3 Simple Ways to Pay Attention
Meditation practice need not be tied to any belief system. The only necessary belief is not a dogmatic one, but one that says each of us has the capacity to understand ourselves more fully and to care more deeply both for ourselves and for others. Its methods work to free us of habitual reactions that cause us great unhappiness, such as harsh self-judgment, and to develop wisdom and love. Meditation gives anybody who pursues it an opportunity to look within for a sense of abundance, depth, and connection to life.
Rather than an ornate, arcane set of instructions, basic meditation consists of practical tools to help deepen concentration, mindfulness, and compassion.
1. Concentration
Concentration steadies and focuses our attention so that we can let go of unhealthy inner distractions— regrets about the past, worries about the future, addictions—and keep from being seduced by outer ones. Distraction wastes our energy; concentration restores it.
Concentration is the art of gathering all that energy, that stormy, scattered attention, and settling, centering.
We often experience our attention scattering to the four winds. We sit down to think something through or work through a dilemma, and before we know it, we’re gone. We’re lost in thoughts of the past, often about something we now regret: “I should have said that more skillfully.” “I should have been less timid and spoken up.” “I should have been wiser and shut up.” We aren’t thinking things through to find a means to make amends. We’re just lost.
Or our distractedness propels us into anxiety-filled projections about the future. Imagine you are sitting in an airplane at one of the New York City airports. Suddenly you start thinking, “Oh no, I think this plane might leave late. I’m sure it will be late. Now I’m going to miss my connection. What will that mean? That means I’m going to arrive in Portland, Oregon, after midnight. There won’t be any cabs! What’s going to happen to me?” It’s as though Portland were famous for having people vanish if they land after midnight!
Without concentration, our minds spin off into the future in a way that isn’t like skilful planning but more like exhausting rumination. When I see my own mind beginning that arc of anxiety, I have a saying I use to help restore me to balance: “Something will happen.” There will be a bus. I’ll spend the night in the airport. Something will happen. I can’t figure it all out right now.
2. Mindfulness
Mindfulness refines our attention so that we can connect more fully and directly with whatever life brings. So many times our perception of what is happening is distorted by bias, habits, fears, or desires. Mindfulness helps us see through these and be much more aware of what actually is.
Imagine you’re on your way to a party when you run into a friend who mentions an earlier meeting he had with your new colleague. He says, “That person is so boring!” Once at the party, who do you find yourself stuck talking to but that new colleague! Because of your friend’s comment (not even your own perception), you end up not really listening carefully to them or looking fully at them. More likely you are thinking about the next 15 emails you need to send or fretting as you gaze about the room and see so many people you’d rather be talking to. Everything this person is saying increases your ire and frustration.
But if you realize what’s going on, it might be that you drop the filter of your friend’s comment and determine to find out for yourself, from your own direct experience, what you think of your new colleague. You listen, you observe, you are open-minded, interested. By the end of the evening, you might decide, “I concur. I find that person really boring.” But perhaps not; life also provides many surprises. What’s important is that we’re not merely guided by what we’ve been told, by the beliefs of others, by dogma or prejudice or assumption. Instead, we shape our impression with as clear and open a perception as possible.
3. Compassion
Compassion opens our attention and makes it more inclusive, transforming the way we view ourselves and the world. Instead of being so caught up in the construct of self and other and us and them that we tend to see the world through, we see things much more in terms of connection to all. This fundamental transformation from alienation begins with more kindness to ourselves.
Even in techniques that don’t particularly emphasize kindness or compassion, these qualities are inevitably being developed in meditation. If we go back and look at the foundational exercise I described, developing concentration, we find that it is often done by choosing an object such as the feeling of the in and out-breath, then settling our attention on it. What we discover in the beginning, sometimes to our shock, is that it usually isn’t 800 breaths before our minds wander. More commonly, it is one breath, maybe two or three, then we are lost. Maybe very lost in a fantasy or memory.
Then comes the moment we realize we’ve been distracted. Our common response would be to feel that we’ve failed, to rail against ourselves. What we practice, though, is letting go gently rather than harshly and returning to the breath or our object of concentration with kindness and compassion for ourselves. Thus, those qualities of compassion and kindness deepen even if we don’t give voice to those words.
In terms of meditative understanding (in contrast to our usual way of thinking, which might regard these qualities as gifts we can do nothing to cultivate or as immediate emotional reactions we enjoy but can’t stabilize), kindness and compassion are indeed skills we develop. Not in the sense of forcing ourselves to feel, or even worse, pretend to feel, an emotion that is not there. Instead, if we learn to pay attention in a different, more open way—seeing the good within ourselves instead of fixating on what we don’t like, noticing those we usually ignore or look right through, letting go of categories and assumptions when we relate to others—we are creating the conditions for kindness and compassion to flow.
We practice meditation in the end not to become great meditators but to have a different life. As we deepen the skills of concentration, mindfulness, and compassion, we find we have less stress, more fulfilment, more insight, and vastly more happiness. We transform our lives.
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Reference:
https://www.mindful.org/meditation-start-here/