, the cobalt, or the chartreuse? Tell me in the comments.

Caught a good pic during dinner last night.⚡🌩. Perfect timing. 💪

Some new work is coming... Simply put, I just needed some space to sort out the love/hate relationship that I've had with this piece I've been working on.

We decided on a short-term separation.
But we have now mutually agreed to come to terms.

More soon. 💪🔥
Here's a glimpse.

Focused Fire started out as a writing exercise. But the more I added to it, re-read it, and edited it, the clearer it became how much value this project could offer other people beyond myself.

So I decided to learn the skills I needed to make it real: structuring a manuscript, editing it into something worth someone else's time, and understanding what it actually takes to format, publish and distribute a book properly.

Today I'm happy to announce that Focused Fire: The Five-Fires Method to Build Lasting Focus is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions, and I've also enrolled it in Kindle Unlimited.

If you've ever felt like your attention belongs to everyone except you, this book was written for you. Just search Amazon using the keywords "focused fire".

Someone who's not on FB asked me about the demo I shot on how to frame a painting on Pixels.com, soooo I guess I have a YouTube channel now.

Now to figure out what subject matter to populate the channel with... (other than the demo) 🤔 Guided meditations, readings of my writing? I'm not big on being on camera so it may all just be spoken word. I'm open to suggestions.

New book announcement on Monday and some new art that I've been working on coming up. I went through some old artwork on my laptop but I'm "iffy" on putting it out so I just have to keep producing. 🤘

www.youtube.com/.108

Jonathan Allin Reclaiming attention in a world designed to scatter it. Through mindfulness, breath, and practices drawn from yoga, creative work, and lived experience, I explore how to cultivate real focus in everyday life — not the rigid kind built on pressure, but the steady kind that grows from awareness and ...

Some flowers ask to be painted quietly. This one is all soft color and motion, blue and violet petals caught mid-breath, like they're still unfolding as you look at them. I wanted the piece to feel less like a photograph of an orchid and more like a memory of one.

New painting up on Pixels! You can customize the frame, matting, size, and more there. "Whispers of the Orchid".

Early writing from a new 3-part series of ebooks I'm beginning to outline and draft... much more to come. 🧠

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The Difference Between a Storm and a Climate

Most of what gets written about anxiety treats it like weather. Something that rolls in, causes a disturbance, and rolls back out. A presentation at work. A hard conversation. A flight that hits turbulence. The nervous system spikes, does its job, and comes back down.

That kind of anxiety is real, and it certainly has its place in the conversation. But it's not what this book is about.

This book is about climate, not weather. It's about the baseline your nervous system quietly settles into and then stops registering as a baseline at all. It's about the difference between a body that gets stressed sometimes and a body that has simply reset its idea of normal to include a low, steady hum of activation, all of the time, regardless of what's actually happening around it.

Here's the tell. If someone asked you, right now, whether you're anxious, you'd probably say no. You're not panicking. You're not shaking. You'd probably say you're just a little wired, maybe. Just someone who doesn't relax easily.

"I'm just built that way", you'd concede.

But that word, "built" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. It's suggesting something fixed and immovable. An idea installed that you were handed at birth and have simply been carrying ever since, the way you carry your height or your eye color.

But I don't think that's what's actually happening. I think what's happening is closer to what happened to my shoulders in that coffee shop. A pattern, repeated so many times, for so long, that it stopped feeling like a pattern and started feeling like identity.