Strengthening the Skills of Attention

Just as physical exercise increases strength, flexibility, and endurance to support the regular activities of your life, mindfulness exercises develop skills of attention that nurture a deep and mature level of personal contentment.

Strengthening concentration makes it easier to focus on what you consider important. 

Making clearer distinctions regarding what you see, hear, and feel, enhances your sensory palette. If you've ever noticed how being able to tease out flavors in food and wine can make dining more satisfying, imagine a similar impact on all your senses and on your thoughts and feelings.

Savoring whatever you notice, while not judging it or needing it to be different, fosters a sense of well-being that becomes less dependent on the constantly changing circumstances of your life.

Realizing the challenges involved in paying closer attention to the components of experience can lead to greater empathy toward yourself and others.

These practical strategies are not designed to help you escape from life, but to help you engage with it more fully. The benefits you can experience as a result of practice will reflect the time and effort you invest. To feel better physically, you can try to move a little more and eat little less. To prevent your satisfaction with your from being determined soley by possessions, moods, thoughts, situations, other people, and the weather, you can try to notice more, struggle less, and help make the world a little better in the process.



What is Mindfulness?

"In a way, nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small, we haven't the time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time." ~ Georgia O'KeefeMindfulness meditation uses ordinary sensory experience to develop skills of attention which can increase our baseline level of contentment. We take the world in through our eyes, our ears, and our bodies. We make sense of the world and our relationship to it through our mental images, internal conversations, and sensations in the body which seem to have emotional flavors.

We are all swimming in this sensory information, but most of us have very little familiarity with the various component parts, how they interact with each other, and the impact of our reactions to them. Mindfulness cultivates concentration so that we can pay closer attention to these details, clarity so that we can become more intimately familiar with them, and equanimity in order to struggle less with unpleasant aspects and derive more satisfaction from the pleasant ones.

Concentration is the ability to attend to what is considered relevant at a given time and to let go of what is determined to be irrelevant, any time you want, for as long as you want. Concentration power is the single most universally applicable and most deeply empowering skill that a human being can cultivate.

Clarity is the ability to distinguish and keep track of the components of sensory experience as they arise in various combinations, moment-by-moment. The basic building blocks of sensory experience include physical-type sensations in the body, emotional-type sensations in the body, external visual stimuli, mental images, external sounds, and internal conversations.

Equanimity is the skill of allowing things to be as they are. It can be thought of as an attitude of gentle matter-of-factness with regard to your sensory experience. It is described as a balanced state of non-interference directly in the middle between not something to be there and not wanting it to go away.

The aim of mindfulness training is not to achieve a temporary state of relaxation that is present when you meditate and then vanishes, but to gradually increase your baseline of concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity throughout the day — ordinary life in higher definition.

The effort and time commitment required is similar to what is needed to acquire any new set of skills such as learning to play a musical instrument, mastering a sport, or becoming fluent in a language. What makes the cultivation of these attentional skills unique is that they strengthen the foundation upon which we can build all other skills.

Consistent mindfulness practice cultivates a sensory palate that supports happiness or satisfaction regardless of conditions. Recent research provides evidence that "people can develop skills that promote happiness and compassion."

*These terms and definitions come from Shinzen Young's basic mindfulness model.

The Mind Mistakes the Talking for the Doing

I highly recommend making practice a priority over reading about it. This is true regardless of the skill you are working on. I'd also encourage you to keep a low profile regarding your attentional skills training. We have a tendency to let everyone know when we start a fitness program or sign up for a tap dancing class or order a Rosetta Stone program to master a foreign language.

However, studies repeatedly show that when it comes to goals which take consistent practice over time, "the mind mistakes the talking for the doing." I recommend keeping your new mindfulness practice to yourself until the habit is established. It’s similar to waiting to tell your friends and family about a pregnancy until after the first trimester. In fact, the length of a trimester is a great milestone to shoot for initially. Ninety days of consistent practice (as you define it up front) is an excellent accomplishment. Wait to tell your people that you’ve been practicing for three months instead of letting them know you are planning to try. The same advice applies to any skill development or regimen.

“Repeated psychology tests have proven that telling someone your goal makes it less likely to happen. Any time you have a goal, there are some steps that need to be done, some work that needs to be done in order to achieve it. Ideally, you should not be satisfied until you had actually done the work. But when you tell someone your goal, and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that it's called a social reality. The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it's already done. And then, because you've felt that satisfaction, you're less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary. So this goes against the conventional wisdom that we should tell our friends our goals.” ~ Derek Sivers

Exploring some of the ways that sharing our good news and best intentions can actually diminish the related satisfaction and success, Lauren Friedman found that "talking up your goals—telling everyone about the language you’re going to learn or the LSATs you’re going to ace—might get in the way of actually achieving them. Recent studies by New York University psychologist Peter Gollwitzer suggest that making public what we hope to do can offer a premature sense of accomplishment, reducing the drive to actually get it done." 

Of course the people in your house are likely to notice when you are sitting quietly for a few minutes every day. That's different. But try to keep it on a need to know basis until you've got some momentum.

I've come to really enjoy anonymous mindfulness practice in general. It feels so subversive. It can really add a zing to waiting in line at the grocery store or in a doctor's office lobby. Nobody has to know that instead of trying to figure out a way to make this experience better or faster, I'm letting my attention feast on the sounds and sights around me or the sensations in my body.

As with anything I say, please don't take my word for it. Try it for yourself and see if you agree.

A Portable Sanctuary

Design*Sponge It’s easy to think that the environment needs to be completely still and quiet for meditation to occur. When I first began practicing meditation I would switch off the ringer on our phone and put a Christmas ornament on the knob of the closed bedroom door to alert everyone in the house to try to keep it down until they heard the sound of the gong. Hey, whatever it takes to establish the habit, right? But these kinds of controls can develop into unquestioned necessary ingredients and a kind of literalism that can solidify into obstacles instead of supports.

Do I need to be in a gym to lift something heavy? Do I need to be wearing running clothes to chase down the bus? Do I need to be standing on a yoga mat to notice my breath? It can be interesting to consider how formal meditation practice and the application of the same strategies in the midst of our ordinary experiences relate to and inform each other. We don’t meditate to achieve temporary benefits, but to develop a kind of deep intimacy with how human perception works and how it operates to influence our happiness or misery. It’s not about trying to avoid life, but a means of engaging more directly with it.

When our physical strength increases as a result of lifting weights we don’t have to be standing in the gym to notice it or to put it to use. We just need to keep visiting the gym to maintain and improve it. In the same way, we don’t need to be in a sanctuary in order to cultivate the skills of attention. We cultivate these skills to gradually transform our senses into a sanctuary that we can bring out into world.

After a few months of practice, I no longer needed an ornament on my door. I usually don’t even need to close it. When the phone rings, I let it ring. Of course there are times when I do close the door or turn off my phone, but these feel like options now instead of requirements. I can relax or tighten my grip on allowing distractions and see what happens. Working in this way helps me bring these strategies out into the world. I’m a little more willing to let the cell phones of strangers ring at the grocery store without them preventing me from doing a few reps of concentration and equanimity strengthening exercises while I’m waiting in line.  

If you lived here…

When I was growing up, our summer vacations were usually opportunities to visit family members who had moved away from Wichita. We knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore when the landscape suddenly became three dimensional. When we visited an uncle in Colorado, my parents would wake my brother and me up as soon as they spotted mountain peaks in the distance. When we traveled to Missouri, the centrifugal force created by the winding roads would rock us awake. These contrasts seemed so exotic that we would get caught up in discovering details that seemed so much more interesting than things back home.

I remember seeing real estate advertisements that taunted us with the idea that if we actually lived there, we’d be living the good life without having to go anywhere but out our own front door. A life lived in a land of perpetual vacation sounds great to kids, but adults realize that the magic carpet would wear thin under the ceaseless traipsing of guests through their living room.

Still, we fantasize that vacations and weekends hold the promise of escape from the aspects of life that tend to drain our energy. Some of us are convinced that retirement will mean a permanent break from trouble. But I doubt that the future will really ever be better than what’s going on right now. Why not? Because when it arrives, it will be instantly replaced by a newer promise of even better things to come.

One good definition of suffering is the wish for our current circumstances to be different than they are, which means that most of us suffer a great deal of the time. The degree to which we suffer fluctuates based on the gulf between how things are and our idea of a more perfect set of circumstances. The resistance to accepting what is happening right now takes energy. No wonder why so many of us frequently report feeling exhausted.  

Mindfulness strategies provide some relief. Not just the kind of temporary relief we might feel from visiting a spa or taking an afternoon nap. With consistent effort, it resembles the kind of relief we feel after we’ve been consistently exercising and start to notice an increase in physical strength and energy. We get better at attending to what we decide to focus on while letting distractions remain in the background. We also get better at noticing subtle aspects of the things we are touching, feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, and thinking. And we slowly come to resist the present less by relaxing into whatever is happening without needing it to be drastically different.

Most of us have trained ourselves to notice discomfort and unpleasant feelings by default. It’s a talent born out of the oldest components of the nervous system which has allowed humans to survive as a species. These problems give our minds puzzles to solve. They also reward us with entertaining stories to share from our day. You’ll never guess what happened to me today…

  Learning to find and create restful states can help us struggle less and enjoy life more. Physical relaxation is a restful state in the body. Breaks between scenes on the mental image screen and pauses between internal conversations are restful states in the mind. These restful states occur frequently throughout the day, but most of us don’t know how to detect them or get the most benefit from them. Strategies for noticing rest can train us to look for and create rest in the midst of our regular lives: at home, at work, at the gym, and on the road.  

When we notice rest, it makes us feel better. This in turn motivates us to focus on it more. We begin looking for opportunities to cultivate concentration in this way. Having some ability to notice, create, and savor rest in the body and mind allows us to experience greater fulfillment from the activities we enjoy when we can let them unfold, flow, and end naturally.

Where can you start looking for restfulness? Don’t wait until your next vacation. Give some of these strategies a try today:

• When you are waiting at a red light, see if you can find any relaxation in your jaw or shoulders. If you can’t, see what happens if you try to intentionally create relaxation in these places.
• If you find yourself in a boring lecture or meeting, try noticing any relaxation that occurs naturally on each exhale. Don’t worry about missing important facts. If you are able to find or create relaxation in these situations, you are likely to discover that you actually retain more of the information but have more energy when it comes time to transition to your next activity. More relaxation means less resistance. Less resistance means more energy conserved.
• The next time someone’s cell phone rings in the grocery store, try tuning into your reactions. Explore whether the startle has left any pleasant shivers in its wake. It is not uncommon for a quick burst of frustration, embarrassment, or anger to be followed by subtle waves of relaxation in the body. We’re usually too busy thinking about ways to right the injustice to notice.
• If loud noises or conversations are preventing you from thinking or reading, see if you can notice what it feels like in the mind to not have enough attention left to think. We can only pay attention to a finite amount of stimulus at any time. When other people’s rants are taking up space, see if you can briefly enjoy how they crowd out your own familiar internal commentaries. This is a challenging one, but even modest success can feel enormous.

If living inside a dream of some elusive future happiness is starting to feel claustrophobic, try a change of scenery. Get curious about looking for restful states where you can find them in the middle of your ordinary routine. And if you can get better at finding them right there where you live, you won’t need to wait to get out of town to feel more at home.