Watching and understanding attention

We're going to start this practice a slightly different way to usual. We're going to actually start by noticing what it is that we're already paying attention to. So rather than saying let's bring attention here or there, let's notice this or that, without that kind of instruction, what are you aware of most obviously, what's prominent, what's hooking your attention? You might notice a couple of things as you try and do this. One is that sometimes attention gets a little bit shy when we really closely watch its movements; it tends to fade and soften a little bit. The thing we might notice is that attention tends to stick to whatever's the most uncomfortable thing we can find. So I notice in my head there's some tension, and it's a kind of magnet for attention. It's where attention wants to flow. You might notice some kind of physical tension or discomfort, how this attracts attention. You might notice if there's some emotion, some feeling—a little bit of agitation or a little bit of anxiety. This can really be a magnet for attention too. You may notice attention just sort of pinging around, jumping from this to getting caught up in thought, coming back to some part of the body. Not right now actually looking to change what attention's up to—although that will change by the fact that we're watching it—but looking to sort of witness its movement. These meditations normally start with a kind of thorough check-in: how the body is, what's happening emotionally. And this is a kind of different way to do this. So we let the natural movement of attention perform the check-in for us. We watch attention flowing here and there, and it tells us what our psyche feels is important in this moment. We discover from this movement of attention, from its pinging around, that we are distracted, restless. If it's sticking to some kind of discomfort or tension, we learn something about how the body feels. So we can just spend a moment checking in this way—noticing what it is that attention feels called to. Just welcoming and allowing both these experiences of the body and our emotional state, and welcoming and allowing the movement of attention itself. Not fighting anything, not trying to harness attention. Not that there's anything wrong with doing that—we're just practicing a different approach. We're going to tune in a little bit to the peripheral awareness of our bodies—the awareness of the body that remains even as attention highlights this or that experience. Attention draws a circle around one thing and brings it into the foreground, but it doesn't exclude this wider awareness. A very important part of our practice is cultivating this wider awareness. We do that just by tuning into it and noticing it. It might help to name some sensations in the body, collecting them as we open our awareness out in this way. Just noticing the shifting patterns of tension in the head, feeling the subtle tingles in the fingers and toes, feeling the shape of the body, feeling the skin’s contact with clothes and air, sensing the breath—which is an easy word to say, but the actual experience is made up of quite a lot of sensations: the belly moving, the chest moving, the sense of air moving through the nostrils, down the throat, a subtle kind of rise and fall in the whole body. We might find that by touring the body like this, bringing attention to different areas, different sensations, it's easier to notice them in our peripheral awareness. Once we've done that, we spend a couple of minutes opening to this sense of the whole body—the whole play of sensation. If it helps to center attention on the breath, you can do that—a kind of soft attention that doesn’t exclude anything else. With this wider awareness of your whole body, this whole moment-to-moment arising of sensation that is the experienced body, we see that in our experience, the body isn’t a solid, continuous thing. It's an ever-changing inner world. As we experience this and receive this, we can again watch the movement of attention and encourage it to just rest a little bit. Not necessarily rest here or there, but we can maybe notice that with attention, with this drawing of circles around particular individual experiences—this creation of individual experiences from a mass of undifferentiated sensation—there’s a kind of tension and a kind of effort. We can notice that and encourage it to relax. One of the functions of attention is that it creates objects. You might be able to sense this in the field of sensation that is your body. The movement of attention draws lines around body parts and creates the idea of a knee or a shoulder or a head. You can watch it do this and see if it's possible to relax this tendency to create boundaries. It's quite a subtle thing that we're trying to do; it may not be very easy or obvious. One thing that can help with this is to just say to attention, as it moves here and there, "Not important." So as attention moves to highlight some physical discomfort, say "Not important, relax." That sort of effort associated with paying attention—not important right now. Attention creates objects from a mass of lower-level experience, and it creates a sense of importance or weight or mattering. We can just entertain the view that right now, nothing needs to be turned into a thing that matters. It's quite important in our daily lives that we create things with attention in this way, but in this practice, we're trying to be really clear about what attention does and how it works—to understand it better so that we can be less beholden to it, and it can be less automatic and more usefully employed. Right now, our exploration is about just being aware of the wider field of sensation without picking out this or that experience, labeling it, or making it a thing. We don't want to get in a fight with attention. This is a gentle offering to it—to relax this faculty that roams around experience and identifies threats and opportunities. We're just trying to give it a break. Resting attention. When we rest attention like this, we can actually be aware of more. We can be aware of much more of this field of experience that is the body—the flickering sensations that make up this ever-changing experience. Attention narrows this down and excludes most of it to make one thing more obvious. So it can feel like a sort of zooming out to let go of this movement of attention—like we're zooming out to a bird’s-eye view. Within this whole bird’s-eye view, notice this objectifying, this thingifying, this identifying construction of boundaries that attention does. We can just encourage it to relax—let it know that right now, it’s not important to differentiate anything from anything else. As attention looks at this or that, we can say, "Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter." It's like when we are looking at a beautiful view for a while, and the eyes naturally soften and take in everything at once rather than fixating on this or that object. To rest in open awareness is to let go of the sense of importance of one experience over another. It's to let go of the sense of defined boundaries between experiences, even to let go of the need to identify them. All these tendencies are higher-level habits of the mind. We’re just trying to get underneath those—to the bubbling away of unidentified experience that can only be felt in this immediate way. We'll carry on like that for the last minute or two in silence.