Mindfulness is a relational quality. It’s not about what’s happening, it’s about how we are with what’s happening. The point isn’t to utterly control our internal and external environment—the point is to have a different relationship to everything. 

Mindfulness can go anywhere: It doesn’t take the shape of what it’s watching. So we can be mindful of those beautiful, wonderful, tremendous times, we can be mindful of those difficult, painful times, and we can be mindful of all the neutral times. It’s a quality that can go anywhere. That’s the biggest, most expansive sense of what our meditation is about. 

When we sit and consciously cultivate mindfulness, through sitting meditation or movement meditation, like walking, it’s a period of dedicated attention. It’s the key to being able to bring that attention into our day. Very often, the foundational exercise in mindfulness has to do with the body, because it’s the most concrete, it’s the most available to us. We take the attention we have cultivated on the feeling of the breath, and expand it to other sensations in the body. 

Some experiences will be very, very pleasant. Some of the experiences, of course, will be painful. It’s just the nature of being in a body, and we get to see what it’s like to be with the painful experience. We see if we can open fully to those experiences without all of those mental add-ons. We come back to the experience in the body, and then we have the opportunity to see more deeply into the nature of what’s happening.

Now, if you are doing your meditation in the form of sitting, it’s important to remember balance. You don’t want to sit in a particularly painful posture. You don’t want to hurt yourself in some way. But if you can sit comfortably, and maybe not shift posture, at the very first moment of some kind of difficult sensation without straining your body, it will open up a world of investigation. (Where is the suffering, actually? Is it in your knee, is it in your mind?)

It’s not a process of grim endurance and somehow making it through. It’s much more a process of the invigoration of exploration and discovery. And it’s quite empowering to realize that we can transform our minds so that our relationship to pleasure and pain and neutrality can all be different. 

Guided Practice: Mindfulness and the Body

So let’s sit together. We’re going to experiment now with a body scan in our meditation practice. You can sit comfortably or lie down, however you feel most at ease. And begin by once again bringing your attention to the feeling of the breath. Just the natural sensations of the in and out breath. If you’re with the breath at the nostrils, that may be tingling, vibration, warmth, or coolness. If you’re with the breath at the chest or the abdomen, it may be movement, pressure stretching, release. You don’t have to name these things, but feel them. This is where we rest our attention.

(Pause).

And then bring your attention to the top of your head. You don’t have to use imagery or visualization. But notice if there are actually any sensations that you can perceive: tingling, pressure. Again, you don’t need to name them, but feel them. What we normally take to be solid is really a living, moving sea of sensation.

Simply noticing, slowly bring your awareness down through your face. Some sensations are pleasant, some are unpleasant, some are neutral. We’re cultivating the same kind of balanced awareness with whatever we’re picking up.

Notice your ears. Notice the back of your head. No judgment. No condemnation. Simply being in the moment with whatever you’re perceiving. Notice your neck and throat, your shoulders.

You may feel some stress and strain, the accumulation of tension. It’s okay. Of course it would be tempting to spin out into ways to “fix” this tension.

But our goal here is simply to be aware and have awareness itself be the vehicle of transformation. Let’s just be with our experience as it is right now, relinquishing as many add-ons as may appear.

Bring your attention down through one arm all the way through to your fingertips, and, when you’re ready, the other arm.

See if, in this process, you can make the shift from the more conceptual level of thinking, for example, of “my finger,” to the world of direct sensation. Pulsing, throbbing, pressure, vibrating, heat, cold, again, without needing to name these things. This is what we’re feeling.

And then bring awareness down through the back. One teacher once commented to me that in the West we tend to be so forward-oriented, we don’t even know we have a back. So what’s it like when you fill your body with this kind of awareness, this kind of attention? Just sweep your attention through your back, and then chest, stomach, groin.

Bringing your attention down through one thigh to the knee and then the other, down one leg, all the way to the toes, and, when you’re ready, the other leg.

You can sit or lie there, feeling the aliveness of the body. Feeling its ever-changing nature.

And when you feel ready, you can open your eyes.

(End of practice)

This is one of the most accessible forms of attention. So much of our day is built around simple sensations. We can cultivate attention to these simple sensations throughout the day. 

For example, if you’re in a meeting, every now and then, see if you can feel your feet touching the ground. It may sound simplistic, but it’s actually very powerful. If you’re washing your hands, instead of, at that very moment, trying to think through a presentation you’re going to give, see if you can simply feel the sensation of water on your hands. 

If you’re reaching for a cup of tea, or a cup of coffee, pause for a moment and simply feel that contact as you actually experience touching that cup.

These are just some of the simple ways we can break some of the crazy momentum of our day, and bring ourselves back to a state of mindfulness.

♦

Excerpted from Sharon Salzberg’s 2013 Dharma Talk, “Real Happiness: A 28-Day Meditation Program.” Watch the full Dharma Talk here.

This article was originally published on August 26, 2022.

The post A Guided Practice for Cultivating Attention   appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I am a very committed mindfulness practitioner. I sit every day for thirty minutes, no matter what. The only day I missed in the last three years was the day my daughter was born. Nothing can stop me from paying attention. . . except, perhaps, the perception that nothing can stop me from paying attention. Adopting this stance can have an unfortunate side effect: the sense that I’m so mindful that it is totally fine if I become a “scrollbot” for 20 minutes on social media because I’ve somehow earned it. Even more dangerous is the misperception that practice makes me “good” and thus I’m incapable of doing bad (my wife might have something to say about that one). What I’m talking about might be called “blindfulness.”

This phenomenon is related to a psychological concept called “moral licensing.” In his podcast, Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell offered a commonly accepted definition for the term: “Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral.” 

Gladwell then provided a prime example of moral licensing, uncovered by a psychologist named Daniel Effron from the London Business School. After Barack Obama became president in 2008, Effron surveyed people who identified as Obama supporters and found that the explicit support of a Black president actually led some people to be implicitly racist, believing their support somehow inured them to such behavior. “​​A significant chunk of the people who supported Barack Obama were then more likely, at least in the experiment, to express racially questionable opinions,” Gladwell explained. One step forward, two steps back.

Those engaged in mindfulness practice can run the risk of both moral and attentional licensing: the belief that one is above bad behavior or that one has earned a respite from paying attention in much the same way an athlete winds down from excess movement with excess stillness. Yet mindfulness doesn’t quite work that way. We don’t bank it and, a literal belief in karma aside, we can’t accrue goodness. So how can mindfulness practitioners be aware of the one-step-forward-two-steps-back pitfall? 

I posed this question to Zen teacher Brad Warner, the author of Sex, Sin, and Zen, and someone who has bristled usefully against the preconceptions people often have about practice. 

“I think it’s important to try to maintain the same attitude one establishes in zazen practice throughout the rest of the day,” said Warner. “It’s not that you try to establish an intense focus for 20 or 40 minutes and then you’re done. In zazen it’s not about establishing an intense focus anyway. It’s about noticing what you’re doing. If you’re vegging out, you notice that. If your concentration is intense, you notice that. These states come and go.”

In other words, creating a binary division between mindfulness and ordinariness might only serve to reify the idea that depth occurs on the cushion and anything goes off the cushion. This can lead to what Chogyam Trungpa called “spiritual materialism”—grasping at states that we believe are special to the exclusion of the richness that is inherent in all states.  

“What is it that is there in every state?” asked Warner. “Who is vegging out? Who is maintaining intense focus? To me, that’s the interesting thing to investigate.” An investigation that can be honed during formal practice but that is no less valuable during informal practice.

“We can get curious about that craving. . . and that curiosity itself feels better than the craving or the anxiety it produces.”

Another way to think about blindfulness is through the lens of neuroscience. Dr. Judson Brewer, the Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, and the author of Unwinding Anxiety, has studied consumptive habit loops in the brain. We tend to engage in licensing because of the short term gratification of scrolling on Instagram or engaging in a salacious vice. According to Brewer’s research, bringing awareness to this habit loop is the first step toward seeing it clearly, and seeing how unrewarding such behaviors are in the long run. Mindfulness can become what he terms the “bigger, better offer.” As he explained to me, cultivating this openness can help us recognize that licensing is a pitfall rather than a productive pursuit.

“We can get curious about that craving,” explained Brewer, “and that curiosity itself feels better than the craving or the anxiety it produces. Because curiosity feels better, our brain starts to engage in that.” A rewiring can occur when our relationship with licensing behavior changes from indulgence to inquiry.

Avoiding blindfulness doesn’t involve going cold turkey on behaviors but seeing them clearly. It is not about establishing an internal police state through constant vigilance, and then guilting ourselves into being extra virtuous when we lapse. This only creates a division: good/bad, open/closed, mindful/blindful. Mindfulness is not a state but an action, a cultivation of openness, again and again in each moment. Blindfulness occurs when we believe we have achieved this state, our task completed. Mindfulness occurs when we humbly accept that the activity is ongoing and the choice to practice is always available.

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Thanks to modern technology, we regularly see photographs and videos of terrible events happening around the world. On television, the internet, and social media, each day we witness disasters, violence, cruelty, injustice, even murder. As a global society and as individuals, access to this information is necessary and important. Collectively, it helps us make informed policy decisions, address injustice, and raise awareness of people and places that might otherwise go unnoticed. Individually, it helps us connect with the suffering and the joy happening in places far away, to people we’ve never met and perhaps never will meet, to remind us of our shared humanity and how our actions can create positive—and negative—changes for all beings. 

Sometimes, viewing all this struggle and pain can be overwhelming, making us feel helpless and discouraged. One person can’t possibly solve all the terrible things happening in the world, so why even worry about it? That’s how my student, Briana, felt last month when she told me, with frustration and anger, “Kim, there’s nothing I can do to fix these problems—in  Afghanistan, in New Orleans—so I’m just going to make a donation and forget about it!”  

I understood her frustration and discouragement. Many times I’ve felt the same way. Witnessing so much pain and sorrow so frequently, it’s hard not to feel frustrated, angry, and impotent. But even though we don’t have the power to end all suffering right now, wisdom shows us that we don’t need to fall into despair or indifference. Although it might not seem like it, there is always something we can do, and that is to skillfully pay attention.

Skillful attention is not the same as watching the news or reading social media. It’s choosing to direct our mindfulness and compassion to other living beings, and to make a real connection to their experience with our minds and hearts. When we truly direct our attention to anyone who is fearful, sick, or distressed, we can allow ourselves to feel their pain and struggle, and recognize that just like us, they want to be happy and free from suffering. With skillful attention, we understand our shared humanity and the poignant truth that all of our lives are precious and vulnerable. With this wisdom, our natural empathy and compassion arises and we’re able to deeply connect with everyone’s struggles and suffering—including our own.  

With skillful attention we also recognize that all our lives are deeply and inextricably connected, so all of our actions—our thoughts, speech, and behaviors—matter. Though we may not be able to prevent all suffering—from war and racism to poverty—right now, we can take actions to create conditions so that this suffering is alleviated in the future. Practicing skillful attention allows us to take the long view, knowing that the outcome of our actions will have effects even after we die.  

If you’re feeling hopeless and disheartened by the state of the world, I encourage you to use your skillful attention to make a real connection to all living beings. Find a quiet spot, get still, stop talking, and put your hand on your heart. Take a few breaths, then imagine someone you love, and say silently, “May you be free from danger, violence, and hatred. May your actions  bring benefit and do no harm.” After a few minutes, think of yourself, and say silently, “May I be free from danger, violence, and hatred. May my actions bring benefit and do no harm.” Take your time. Then, when you’re ready, include your loved one and yourself with everyone suffering. You can include the group or person in the news that you’ve been worrying about, and say silently, ”May we be free from danger, violence, and hatred. May our actions bring benefit  and do no harm.” Repeat as necessary. 

The post Overwhelmed? Pay Attention appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What are you attending to at this very moment? What—or who—were you attending to before this? Perhaps more importantly, what was the quality of your attention? Were you fully aware and present, or partially distracted and disengaged?

These are the types of contemplative questions I ask students in my Asian religions course. Contemplative pedagogy incorporates stillness, silence, mindfulness, attention, reflection, and self-inquiry into teaching and learning, helping students build their attention, deepen their levels of introspection, and strengthen their sense of connection. Although some instructors incorporate contemplative practices directly from religious traditions, because I teach at a public university, I’ve designed what I call “analogous activities,” which are similar to religious practices, but secular and relatively simple to perform. 

My students practice social rituals when they’re learning about Confucianism; stillness and sitting in nature when learning about the Daoist practices of “fasting the mind;” social media fasts when learning about Hindu ascetic practices; singing when learning about Sikh devotional hymns; mindfulness when learning about Buddhist meditation; and nonviolent communication when learning about Jainism. They intentionally engage in the analogous activity for several days, journal about how it affects them and their relationships with others, and write a reflection that brings their experience into dialogue with their understanding of the respective tradition. My research has shown that engaging in such activities develops my students’ moral attention because it disrupts their fixation on themselves and heightens their awareness of others. Most students observe that their relationships with other people improve, and they identify digital technologies as impediments to their interpersonal interactions. 

Continuous Partial Attention

Technology allows for constant access to a variety of media through a range of digital devices, and this impacts the way some students manage their attention. They tend toward “continuous partial attention,” a phrase coined by tech writer Linda Stone that describes the process of paying simultaneous attention to numerous sources of information, but on a superficial level. Continuous partial attention is motivated by the desire to continuously connect and be connected in an effort not to miss anything. As Stone says, “It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior, and it involves an artificial sense of constant crisis.” Continuous partial attention can also impede my students’ ability to perform tasks requiring undivided attention.

This continuous partial attention—and resulting tendency to be less attentive to the people surrounding them—poses considerable obstacles to my students’ capacity for moral attention, or perceiving people, environments, and situations in all of their complexity and particularity. French political thinker, social activist, and essayist Simone Weil called moral attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” In Waiting for God, a collection of essays published after her death, Weil writes, “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object…Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” Moral attention involves suspending our thoughts so that we can actively receive something or someone else. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum has emphasized, moral attention requires that one be “finely aware and richly responsible.” She writes, “We live amid bewildering complexities. Obtuseness and refusal of vision are our besetting vices. Responsible lucidity can be wrestled from that darkness only by painful vigilant effort, the intense scrutiny of particulars. Our highest and hardest task is to make ourselves people ‘on whom nothing is lost.’” In other words, moral attention requires considerable effort and concentration on the particularity of people and situations—something that continuous partial attention undermines. By disrupting their habitual engagement with digital devices, analogous activities allow my students to develop their capacity for moral attention.

Social Rituals

The social ritual activity instructs students to intentionally perform five social rituals for one week, including opening doors for others or letting them into traffic, saying please and thank you, and looking people in the eyes when they talk to them. Although most social rituals come naturally to students, they have admitted having difficulty and experiencing discomfort when maintaining eye contact with other people because it requires concentration and focus. Reflecting on their experience, however, they report feeling a greater sense of transparency and presence—a feeling that became particularly palpable for students who committed to not using their phones while conversing with others. Several students have admitted that although it was initially difficult to not look at their phones, it got easier. When they provided their full attention to the other person by making eye contact, they were showing respect through their nonverbal behavior. One student identified it as a “generational concern.” “Whether users are scrolling through social media or texting friends, cell phones have a tendency to be an intruder during face-to-face conversation.” Burying her cell phone in her bag, she noted how she found herself engaging in deeper conversation, but also admitted feeling annoyed when the other person checked her phone. She was not alone—dozens of students admitted feeling disappointed when others failed to similarly observe such social rituals.

Students often discuss the adverse impact that digital devices have on their interactions with other people. After performing the “social rituals” one student wrote, “It is easy to assume that by communicating through my phone, I am participating in a community. However, the more direct relationship to the world is to the people physically around me, and I owe them the respect that such friendship deserves.” Some students realized that they previously prioritized those in their online networks rather than people around them. Some went further and identified their phones as obstacles for interpersonal relationships. As one student wrote, “I wasn’t as zoned in on my phone and actually interacted with others more than I normally would.” Another student remarked, “By giving my full attention, I realized that this strengthens relationships and can create greater harmony.” In this way, they brought their experience into dialogue with Confucian notions of humaneness and harmony, and recognized the ethical impact of attention. They identified digital distraction as endemic to those of their generation. “I noticed that most people hold doors open for people or say please and thank you, but not many people really pay attention to their friends when they have a conversation,” another student wrote. “They are usually multitasking by talking to friends and checking social media on their phones.” 

Stillness

The stillness activity challenges my students’ tendency to be busy, productive, and constantly connected. As students learn about Daoist traditions, they engage in non-purposeful action—sitting quietly in nature or otherwise being still—for at least thirty minutes a day for a week. They reflect on their experience, including the impact it had on themselves and the responses they noted from others. Students choose various ways to engage in stillness such as sitting at the beach watching the ocean, sitting on the balconies of their apartment, swinging in a hammock, or sitting and drinking tea. Almost all of the students say they thought it would be an easy practice, but instead they find it incredibly challenging. 

For many students, the experience of solitude is novel: “It was like thirty minutes of just being with myself uninterrupted by anything. I’m alone a lot, but there’s always some sort of device distracting me,” one student wrote after trying this practice. Many noticed that their habitual instinct was to reach for their phone when they were alone. As one student wrote, “I sat there for a solid minute before I automatically reached for my phone. . . I found one of the hardest struggles was to be disconnected from the world of the internet. After this, I have become conscious of the amount of time that I am constantly connected to my phone and to the latest buzzes constantly changing my thinking and what I am doing.” They acknowledge their tendency to disrupt what they are doing in order to check text messages and notifications on their phone, and how their minds resisted not doing anything. As one student remarked, “As millennials, we need to be constantly stimulated by the next entertaining thing—silence and ‘doing nothing’ are boring. . . Doing nothing has proven to do a lot more than worrying and stressing about the minuscule and trivial parts of life.” 

Although they struggle on the first day, most students eventually appreciate the value of stillness and how it gives them a broader perspective on their lives. One student wrote, “My mind was in complete control, and it had my full, undivided attention, which is a very unique experience.” Instead of being partially aware, the student appreciated how stillness allowed for complete and undivided attention.

Social Media Fasting

Students become especially aware of the distractions of digital devices when they engage in a social media fast, during which they avoid logging into social media or browsing the internet. Often students resort to deleting social media apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook from their phones, and even after deleting them they still find themselves reaching for their phones to look for updates. They describe feeling disconnected from their peers because they can’t “check in” to restaurants through Facebook or upload pictures of their meals to Instagram, and they struggle with constant cravings to be informed of what others are doing. Recalling the overwhelming and over-stimulating effects of continuous partial attention, students describe feeling anxious when withdrawing from social media. They remark how novel it is to make “actual jokes and laugh at things that people are saying in front of me” as opposed to scrolling through funny videos on Facebook. They describe the exercise as a process of de- and re-habituation. 

Many students also find it novel that they can decide whether or not to engage with social media. When they reflect on their experience, they often bring it into dialogue with Hindu ascetic ideals of discipline, self-control, and taming the ego. They describe the social media fast as an opportunity to gain back the control that social media had over them.

Many students admit to an “obsessive relationship with social media” and struggling with various types of discomfort and anxiety during the social media fast, especially the “fear of missing out,” known as FOMO, which captures the “artificial sense of constant crisis” that Stone associates with excessive continuous partial attention. Downtime is usually spent checking the latest Instagram pictures, Facebook posts, or Twitter updates, and the social media fast heightens students’ awareness of a dependency on their digital devices. As one student remarked, “I found it especially hard when waiting for class to start because I wasn’t sure what to do and I just felt very awkward and uncomfortable. It amazed me how much [I], as well as recent generations, rely on technology. [We] are constantly glued to our phones and computers instead of actually interacting with people.” 

Another student, who described initially experiencing great FOMO after a social media fast, wrote, “By not being nearly as tied down by my smartphone or laptop all day, I was able to experience reality in entirely different ways, whether it was asking friends in face-to-face communication what social events were going on later that day or using words instead of texts to communicate with people.” The student disciplined his desires, refocused his attention to people around him, and discovered a new way of engaging with the world.

Paying Attention 

It’s clear that the analogous activities encourage the development of moral attention, allowing students to suspend thought and forget themselves, to actively receive others, to care for the particulars of others, and to increase their sensory concentration, all of which constitute crucial elements of moral attention. One student wrote after a social ritual activity, “During the course of this exercise, I was more aware of my surroundings. I was able to be mindful of my actions and how they are perceived by others.” Many students have found that the stillness activity heightened their sense of hearing, which shifted their focus away from themselves and their own thoughts. One student described how she became keenly aware of birds chirping, the wind blowing, and people laughing, and wrote, “This was a little hard for me, only because when you yourself are so quiet, the noises that surround you become extremely loud and noticeable.” Another student wrote, “One can begin to see the world for what it is, rather than overanalyzing and worrying about everything.” 

Another wrote, “I was able to pay attention to little things within the environment like ants crawling on the bench and squirrels running up trees.” Another student wrote, “Watching the raindrops striking the pavement and the wind shaking the trees, I thought of myself as a squirrel or some other animal jumping between the rapidly swaying branches and quickly falling raindrops. I saw other people pass from time to time, and I thought about what lives they may have been living, and what it would be like to be them.” 

Paying attention to the details—the wind, rain, and squirrels—led the student to consider the perspectives and experiences of others. This was echoed in yet another student who wrote, “This practice has made me realize that there are different ways of seeing and reacting to things. It really emphasized, to me, that there are different ways of thinking; intellectual and rational thinking is not always right or the best.” When students allowed their minds to wander more freely, they discovered greater care and concern for others.

In all these ways, the so-called analogous activities prompt students to suspend thought, become receptive, and focus their attention on others. They challenge conventional thinking and, perhaps more importantly, conventional habits tied to digital devices that can impinge on moral attention. 

From a Buddhist perspective, such activities are important because they reveal the true nature of reality. They lay bare the three characteristics of existence: no-self, suffering, and impermanence. When we suspend thoughts that ordinarily lead us to fixate on ourselves, and instead become receptive and attuned to others and our surroundings, we become more sensitive to universal experiences of suffering and change. As Weil writes, “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing. . . It is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.” 

♦

This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.

The post How to Hone Moral Attention—and Why It’s So Important   appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Boredom fascinates me. Whenever I feel bored, I wonder, “Why is this such an unpleasant experience?” I mean, I’m not in pain or being tormented or forced to do something I don’t like. I’m simply feeling disinterested in what is currently happening. 

My own life during the pandemic was one monotonous routine. Wake up, make coffee in the kitchen, go back to the bedroom to work, eat lunch in the kitchen, return to the bedroom to work, eat dinner in the kitchen, take a walk around the local park, watch a movie in the living room, go back to the bedroom to sleep. Each day was very predictable, and I felt so much boredom. I wanted something to change, to break the monotony, to add some excitement or anticipation to my experience. In the past year, I heard about so many people struggling with boredom, feeling very “blah” about each day seeming the same. 

In Buddhism, boredom is one of the three poisons. These are mind states that cause suffering. There’s hatred and aversion, not wanting something; then greed and desire, really wanting something; and then there’s boredom and ignorance, and a lack of interest. 

And then I remembered the movie Groundhog Day. Bill Murray plays a New Yorker visiting Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania for the annual Groundhog Day holiday. But when he wakes up the next day, it’s Groundhog Day again—and it’s exactly the same as yesterday. This continues to happen day after day, and he realizes he’s stuck in the same time and space.

Throughout the movie, Bill Murray experiences different stages of reacting to the time loop. At first, he hates it and tries everything to make it end. Then he figures as long as he’s stuck in the same day, he’ll exploit it. After that, he’s so bored, nothing interests him. But finally, after a long, long time—perhaps centuries—he burns through his hatred, greed, and especially his boredom. 

It is the boredom that prevents him from seeing what’s going on, the life around him. He stops trying to change events and instead starts to pay attention to each moment. Each morning he wakes up and responds to that moment—not to the feeling of, “Oh no this day is going to start over again.” He begins to respond with compassion and wisdom to whatever and whomever he encounters, and when he does this, he’s free from the poisons of suffering and the ignorance of separation—and he’s happy. 

At some point in the pandemic, I decided to take inspiration from Bill Murray and look a little closer at what’s really happening in my small and limited space. And when I really paid attention, I could see that each moment is different and new. I began to notice the way the sunlight reflects off the cherry tree outside the front window and its blossoms as they opened and died. I noticed my husband and his request for homemade chocolate chip cookies that day, and I heard the sound of an ambulance on its way to the hospital. I let myself feel the sadness in my heart that would come and go, and the happiness too. 

The antidote for the poison of boredom is simply to pay closer attention. There is always something happening, no matter how subtle. One of the truths of life and phenomena is that everything is always changing. Every moment is impermanent. Nothing just stays the same, it’s all arising and coming together and falling apart. If I pay attention, I can see that even the light in my bedroom moves and changes throughout the day and it’s never exactly the same, and each moment it’s a little bit different. 

The word mindfulness is used so often, but mindfulness meditation is paying attention to what’s happening as it arises. Instead of focusing our attention on one object like the breath, we pay attention to what’s happening as it happens. This practice—like all meditation practice—requires us to be kind to ourselves, though it may be hard at first. We haven’t been trained or accustomed to noticing small and subtle changes—we’re very used to excitement and things grabbing our attention. So it takes a bit of patience and practice to relearn the art of paying attention. And we need to remember to come back. The Pali word for mindfulness is sati, in Sanskrit it’s smriti, and its meaning is “to re-collect, to gather, to come back.” What are we coming back to? Here and now. 

A Mindfulness Practice for When You Feel Bored

Take your time to find a quiet and comfortable spot where you can sit. Stop talking and don’t use your devices. Gently bring your attention to your feet, your seat, your shoulder blades, the back of your head. Give yourself permission to experience this very moment. 

Rest your attention to the rise and fall of your belly as you inhale and exhale. Just lightly place your awareness on your abdomen, being with each breath as your belly expands and contracts. Resist the urge to get up or to look around. Softly keep your attention on your breathing, gently feeling the rise and fall of your breathing. 

Now carefully open your attention to other sensations that are arising. Rest in sound that may be entering your ears, the air on your skin, light entering your eyes, taste in your mouth. Let these sensations come and go without grabbing them. 

If you find you’re getting caught in a plan or memory or idea, that’s okay. Breathe out quietly and slowly, and refocus your attention on your belly. When you’re ready, start again—carefully opening your attention from just your breath to other sensations. You may feel an itch or tension, or see an image in your mind, or hear the neighbors. Try not to work too hard. Let yourself rest in what’s arising. 

As we conclude this meditation, take a moment to appreciate your time and your good heart, say “thank you” to yourself. And the next time you’re feeling bored, stop and pay attention to what’s arising—inside and outside. 

♦

Adapted from Kimberly Brown’s Dharma Talk, “In It Together: Kindness through Crisis”

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Attention is not just another “function” alongside other cognitive functions. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to, the very nature of the world in which those “functions” would be carried out and in which those “things” would exist. Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world. If you are my friend, the way in which I attend to you will be different from the way in which I would attend to you if you were my employer, my patient, the suspect in a crime I am investigating, my lover, my aunt, a body waiting to be dissected. In all these circumstances, except the last, you will also have a quite different experience not just of me, but of yourself: you would feel changed if I changed the type of my attention. And yet nothing objectively has changed.

So it is, not just with the human world, but with everything with which we come into contact. A mountain that is a landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to a prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or to another the dwelling place of the gods, is changed by the attention given to it. There is no “real” mountain that can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking that reveals the true mountain.

Science, however, purports to be uncovering such a reality. Its apparently value-free descriptions are assumed to deliver the truth about the object, onto which our feelings and desires are later painted. Yet this highly objective stance, this “view from nowhere,” to use the American philosopher Thomas Nagel’s phrase, is itself value-laden. It is just one particular way of looking at things, a way that privileges detachment, a lack of commitment of the viewer to the object viewed. For some purposes this can be undeniably useful. But its use in such causes does not make it truer or more real, closer to the nature of things.

Attention also changes who we are, we who are doing the attending. Our knowledge of neurobiology and neuropsychology shows that by attending to someone else performing an action, and even by thinking about them doing so—even, in fact, by thinking about certain sorts of people at all—we become objectively, measurably, more like them, in how we behave, think, and feel. Through the direction and nature of our attention, we prove ourselves to be partners in creation, both of the world and of ourselves. In keeping with this, attention is inescapably bound up with value—unlike what we conceive of as “cognitive functions,” which are neutral in this respect. Values enter through the way in which those functions are exercised: they can be used in different ways for different purposes to different ends. Attention, however, intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a “howness,” a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a “whatness,” a thing in itself, an object of consciousness. It brings into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values.

♦

From The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, 2009. Reprinted with permission of the author. 

The post Examining Attention appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Ven. Pannavati has led weekly guided meditations each Monday in March for Meditation Month. Check the blog for the previous installments in this series. 

Download the transcript of this retreat. It has been edited for clarity. 

Ven. Pannavati will respond to reader questions posted below.

The post Guided Meditation—Week 4 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Ven. Pannavati is leading weekly guided meditations for Meditation Month. Check back every Monday in March for a new video teaching on the blog.

Download the transcript of this retreat. It has been edited for clarity. 

Ven. Pannavati will respond to reader questions posted below.

Guided Meditation Week 4

The post Guided Meditation—Week 3 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Ven. Pannavati is leading weekly guided meditations for Meditation Month. Check back every Monday in March for a new video teaching on the blog.

Download the transcript of this retreat. It has been edited for clarity. 

Ven. Pannavati will respond to reader questions posted below.

Guided Meditation Week 3

Guided Meditation Week 4

The post Guided Meditation—Week 2 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We text while we’re driving, check our email in meetings, post photos of meals before we eat them. Americans are now known around the world—well, to waiters in France, at least—as the people who are “glued to their personal devices.” Does all this digital engagement compromise our ability to focus on what’s really important in life? What’s it doing to—and for—our kids? How does our brain keep us from seeing the big picture? Can meditation offer us relief?

These are the kinds of questions considered by psychologist and longtime Buddhist practitioner Daniel Goleman in his latest book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. Like his runaway best seller Emotional Intelligence, this one was inspired, he says, by “a burst of new findings, particularly in neuroscience.” In this case, the science provided a “framework for understanding, for instance, what mindfulness is doing for us,” along with a wealth of evidence for attention’s vital role in our success and well-being. And in a neat coda to both Focus and Emotional Intelligence, Goleman discovered that the neural networks for empathy, self-awareness, and attention are interwoven in the brain. Therein may lie the key to the promise of the new book’s title and subtitle.

What follows are highlights of two phone conversations between Goleman and Tricycle’s editor-at-large, Joan Duncan Oliver. “Dan’s focus was unwavering,” she says. “Our connection kept breaking up, but he never lost the thread, even with me continually braying, ‘Can you hear me now?’”

—Joan Duncan Oliver, Editor-at-large

You seem to use focus and attention interchangeably. Are they the same? “Focus” is the word I’m using to cover attention in all its aspects. Mindfulness is one variety of attention, one way to focus. Concentration is another. Open awareness is another. Sensory awareness is another. Daydreaming is another. Each is a discrete way to apply focus, a different way that focus can manifest.

For example, when we’re being mindful, we’re using our mind to monitor our mind, in order to keep our attention in a particular stance—noting with an equanimous awareness what is arising in the mind. If we start to be too concentrated, then mindfulness reminds us to break that trance of absorption and become mindful of what’s arising in the mind. If we start to daydream, which is another attentional stance, then we can bring back our awareness into the mindful mode of paying attention. So knowing the different modes of attention can help us maintain mindfulness itself.

In the book, you describe three different kinds of attention—inner, other, and outer. What are the characteristics of each? Inner focus is self-awareness, which is the basis of not only insight into our mind in Buddhist meditation, for example, but more generally, insight into problems we may be having in our lives. It is also the platform for self-management. Take, for instance, kids who are able to manifest what’s called good cognitive control—cognitive control means you ignore the distractions and keep your mind on the goal; you can ignore impulses and be patient. Cognitive control is a better predictor of a child’s financial success and health in their 30s than their IQ or the wealth of the family they grew up in. It’s a very powerful factor in how you navigate life.

The classic test of cognitive control is the marshmallow test, which was done at Stanford. A 4-year-old is brought into a room and seated at a small table with a marshmallow on it. The experimenter says, “You can have the marshmallow now, if you want, but if you don’t eat it until I come back, you can have two.” Then the experimenter leaves the room. This is a test of impulse and delay of gratification. Some kids grab the marshmallow right away, and some can wait it out and get two. The ones who can wait it out use attentional strategies: they intentionally distract themselves, putting their attention somewhere else and ignoring the marshmallow. That helps them reduce temptation. And it turns out that the neural wiring for ignoring distraction and deploying attention somewhere else is the same as for managing upsetting emotions and resisting impulses.

Cognitive control is a manifestation of self-awareness. So inner awareness is extremely important in life and, it goes without saying, in dharma practice, in meditation.

What about the second kind of attention, other awareness? Other awareness is absolutely essential. This is empathy and deploying empathy for cooperation, for social skill, for surfacing things that need to be dealt with. Empathy has a developmental course that starts in childhood, and should be cultivated in children.

When I told my publisher I wanted to write a book on attention, the response was, “That’s great. Just keep it short.”

And the third type, outer awareness? Outer awareness manifests, for example, as understanding systems. Every child starts out as a pretty brilliant systems analyst: you see a 2-year-old controlling a family very artfully with its crying, for instance. But then we go to school and tend to lose that sensitivity to systems, because the mental models taught in schools aren’t arranged in terms of systems; they’re pieces, rather than wholes. So most of us tend to end up what’s called “systems blind.” This is a huge problem, because we don’t understand the ways in which our daily activities, including the things we buy, are slowly and inexorably degrading the global systems that support life. We’re facing a species-level crisis—that the planet may no longer sustain our species in the future because of the way we’re acting—yet we’re blind to our own day-to-day role in that.

But in the book you suggest that the circuitry for systems thinking is not inbuilt in the way the brain is wired for things like eating and self-defense and sex. There may be some primal circuitry for family dynamics, but there isn’t dedicated circuitry for understanding larger systems like the ecological system or the economy—the macro systems that create the larger realities that we have to inhabit. So we need to make a dedicated effort to understand these systems. There are now websites that can help us get the information to tell us what our carbon footprint is, or our total ecological footprint—the environmental, health, and social impacts of the things we buy. For example, goodguide.com evaluates the ecological footprints of tens of thousands of consumer products. If we could make a sustained effort to look at all the things we buy and make better choices in terms of their impact on the climate—and do this as a collective—it would create a market force and incentivize companies to look at their own supply chains and do things in a way that has fewer harmful impacts. Right now that consumer pressure doesn’t exist, because so many of us are systems blind.

You refer to “the impoverishment of attention” today. How much of our attention deficit can we blame on digital engagement, on our obsession with our electronic gadgets? Nobody has a good metric to say that this much of our growing attentional deficit is due to digital media, but we can make some educated guesses. We all have the experience of the last 15 to 20 years, for example, that the collective attention span seems to be shortening. And we each have our stories. For me, the big irony is that when I told my publisher I wanted to write a book on attention, the response was, “That’s great. Just keep it short.”

In general, I think what’s happening is that we’re paying less sustained attention to complex ideas, and we’re simplifying everything. It’s a little bit like what George Orwell described in 1984, with the propaganda ministry enforcing Newspeak, where on the one hand words meant something other than their conventional meanings (that’s already happening in politics: for example, “pacification” for “war”) and on the other hand, words disappeared. Words are disappearing—think of texting and Twitter—and with them the ability to pay sustained attention. People have more interruptions and distractions than was ever the case in human history. And it’s because of the seduction of our digital media and digital devices. They have their upside, definitely, but we also need to pay attention to this downside, because it has serious implications, particularly for children. We now have a first generation of kids growing up with this barrage of distractions as the new normal. We don’t know what it will do to their attentional capacity. Some of it may be good, some may be bad, some may be disastrous.

We’ve also all had the experience you describe in the book of being with someone who suddenly turns away to read a text message or answer their cell phone. I find it very disturbing. It’s very disturbing to have the person you’re with suddenly tune you out as though you were a nonentity and didn’t exist. It used to be that people apologized for that. Now they just do it.

So is the idea that we should just suck it up and say, “This is the new reality,” and not be offended by it? No, I think it’s to recognize how destructive it is to our interactions and our relationships. Now, because of digital media, the line between the office and home has disappeared. You can get an email, a text, a phone call at any time about work. And it intrudes on what used to be private time. But I know a couple—they’re both busy professionals—who have a pact that when they’re together, they put their smart phones in a drawer and ignore them. I think we probably need to get more intentional about setting boundaries for something that so insidiously slips into the midst of the most enriching part of life, which is our private, rich connectivity with the people we care about the most.

Speaking of threats to meaningful connectivity, what about the artificial intimacy social media foster? We’re spilling our guts online to people we’ve never seen and will never see, yet we have difficulty maintaining one-to-one connections in person. The power of something like Facebook is that it expands the range and frequency of being in touch with people we care about. But at the same time, social media also expose us to a large number of interactions with people we don’t actually know and may never know, who are kind of secondary relationships. They can be very important in, for example, finding a job or finding a girlfriend or boyfriend, because they expand our network of information gatherers. But they have nothing like the emotional importance of the people we care about and love who are in our primary circle of friends and family. So what happens is that the relationships online become very diluted. And being online itself dilutes a relationship.

The emotional brain and the social brain are designed for face-to-face interaction. You want to be able to hug the person, to hear their tone of voice, see their facial expression, understand their posture. This is what the social brain does in an instant: it creates a sense of simpatico, of rapport, that is almost impossible to duplicate in social media.

And email—you point out how prone to misunderstanding it is. When we sit at our keyboard writing an email, the social brain thinks that our tone of voice and our facial expressions and so on are going along with the message. But when you hit SEND, all of that stays behind. And those are the emotional signifiers that give connotation and context to what you’re saying. This means that the receiver understands something different than you meant to send.

Usually it doesn’t matter. But there is a negativity bias to email: If you ask someone if the email they sent was positive and they say yes, and then you ask the receiver if it was positive, they tend to say it was neutral. If the sender says it was neutral, the receiver is likely to say it was negative. So we need to be aware of this. Some people recommend that if you have an important email to send, send it to yourself first and read it as though you were the receiver, to get a feel for the emotional tone. You may well rewrite that email.

Or you may pick up the phone and call that person. [Laughs.] You might actually have lunch with them.

Let’s talk about the myth of multitasking. The myth of multitasking is that it saves time. The truth of multitasking—and there are some very good research studies on this at places like Stanford—is that people who multitask actually perform worse than people who stay concentrated on one thing and don’t get distracted. Meditators know this: The more you stay focused on one thing, the deeper your concentration becomes. And the more your mind wanders off to other things—let alone, you go off and do other things, like check your email—the poorer your concentration becomes.

The other part of the myth is that you can actually focus on two different things at the same time. In the brain, what you’re actually doing is switching from one thing to another. And when you switch focus, it takes what’s called “cognitive effort” to get back to where you were before. Cognitive effort means (a) to be mindful, to notice that your mind has wandered; (b) to disengage from where it’s gone; and (c) to put it back where it was. A famous study by Clifford Nass at Stanford showed that when people were focused on a task and their mind wandered off—“Oh, I’ve got to check that text; I’ve got to check my email”—it took them many, many minutes to get back to full focus on that task.

Yet we persist in thinking multitasking is the way to handle all the various distractions today. It’s very seductive, with all the nice little dings and pings and pop-ups calling to us like Sirens.

So what’s the solution? Is meditation a good strategy for improving our ability to focus? The capacity for attention is like a mental muscle, and it’s getting flabbier and flabbier in most of us. We have more distractors than ever. Distraction means that rather than us taking control of our attention and deploying it as we wish, we’re letting the external world grab our attention and take it where it wants. So the fundamental tension is between having attention guided by the world around us rather at random and having attention within our control, which is what all meditation training helps us do. Whether it’s concentration or visualization or mindfulness or open awareness, we are taking control of our attention and cultivating the capacity to manifest a particular attentional strategy. Every kind of meditation, no matter what it is, reduces to a kind of training in maintaining a specific attentional stance.

The Value of a Mind Adrift

Every variety of attention has its uses. The very fact that about half of our thoughts are daydreams suggests that there may well be some advantages to a mind that can entertain the fanciful. We might revise our thinking about a wandering mind by considering that rather than wandering away from what counts, it may well be wandering toward something of value.

Cognitive scientists see a wandering mind as the brain’s “default” mode—where it goes when it’s not working away on some mental task. The circuitry for this default network centers on the medial zone of the prefrontal cortex. But recent brain scans have revealed that during mind-wandering two major brain areas seem to be active. The other—the prefrontal cortex’s executive system—had been thought to be crucial for keeping us focused on tasks. Yet the scans show that it, too, was activated.

That’s a bit of a puzzle: mind-wandering takes focus away from the business at hand and hampers performance on cognitively demanding matters. Researchers tentatively solve that puzzle by suggesting that the reason mind-wandering hurts performance may be that it’s borrowing the executive system for other matters.

A mind adrift lets our creative juices flow. We become better at anything that depends on a flash of insight. Among positive functions of a wandering mind are generating scenarios for the future, self-reflection, navigating a complex social world, incubating new ideas—and giving our circuitry for more intensive focusing a refreshing break. People who are adept at mental tasks demanding cognitive control and a roaring working memory—like solving complex math problems—can struggle with creative insights if they have trouble switching off their fully concentrated focus.

The brain systems involved in mind-wandering have been found to be active just before people hit a creative insight and are unusually active in those with attention deficit disorder (ADD). Adults with ADD show higher levels of original creative thinking and achievement. When challenged by a creative task— finding novel uses for a brick, say—those with ADD do better, despite zoning out. Or perhaps because of it.

We might learn something here. When people who had a creative accomplishment to their credit were tested for screening out information to focus on a task, their minds wandered more frequently than other people’s, an open awareness that may have served them well in their creative work.

Since the brain stores different kinds of information in wide-reaching circuitry, a freely roaming awareness ups the odds of serendipitous associations and novel combinations. Freestyling rappers, improvising lyrics in the moment, show heightened activity in the mind-wandering circuitry, allowing fresh connections between far-ranging neural networks.

But for those associations to bear fruit in a viable innovation, something more is required: the right atmosphere. We need free time where we can sustain an open awareness. The nonstop onslaught of email, texts, bills to pay—life’s “full catastrophe”—throws us into a brain state antithetical to the open focus where creative discoveries thrive.

♦

Adapted from Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, by Daniel Goleman. Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Goleman. Reprinted with permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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