By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+
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Imagine you're at your favorite cafe. You order your favorite drink, perhaps a latte or a chai tea or a kombucha open tap, and you have to carry it across the room to an open table. You don't want to spill it.
Just imagine yourself in this scenario, and notice in this scenario how attention is working. It's doing two things simultaneously. That is, we don't want to spill the beverage so we’re focused on it, but simultaneously and often unconsciously, our peripheral awareness is also scanning the environment for potential obstacles.
The way modern neuroscience breaks down our attentional system is into what I call simply focused awareness and open awareness. One aspect of your attention is paying attention to something — presumably these words on this page. In the meantime, your peripheral awareness is aware at some level of the environment around you. It can be quite an unconscious affair until suddenly you hear a car screeching outside and your attention breaks from this page and you're wondering if there's something you need to check on outside.
When you're carrying your beverage across the room in a cafe, you're paying close attention to the drink, not wanting to spill. And in your peripheral awareness you're scanning the environment for obstacles. Is there oncoming traffic? Is the floor uneven, uneven? Do I have to walk around to plant or weave through some chairs to get to my little nook in the corner where I can pull out my novel or my laptop? That kind of thing.
So why am I talking about attention and peripheral awareness? Well, when we don't pay attention to how we pay attention, when we don't consciously cultivate these two sides of the same coin, we end up with a condition that John Yates, a great mindfulness teacher, calls awareness deficit disorder. We all know about attention deficit disorder. This quality of mind where our attention just won't stay put on the same object. It's bouncing around, bouncing around. We feel hyperactive and can't just settle in.
But Yates points out that really many of us have a kind of undiagnosed awareness deficit disorder, meaning we don't make full use of our peripheral awareness or open awareness. And why is that worth being aware of? Well, let's stick with the simple cafe example. If I get really good at using my peripheral awareness and I'm able to scan the environment for any potential problems, any obstacles that could get between me and my destination, rather than those problems, surprise-attacking me in my focused awareness where I'm just trained on my coffee cup, I'll actually see those problems coming. I can anticipate them and I can skillfully work around them. And this is how life works and this is how meditation works. If we really engage our peripheral awareness, if we learn how to keep our awareness really open and spacious, even as we're focusing intently on our object of meditation, then we're less surprised by the distractions that creep in.
We can take care of the distractions before they become problems. In other words, and this is according to Yates, a good functional definition of mindful awareness is the optimal functioning of attention and peripheral awareness, simultaneous focused awareness and open awareness.
If the cafe metaphor is not rich enough for you, I've got one more. My friend Sally is a physical trainer who is really good at what she does. She pointed out to me that she has a lot of clients who want washboard abs, but they, even though they work their abs a lot, don't quite get that finished look. They're so focused on the crunch, they don't realize that elongating the muscle is equally important for toning the abs. So when we want to build muscle we think, “Okay, heavy weights, lots of reps, crunch, crunch, crunch.” But we don't think necessarily about fully extending and relaxing the muscle, maximizing the range over which it's doing work.
It's a similar principle. We want to get good concentration, we want to build mindfulness, and we don't realize that a crucial skill in mindfulness is to learn to let awareness relax and get really big and spacious. When we do this, when we get good at this skill, when we really exercise the attentional system in the way it was designed to work, we find that we're able to focus really intently on what we need to in a given moment and our peripheral awareness is keying us in on maybe the next thing coming and what we'll need to pay attention to next. So we have the experience in life of being in a flow state and knowing what to pay attention to moment to moment and knowing when to let go and being able to respond optimally to each situation. That's powerful and that's mindfulness practice.
We're going to do this right now. We're going to practice paying attention in a focused way and simultaneously being aware of the open quality of awareness. Go ahead and get comfortable.
Start Meditation
Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a big breath. Take a couple of big breaths and just let out, just extending that exhale signals the body to relax, letting us drop in.
Find a posture where you can be comfortable and soft yet also alert. Whether you're sitting, standing, walking, see to it that you have an upright spine. An upright spine increases alertness in your system.
And as we get underway here, I'm just going to invite you to attend to the entire physical environment, the entire world around you right now, and this includes physical sensations within the body, emotions, thought forms, all of it. Just let your awareness be wide open, not focusing on any one thing. Taking it all in. Feeling how spacious awareness is.
Then any moment if you catch yourself kind of clinging to something or paying attention to it, you can just notice that and let go, coming back to open awareness sounds around you. Smells, textures, maybe your bare feet barefoot in the grass right now and you're aware of the touch of clothes on your skin, the temperature of the air, the sounds of nature, sounds of your house or your apartment wherever you live.
Just be open to the environment, wide open. And now I want to invite you to let the environment fade into the background of awareness just a little bit while you start to focus on physical sensation.
When we practice this way, you're not supposed to feel a certain way. Nothing in the world needs to start happening or stop. Everything is just in the background. While in the foreground you're paying attention to the flow of sensation like a river flowing between two banks, sensations of the body, just flow and flow, endlessly flow.
If at any point any event in peripheral awareness starts to move into your field of focus, kind of replacing the focus of physical sensation, you can just notice it. Notice distractions creeping in and just relaxing, resetting your intention to flow with the sensations of the body, letting everything else be in the background and we can tighten up our attention even more now from the entire physical body to just the torso. Really attending to the expansion and contraction of breath through the torso, letting everything else in all of the world and all of experience just be in the background. You don't have to stop it. You don't have to do anything to it. Just let it happen. In the background of awareness and the foreground, you're just feeling this flow of breath rolling through you like a wave.
Feel the sensations of breathing in and how they're distinct from the sensations of breathing out. Let awareness be open. You're not just trying to be aware of the breath. You're focusing on the expansion and contraction of the breath while staying totally open to all of life, all of the world. Just appreciate this dynamic equilibrium. When awareness is open and relaxed, events can just flow and it supports our paying closer attention to what we choose to focus on.
And when we anchor our attention on a particular object like the breath, it supports the opening up of our peripheral awareness. These two systems support each other. They're two sides of the same coin. So often when we practice mindfulness, we just struggle with ourselves. We have this idea that we shouldn't have thoughts in our mind. We should be feeling something different than our breath. Oftentimes the problem is an awareness deficit disorder. We're not relaxing enough in awareness and just letting things happen.
Take just another moment to let everything flow. Let your awareness be wide open as the sky letting everything just arise and pass as it does as you stay trained on the expansion and contraction of the breath. So the steadiness of this focus for the pleasure of being embodied and breathing. Feel the constant unbroken awareness moment to moment. I appreciate that. Whether awareness, focus or open or both. And it's always both. It doesn't take any effort to be aware. You're already aware. Awareness is simply what you are.
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