Attention

©Caitlin Rose Kenney ~ please do not distribute without consent and credit to the author

Everything Is Waiting for You

Written and read by David Whyte

After Derek Mahon

Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note

the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things

to come, the doors have always been there

to frighten you and invite you,

and the tiny speaker in the phone

is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the

conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds

and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

The same phenomena that David Whyte points to in his poem was said in a different way by Richie Davidson while he was interviewed on the Ezra Klein Show:

Being fully present is a form of love that provides a deep sense of being cared for and secure. You are being cared for in a fundamental way.

This podcast episode “How the brains of master meditators change” hones in on the role of attention in mindfulness and meditation practices. Richie said that mindfulness practices are our technology for practically developing and tuning our attention. 

Richie talks about stimulus driven attention — which means our attention goes to whatever stimulus is pinging our system. The challenge we have is that there is more stimulus in our lives today than there ever has been competing for our attention. What has been glorified by the term “multitasking” is actually an attentional deficit in our ability to self-direct our focus. Richie debunks the glorification of multitasking by pointing out, “Multi-taskers are suckers for irrelevancy.”

Richie encourages us to move away from multitasking, away from environments that overload us with stimulus and re-learning voluntary attention. Just as muscles atrophy when we do not use them, our ability to engage our voluntary attention can deteriorate if we do not exercise it. Brain circuits can be strengthened or weakened by lack of use. Mindfulness techniques are a form of mental hygiene and the benefit of a focused mind is not just about productivity. A nourished mind has the capacity to intentionally attend to another.

“Being fully attended to by another human being or being fully attentive towards another is an act of caring that we all can benefit from.”

The link between mindfulness and attention sheds light on a wide array of benefits for both our inner and outer relationships; it can support socialization, productivity and our intrapersonal world.

Directing Attention

Exteroception

Attention can be tuned to the external environment. When we bring our attention to our surroundings it awakens our senses and the way in which we contact the world becomes more intimate.

Exteroception is using the “sense doors” of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch to attune to the current environment your body inhabits. Beyond the 5 senses, we can also attune to:

• Thermoception of outer environment

• Pressure in outer environment (underwater, altitude changes)

Interoception

Attention can be tuned to the internal environment. Interoception is sensing the inner physiological experience including the senses of:

• Itching

• Thermoception of body temperature

• Proprioception

• Tension sensors

• Nociception - pain receptors 

• Cutaneous (skin)

• Somatic (bones and joints)

• Visceral (body organs)

• Equilibrioception - sense of balance, sense of acceleration

• Vestibular - sense of direction & gravity

• Stretch receptors - found in lungs, bladder, stomach, intestines, blood vessels

• Pressure in inner environment (food digesting, pregnancy, headaches, swollen tissues)

• Thirst

• Hunger

• Magnetoreception - ability to sense magnetic fields 

• Unlike most birds, humans do not have a strong magnetoreception. However, experiments have demonstrated that we do tend to have some sense of magnetic fields, the mechanism for this is not completely understood.

• Time

• No singular mechanism has been found but experimental data has shown humans have a startling accurate sense of time, particularly when younger.

• Light detection

Tracking subtle sensation, chi movement, may be in a category of its own. Breath is the bridge between the gross physical body and the subtle body.

Intrapersonal

Attention can be pointed towards the invisible psycho emotional landscape of thoughts and emotions. The anchor for your mind during a meditation could be mindfulness of the mind, developing a meta awareness or witness consciousness that has the ability to recognize the thinking mind. Another method of practice could be focused on noticing and befriending an emotional tone. 

Go deeper: 

• Visualize your inner landscape

• Tara Brach’s RAIN practice

• Inner Family Systems (I.F.S.) Therapy

Interpersonal

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. — Simone Weil

The interpersonal realm is our interactions and relationships with others. 

Honing a capacity for voluntary attention can be impactful for socialization ~ developing the skills needed for connection including the capacity to listen, observe, learn, ask questions, empathize and help another. Mindfulness practices of exteroception, interoception and introspection can support our capacity for genuine and compassionate interpersonal relationships fostering deeper, more attuned, presence.

Transpersonal

Transpersonal refers to a framework of interconnectedness and subsequent value of relationship, subjective meaning, and shared humanity. Transpersonal conveys a connection beyond the ego, capturing spiritual dimensions all humans share with a deeper self, others, nature, and the universe.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. In other words, attention improves our sense of belonging through a more intimate acknowledgement and appreciation of our surroundings and connection to both the human and more than human. 

Mindfulness is a powerful tool for repatterning the mind and changing our relationship with anxiety and depression by empowering us to show-up for the spaces we inhabit and simultaneously recognize all the ways in which our surroundings show-up for us.

Mindful attention may be the key to a life well-lived and well-loved. Skillfully attuning the mind brings vibrancy into both the practitioner and their surroundings. 

Mindfulness Practices 

Practices that nurture our capacity for presence and our attention. Summarized from Richie’s podcast interview and other resources:

Concentration Practices — attention discipline and refinement

• Single Pointed practices

• Refines concentration

• Focusing on specific parts of the body

• Focusing on the air in your nostrils

• Attending to an external stimulus like sound

• Open Awareness  — broadening the attentional focus, not fixing on anything in particular, not getting lost, being present for whatever might arise

• Strengthens circuits in the brain of meta awareness: knowing what the mind is doing

• Example: reading a few pages of a book and realizing you haven’t been paying attention to what you’re reading. That moment of recognition is meta-awareness

• Meta awareness is essential for correcting mistakes 

Constructive Practices — nurturing emotional qualities intentionally

• Loving-kindness — the wish for all beings to happy

• Compassion — the wish to relieve suffering for another

Insight — self-knowledge, knowing the narratives we carry about ourselves

• Analytic meditation — ask ourselves questions, this provides insight into the fundamental insubstantiality of the self, narrative is actually a bunch of thoughts and the practice is not about changing the narrative as so much as it is about changing our relationship to the narrative 

• What is the self made of?

• Is there a feeling to self?

• A color to the self?

Language of Mindfulness

• Mindful awareness

• Awaring

• Attuning

• Tracking

• Presence

• Vulnerability

• Essence

• Rawness

• Vivid

• Alive

• Attending

• Relaxed-awakeness

• Calm alertness

Yin Yoga is an excellent container for Mindfulness practices.

The essence of Yoga is focus and attention — attention to breath, the body’s messages, to the energy and even to the quality of your attention. — Joel Kramer 

Mind states can be purposefully cultivated and brain pathways regenerated. Similar to how the body gets locked into movement patterns, the mind develops thought grooves that are more likely to travel on the more they get worn-in. Once we are aware of our thought paths, we can step off of well-worn paths that are causing suffering and develop new thought paths.

Meditators have long harnessed the regenerative capacity of the mind to cultivate states of “higher consciousness” like non-dual awareness and samadhi. 

Practically, a great place to start for many practitioners is noticing where their attention goes and how it is moving. From self-awareness, the practitioner can then learn techniques that rewire the mind and start to change their default way of being.

Training in relaxed-awakeness and compassion practices can alter our mind state, but will not eliminate naturally occurring and typically unpleasant states like anxiety, fear or anger. There are a variety of teachings on how one might reduce suffering ~ from Tara Brach’s teachings on radical acceptance to Sam Harris’s thoughts on non-dual states and Byron Katie’s The Work. At the foundation of these teachings are attention and mindfulness.