Episode 3: Mindful Attention
Our attention is a precious thing. It is the the only way to access this moment. Contrary to what you might think, it is finite. We can only pay attention to one thing at a time. It is this very attention through which we live our lives and as such, it is very important that we use it deliberately. We have a choice as to how we use our attention in each moment. If we are not careful, we can blow it on nonsense. We often lose it to the past or future without even realizing it. Or we can let it slip through our fingers as we stare into our phones, or any number of glowing screens for that matter. It can be stolen by our emotional attachment to things we feel to be important in the moment, and can do nothing about. Whatever it is that captures our attention will no doubt affect our lives. Moments make up our lives, so it is important that we are aware of how our attention is being used in each moment, and how this attention makes us feel, because these momentary feelings all added together become our lives.
If you can, close your eyes for a moment and picture yourself. Not your physical, external self, but your internal, mental self. Is there a struggle in there between who your are and who you want to be?
Do you find that you embody any characteristics, even temporarily, that you wish you didn’t?
Do you find that you’re quick to anger?
Are you often impatient?
Are you often judgmental?
Do you become easily frustrated?
Are you ever selfish with your time or knowledge?
Do you ever feel vindictive?
Do these emotions then cause you to treat others or yourself poorly?
If the answer is yes to any of these questions then you know how it feels afterwards, and these feelings will move you to apologize for your behavior. Perhaps you feel hot in the case of anger. Or shame or sorrow or regret in the wake of impatience, selfishness, or frustration. These feelings are the body’s way of telling you that you are not in alignment with your true self. If you have felt this, then you also know what it feels like to embody the opposite of these emotions and reactions. To be patient, understanding, generous, and kind also makes you feel a particular way.
Which of these feelings do you prefer? Not the immediate feeling in the moment, but feelings after the fact. The bodily feedback. Imagine yourself as the one who no longer takes action which causes you or others sadness, or sorrow, or regret, or shame. This is your ideal self, and it’s not far away. It exists deep within you. Can you sense it? You know that it exists, because you already know what it feels like to be this person. It’s the self who no longer asks, ”What was I thinking?”
This is the self we access through mindful meditation, the unconditioned self. As we sit and focus our attention on the sensations of breathing, of sitting, and of being, we become less distracted by the numerous things outside of us. We see thoughts arise in the unconditioned awareness and we let them pass. We are not avoiding anything, we simply see whatever arises and we know that it is nothing and that it will surely pass. This is the great life secret. Everything will pass if you let it. If we cling to the past, thoughts, emotions, and reactions, we don’t allow them to pass and they become part of our conditioned self. We will get stuck as we focus our attention in the rearview mirror, which will keep us from enjoying life in this moment. With our attention aimed in the wrong direction we will not be able to learn and move forward.
We can use our attention in so many ways, really there is no shortage of things we can pay attention to. We often use it to focus on past problems, current concerns, or future projections. We can be overcome by sports, politics, video games, or hobbies and we define ourselves by these preferences. Our emotions so tangled in a particular outcome that we may become depressed if these things, which are out of our control, don’t go our way. Our attention has become the most profitable resource in the world and there are many corporations fighting over it. At times we pay someone or something to take our attention in the form of entertainment. Sometimes we just give it away in the form of endless scrolling—giving our attention to those who want attention, who then use their attention to see if anyone is paying attention, and so goes the endless feeding. We can get lost for hours without second thought. In every moment we have a choice to lose it or to direct it. But quite often we aren’t aware of the choice because of our past conditioning, which has lead to our current habitual actions and reactions.
A fairly common example of this is getting cut off in traffic. If we react without thought, we will often get angry and say something awful about the driver, sometimes even speed up, tailgate them, give them the finger, or even attempt to cut them off. We will even put other drivers at risk. All in an attempt to show them that they were wrong, to teach them a lesson. We justify this behavior to ourselves because we were the aggrieved and they were careless and inconsiderate. Not being able to let it go, we then arrive at where we were going, hot with anger, and tell our side of the story to whoever will listen, looking for confirmation that we were surely in the right. Just imagine for a moment, what if this other driver had no idea what they did, a truly honest mistake. What kind of story might they be telling about you at this exact moment?
Yes, there are intentionally bad drivers out there. But the fact is that we really do not know and never will know where a person is trying to get to, or what just provoked them to be driving in such a way, just as you found yourself driving in just this way. We don’t know the skill level of other drivers or their true intentions. In fact we’ve all cut somebody off accidentally and we are sorry and seek patience, understanding and compassion. Why not extend this to every driver regardless of how they’re driving? Most of us are just trying to get from point A to point B with the least amount of resistance. These moments while driving can be seen as part of the deal each time we get behind the wheel, in fact we know that it will happen. Like traffic lights that just turn red, or abrupt speed limit changes or construction. Or when an animal darts out in front of us. We never honk at a squirrel and give it the bird while trying to run it down. Our hearts may skip a beat as we quickly apply the brake, then we continue down the road and maybe take a quick glance in the rearview. We use our attention in the moment it’s needed, make the proper adjustments, and we don’t attach a prolonged negative emotion it.
So how do these incidences make us feel? What is the feedback we’re getting from the body in these moments? Do we interpret this feeling as triumph or failure? If the answer is triumph then we can expect these incidences to continue to happen time and time again because we are attaching our identity, our sense of self, to this type of outcome. We begin to see ourselves as traffic enforcers on the road and become proud of it. Completely self justified, we will even seek out these experiences to further continue to get that feeling, the food for the ego—I’m right because you’re wrong. We misplace our attention on negativity and frustration, emotions we know are harmful to that ideal self. If instead we interpret this feeling as a failure, we have an opportunity to learn that the proper response to being cut off is simply to apply the brakes and let go. Let the driver go, far away.
Practice deliberate attention and right action. Decide beforehand, perhaps the moment you buckle up, that today you will not let your attention get stolen for negativity. It may take a little time to recondition yourself, but it will happen as you learn to interpret the bodily signals. If you have your ideal version of self in mind, you will change because you remember the unpleasant bodily feedback you received the last time, and it did not align with your deeper ideal self.
Unlike the above scenario when our attention is momentarily stolen, we often give our attention away out of boredom, but end up in the same emotionally charged state. We may find that we have a little free time during the day so we pull out our phone and open our news feed. We do this out of habit but justify this because it’s important to us that we stay informed. We have become the person who feels good when we know what’s going on all around us. But who is informing us and what exactly are we being informed about? How often is it something that we can do absolutely nothing about? How often does this information actually impact our daily lives, aside from the lingering attention and emotion we give to it? How do we then feel when we begin clicking on articles? Is our reaction similar to the feeling we get when being cut off in traffic? Do we click on a headline perfectly tailored to capture our attention and spark an emotional reaction? Then after skimming the article to fan those flames do we click another one and then another? Do we get angry and speed ahead, looking for more, using our attention to focus on negativity and frustration? Then, hot with anger and unable to let it go, do we tell our side of the story to whoever will listen with the hope that they’ll tell us that we are right? In fact, we always take this to the person who will help keep this feeling alive.
This is part of the ego feeding cycle, so long as we view this self-righteous feeling as triumphant. So long as we can define ourselves as right and others wrong. We become proud of our findings because it feels good to the conditioned self, the ego, to point out all the wrongs in the world. The ego becomes visible as it has something to contrast itself against.
There truly is bad news out there and we gravitate towards it, much like the single bad driver, we choose to focus our attention on the one offender rather than the 30 others who seem to be doing nothing extraordinary. If you don’t think this is true, just look at your news feed and pay attention to your feelings as you unconsciously scroll and click. Is it inspiring feelings of joy, peace, love, understanding? Or inspiring outrage, hopelessness, frustration or envy? It’s interesting that we’ve come to call it a news FEED, for it has become just that. Food for the ego, the conditioned self. The ego can’t feed on positivity, it needs to set itself up against something to keep itself alive. With our clicks and preferences, we have all told it what we want to see, to feed on, and it obeys. It has to obey. With thousands of news organizations now competing for our limited attention, they have learned, with each click, that outrage sells. Now each one of us gets the exact news that keeps us coming back.
If your news feed does inspire negative feelings, pay attention. Recognize those feeling for what they are. Feedback from the body, telling you that your deeper ideal self is being buried even deeper. If you can do nothing about what you’re reading, and it’s causing you internal turmoil, apply the brake and let it go, far away. Then shift your attention to one of the many amazing things in your life.
I’m certainly not suggesting ignorance, I’m suggesting that you ask if what you’re paying attention to is worth it? Is it worth feeling these negative emotions all the time? There are many other positive and productive uses of our attention. We can learn how to do something new. Read about something that interests us. Make a phone call to a struggling friend. We can become familiar with our minds in such a way that we are no longer taken on an emotional rollercoaster every time we open our feed or hear an opposing opinion. This is quite the opposite of ignorance. It’s opening yourself up to new experiences, to new knowledge. What I am suggesting is that we open our minds to a new understanding, to a new way of thinking and a new way of feeling which will help us uncover our ideal self.
We truly have a choice as to where we apply our attention. We can use it to create a new, better reality for ourselves. At the moment we may be unconsciously using it to create unease and mental suffering, as we’ve seen. If you think that external factors are the cause of your internal pain, you are not entirely incorrect. It is not the thing itself which is causing you pain, it is the application of your attention to this external source, which is causing you pain. Your input, that which you’re paying attention to, is affecting the output, that which you are feeling. The old adage, garbage in, garbage out, is quite true.
In mediation, we learn to place our attention on the breath and the bodily sensations, such as the tingling at the tip of our nose as we breathe, or the raw sensations which make us feel our hands or legs or feet. Whenever thoughts arise, we notice them and watch them disappear, then we return to the breath and the body. Returning to these raw sensations will snap us out of our unconscious thought patterns and reactions to them, most of which are automatic. This automaticity is the result of years of clinging to our emotions and our subsequent reactions. This mindful practice helps us to focus our attention on what is necessary in the moment and trains us to not get carried away by our thoughts which can trigger unwanted or unnecessary emotions. In a way, we are learning how to retrain our minds to recognize its original unconditioned state, the one without all the emotional baggage. This is useful on and off of the cushion.
If you feel the body sending signals of anger or frustration or impatience or anything contrary to the feelings you want to embody, such as love, kindness, patience, compassion, respect, generosity— the very traits we generally encourage in our children—and these unwanted feelings seem to be showing up more frequently than you wish, take a moment to focus your attention on your breathing and then locate exactly where these feelings are in the body. Is it a thought which is causing these unwanted feelings and emotions? Was it an external event which triggered this negativity? If it’s already happened, then let it go. If it’s currently happening and you can do nothing about it, let it go. If an opinion is challenged and it’s causing you inner turmoil, let it go. It’s just a chosen opinion with arbitrary value which you have placed on it. Remember the deeper ideal self you wish to access, it is the quality of your awareness, your attention, which will allow it to emerge.
Throughout life we will experience heartbreak, grief, pain, sadness, anger, or frustration to some degree, but if we can be skillful with our attention, we can reduce these occasions and the impact of these moments. There is no need to hold on to any of these emotions. Feel them, notice them and let them pass.
This again is where these meditation technique comes in handy. We can skillfully use our attention in such a way that we don’t caught up in unnecessary emotions and reactions, as we let them be and focus on our breath. Letting things be doesn’t mean we run away or bury our heads, we just accept what is without resistance and respond in an appropriate way, not adding to the turmoil of the moment.
What can be done? How do we take control of our attention and use it in a positive and productive way? We first need to be mindful of the relation between our attention and bodily sensations. Is it ever worth being provoked into a road rage incident, where nothing is ever resolved and it leaves you feeling angry and upset all day? Is that how we should use our precious attention? Is it worth getting sucked into our phones for hours and hours if it leaves us feeling hopeless, frustrated, angry or envious? Is it worth focusing our attention on a challenged opinion which has left us feeling judgmental and disappointed toward someone we love? Is it worth listening to music that triggers hostility or sadness or depression? Surely all of these feelings will come into our lives at one point or another, and going through them helps us to have empathy and compassion for others, but there is no reason to choose these negative emotions once you begin to see their moment to moment impact on your ideal self.
So how do we resist our engrained automatic reactions which capture our attention and feed negativity? We practice. We hold the ideal version of ourselves in our minds at all times. We then let the body tell us if our actions line up with that idea self, and gently adjust accordingly without judgment. The driver who cuts us off steals no more than a moment of our attention, or less and less of it as we listen to the body and adjust. It’s a process. The reverse process that lead you here. It doesn’t happen overnight, it takes attention and awareness. We already are that ideal person, we’re just buried so deep underneath layers and layers of unconscious conditioning. We have unknowingly defined ourselves as this current self. At some point we became this version of ourselves, but it’s not permanent. We have become this way, which is to say we weren’t always this way, which means there is a way back.
Remember that your attention is precious. Use it deliberately. Do not give it away thoughtlessly or let it be stolen for negativity. Keep in mind the ideal you and your body will help you find your way back to it if you do get lost. If your attention is primarily used on anger, frustration, hatred, jealousy, sadness and other negative emotions, this is what you’ll become. You are chasing to use your attention, this moment, your life, on negativity. But if you instead use your attention on love, compassion, patience, understanding, kindness, and generosity you will access your beautiful ideal self and you will find true happiness. What is true happiness? Maybe we’ll explore that next time.
Again, keep in your heart and mind the feelings you wish to embody. If your attention is leading you away from these, turn it back to your breath, to your heart, to the sensations in your body— as we do in meditation. There is always a stillness deep inside of you and the more you draw your attention to it, the easier it will be to access in times of greatest need. Use your attention wisely, for it is the only way to access this moment of your life. Indeed our attention creates our reality which will determine who we become. Pay attention.