Watching my grandchildren play reminds me of when I was a kid, not just the stories I remember but the rich sensory details that live in my memory without coalescing into clear storylines. Quinn gets excited by spotting a purple crayon in the batch. Frankie gets nervous when the sky darkens, or he hears thunder rumbling in the distance. Both of them giggle uncontrollably when they hide from a parent returning home from work, even though neither can resist gleefully announcing they’re hiding.

When we’re at the swimming pool, I find myself listening to the blend of squeals and splashes that evoke countless similar sensory experiences, coming alive in my imagination even without conjuring any associated beginnings, middles, or endings.

A lot of our time gets spent on making sense of what’s happening, and for good reason—it’s how we solve problems, understand one another, and find our way through a complicated world. Yet when interpretation takes over, we can drift away from the raw experience of living.

There’s another way to be here. Rather than letting the impulse to explain and solve everything dominate, we can discover how deeply satisfying it is to meet what’s happening directly through our senses.

Let’s break it down.

Pause

Try, now and then, to briefly set aside the urge to make sense—not because it’s bad, but because perception has something to teach us that interpretation can’t.

You don’t have to stop what you’re doing. Just shift into a slightly more observant stance toward whatever is already happening.

Notice

In the midst of whatever is happening in the present, most of us tend to ask immediately: "What does this mean?"

For a few seconds, play with a different question: ”What is actually here?”

You're temporarily shifting from making sense to sensing directly.

This kind of noticing takes practice because it requires setting aside, even briefly, the compelling drama playing out in your mind so you can observe real life unfolding in and around you.

This shift is somehow both unbelievably simple and surprisingly difficult. What makes it difficult is remembering to do it—and then not overthinking it. The simplicity comes from how natural it is to reconnect through our senses.

It’s a way of coming back to your senses—in the most literal sense of the phrase.

Real-time sensory details

When you pause to notice what’s happening in any moment, what comes into the foreground is what you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell:

• The taste of the coffee you’re sipping.

• The warmth of the mug in your hands.

• The touch of a breeze on your skin.

• The play of sunlight on the wall.

• The sounds of people in other rooms—talking, laughing, or arguing.

• The hum of the air conditioner.

• The feeling of your body registering boredom or frustration during a meeting.

Your senses are doorways inviting you to briefly set aside the need to make sense of what’s on your mind.

The pull toward interpretation and internal commentary is strong. Instead of waiting for it to quiet down, you can practice letting the sensory details fascinate you. This is a trainable skill, and it doesn’t require perfect conditions to cultivate.

When you approach moments this way—pausing, noticing, and letting real-time sensory details come to the foreground—you’re not doing a fancy new technique. You’re reclaiming a built-in capacity you’ve always had. And as simple as it seems, this small shift in how you pay attention can quietly change your relationship with everyday life.

Why this shift matters

This habit isn’t just about collecting interesting details.

Pausing to notice real-time sensory details strengthens your natural capacity to make direct contact with being alive as experience unfolds.

This layer of experience is always available—hiding in plain sight—waiting for you to notice. Yet we tend to postpone this kind of contact by default, assuming some ideal future moment will be more worthy of our attention.

Children notice these details without being told they’re important. Adults forget, and have to reprioritize them intentionally—even though we have plenty of evidence that they matter.

The good news is that this tiny, capacity-building shift becomes easier through repetition.

There are two ways I think about strengthening attention:

• Through longer, dedicated practice.

• Through hundreds of brief repetitions woven into ordinary life.

You don’t have to choose one or the other. They reinforce each other, much like structured exercise and simply moving more throughout the day.

Some people thrive with a daily meditation practice. Others rarely sit formally but become remarkably consistent about noticing throughout the day. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

You don’t have to find the perfect blend to benefit. Any way you practice this shift—longer sessions, tiny moments, or a mix of both—can help you come back to your senses more often than never.

Exercise

This exercise explores sights, sounds, and bodily sensations to strengthen your capacity to pause, notice real-time sensory details, and feel more alive.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• While waiting.

• While moving from one activity to another.

• When you feel like your own mind is yanking you around.

Settle into practice. When we shift into formal practice, we don’t need to wait for ideal surroundings, turn thinking off, or numb any emotional residue percolating from the preceding hours. We need to gently steer our attention away from making sense and toward making contact with what’s happening in and around us.

Notice visual details. Pay special attention to sights around you. How might an artist, a young child, or an animal investigate their experience of seeing? If you were forced to wear bandages on your eyes for several days following a medical procedure, how would you take in the scene? Try to emulate these types of curiosity.

If your eyes are open, pick a specific object to look at for a few seconds. Notice its shape, color, and texture without rushing to evaluate it as a whole. You can broaden your gaze to take in some part of what’s in front of you, or take in your entire field of vision, again emphasizing color, form, and the quality of the light rather than trying to describe what you see or make a list of tasks related to it.

If your eyes are closed, gaze into the darkness, or at the swirling mixture of light and dark you discover there. Even with your eyes closed

In this moment, seeing is like this.

Notice auditory details. Pay special attention to sounds around you. Let your attention be pulled to specific sounds—nearby, farther away, or off in the distance. Listen in one direction and then the opposite—right and left, in front and behind, above and below. Listen for fleeting sounds and the silence that occupies the space when they’re gone.

If you notice your attention being pulled into verbal thinking, instead of trying to get rid of it, try to listen to it as just another sound in nature. Try to focus on its volume, rhythm, and tone rather than on what it means. The meaning will be obvious, of course, but try to let it be secondary to what you’re curious about.

In this moment, hearing is like this.

Notice body sensations. Pay attention to whatever you can feel in your body. Notice what feels purely physical, obviously emotional, or some inextricable blend of both. Explore sensations that are comfortable, uncomfortable, stable, and changing.

While your visual and auditory senses expand your awareness of the space around you, they remind you how little physical space you actually occupy in any situation—even though that space feels so personal and important.

In this moment, feeling is like this.

Focus on one external sensory category at a time. Pick one or two sensory domains to explore—or focus on all three—one sensory detail at a time. Practice in a way that feels like strengthening a shift you could make out in the world as you go about your business.

Life practice. Come back to your senses—more often than never—by making contact with sights, sounds, and body sensations throughout the day. While this might seem trivial or too easy to make a real impact, I encourage you (I dare you) to stay open to the possibility that habitually paying closer attention to the mundane details of being alive can bring ordinary moments to life.

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Meditation apps can help establish a consistent practice. They offer structure, guidance, and encouragement to begin—or begin again.

But they can also make mindfulness seem like something that only counts when you have a timer running and an unbroken streak.

You don’t need an app to develop flexible focus, perceptual clarity, or responsive composure. You need small intervals that already exist in your day, a way to recognize when they begin and end, and a plan for what to notice while they last.

What you need:

• slivers of time

• a way to track them as they pass

• sensory options

It seems like we don’t have time to strengthen our attention. More often, we resist giving up even a few of the fragments we already spend rehashing conversations, overthinking decisions, and rehearsing worst-case scenarios.

It seems like we need an official timer. In reality, unofficial timers are better suited to developing mindful awareness and are surprisingly abundant when we start looking for them.

It seems like we shouldn’t need to plan to be more present. In reality, without a plan, we tend to waste potential practice time because we are not prepared to dive into our perceptions.

Shoot for more than zero seconds

A twenty-minute meditation is valuable. But it can become the enemy of noticing you’re alive more often than never if it convinces you that practice only counts when it is formal.

Stolen seconds add up to richer moments.

Notice how many times a day you’re waiting for something to begin or end. Allocate two or three of them to track sensory details. This requires foregoing a few seconds of figuring out yourself or the world.

Trust me. You can afford it.

Scout for fragments with obvious endpoints

Over the next few days, secretly spot ordinary situations that don’t last very long.

Your bathroom is full of them:

• brushing your teeth

• taking a shower

• relieving your bladder

So is your kitchen:

• making coffee

• chopping vegetables

• unloading the dishwasher

Your workday is littered with them, too:

• your commute

• waiting for a website to load

• waiting for a meeting to begin

The best candidates are ordinary, recurring, and long enough to hold a sensory pause without requiring your full problem-solving attention.

Once you have a list of contenders, pick two or three to convert into mindful awareness timers. Explore them for two or three weeks and see what you discover.

Decide what you’ll notice before the timer starts

Before the moment arrives, choose one kind of experience you can explore while the clock runs out: sounds, sights, body sensations, taste, smell, thoughts, or emotional pressure.

Examples:

• While I brush my teeth, I will notice the changing sensations in my mouth, hands, and face.

• While I heat something in the microwave, I will notice how many sounds I can hear around me and try to listen to them closely.

• While I wait for a green light, I will watch the flow of cars moving through the intersection.

• While I wait for a Zoom meeting to begin, I will secretly savor any relaxation that I’m able to find in my body.

You might be surprised by how many satisfying details have been quietly waiting in the background for a few seconds of your less-divided attention.

The point is not to turn every spare moment into a self-improvement project. It is to remember that ordinary life already contains more texture, richness, and possibility than your planning mind can keep track of.

Exercise

This exercise uses your breathing both to explore a variety of body sensations and to parse out a realistic, tangible duration for each repetition of close noticing.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• before reaching for your device

• while waiting for something to begin or end

• before deciding how to spend the evening

Read more

1. Some People are Easier to Love

2. Give Humanity More Human Wiggle Room

3. Our Own Best Enemies

While mindfulness teachers tend to emphasize focus-building strategies more than other approaches, I’ve always found that mixing things up with empathy- and gratitude-strengthening exercises brings the exploration to life. It’s similar to how cross-training works in physical fitness: each capacity strengthens the others and elevates the whole game. The results somehow become more than the sum of their parts.

Loving-kindness is usually positioned as a self-compassion tool, but it’s often taught in a way that feels more like an intellectual exercise than an experiment in emotional awareness—one that can set the stage for a different kind of relationship with yourself, without trying to force your emotional responses to line up with some spiritual-sounding ideal.

I like to deconstruct this puzzle to make it more accessible to anyone who cringes at other explanations, which is what I’m attempting in this three-part series. In the first week, we explored imagining the well-being of people we find easier to love, while observing whatever emotional reactions arose. Last week, we watched how our minds work when we try to conjure up happiness for people we don’t know well, again noticing whatever we feel as we do.

When I first learned how to practice loving-kindness, I quickly noticed that the emotional warmth directed toward likable people created momentum that made it easier to cultivate similar feelings as I worked my way along the continuum. I had to get clever about imagining difficult people, even aging them in reverse to much younger versions of themselves. I was surprised by the complexity of my emotional reactions when I pictured my enemies as children, safe in the arms of an adoring young parent.

The most challenging part for me turned out to be considering my own well-being. Respected teachers insisted that you have to begin with yourself before moving on to other groups of people. I understood the logic of starting with myself, but I simply couldn’t do it. It was beyond challenging. It was impossible. Reciting the traditional phrases felt empty. My typically active visual imagination went blank. I felt nothing. I had to ignore the rule of beginning with myself to explore the technique at all.

It occurred to me that the reason it was so difficult to consider my own well-being was that I was approaching myself as if I were someone I liked. When I like someone, it’s easy to picture them safe, happy, and healthy. When I don’t like someone, I’m forced to turn to creative ways to navigate my resistance to focusing on whether or not the person deserves to have their basic needs met. I’ve imagined presidents of both parties as little children playing in the snow, warming up with tomato soup afterward, or having lullabies sung to them unironically by their mothers who hoped they’d have satisfying adult lives.

I couldn’t imagine my own happiness until I eventually realized that, rather than being someone I found likable, I was actually one of my difficult people. I might even be my most difficult person, which was a real bummer to realize. Forget about trying to love myself. What am I supposed to do with the realization that I’ve been actively loathing myself for most of my adult life without realizing it? Had I been recruiting others to play that role, sometimes just to make it easier to live with?

This proved to be a significant insight that led to exploring creative ways to solve the challenge. I came up with a strategy that worked for me and felt grounded in the essence of the traditional exercise. I pictured all the people in my life gathered in a circle around me. I abandoned the rote script I’d been instructed to say and tried to really imagine what their individual thriving might look, sound, and feel like. The shift in perspective invigorated me and sparked even more creativity.

Next, I imagined them taking turns putting the loving-kindness phrases into their own words, but aimed at me. I could see them. I could see myself. And when I let them speak in their own voices, I began to feel something. What I felt wasn’t comfortable. It felt raw, tender, and excruciatingly vulnerable. It felt awkward and embarrassing. I wanted to resist feeling it because it hurt too much. But when I began to actually take in the possibility that none of the people in my life had ever wanted me to suffer, even as they tried to reconcile how they thought my life was supposed to be instead of how it actually played out. The grief embedded in that gap was theirs to feel. I had my own heartbreak to navigate. Not even the strangers or enemies were actively trying to curse or reject me. I probably wasn’t even on their radar at all most of the time. This wasn’t based on logic. I wasn’t trying to talk myself into rationality. It was something tangible and complicated that I could feel in my body.

Regardless of our conflicts, the people in my life want me to thrive. There was no actual evidence that they intended for me to live my life alone outside the circle of humanity. I was left wondering if I could be the one keeping my persistent fear of being ostracized alive and fueling it with stories that resonated emotionally.

Once I had allowed a bit of basic human kindness to flow toward me, I jumped into the circle to offer it to myself. It didn’t feel peaceful, unless serenity is supposed to sting. It felt shattering and cathartic. It must have been odd to see a runner sobbing on the bike path that day, but it felt as natural as sweating and discovering what my muscles and lungs were capable of doing when given a chance. It was only in the flood of imagined acceptance that I realized the depth of my self-loathing. Observing it seemed to weaken its grip.

Looking back, this insight tied the whole exercise together and made its value pop in a practical yet profound way.

The challenge wasn’t really learning to love difficult people. It was noticing where I’d stopped seeing people—including myself—as fully human.

This has changed the way I hear the aphorism shared across all wisdom traditions that we should love our enemies. I need lovable people, but they don’t exercise my heart the way my enemies do. I hate to admit it, but noticing myself constructing narratives about people I don’t know—and working through my resistance to being internally hospitable toward the challenging people in my life—has deepened the closeness I feel with my family and friends. I feel genuinely grateful to my enemies for this surprising gift. You might even say I love them for it.

It’s amazing how impactful this exercise can be when I practice it regularly, even for a few minutes here and there, and even more fascinating to me is how often I forget to include it in the mix. Even my resistance to doing it can be a sign that it might be exactly what I need.

Here are some surprisingly effective ways I’ve discovered to recognize the basic humanity hiding in difficult people, which can be ourselves sometimes.

Avoiding Eye Contact

When considering the well-being of the people who are easy to love, I like to imagine their faces and facial expressions. It can feel wonderful. But when we imagine difficult people, it can help to avoid picturing their faces. Try turning them around or imagining observing them from behind or from a safe distance, and see how much less challenging the task becomes.

Using the Benjamin Button Method

Imagining my difficult people as young adults, teens, and children can be a powerful way to connect with their humanity. When all else fails, I can try to remember that they were once babies whose parents loved them and wanted the best for them. Putting this universal image to work can really help me step down from my self-appointed judge of who deserves to be part of the larger human family.

Objects in the Rear-View Mirror Feel Less Personal than They Appeared

I stopped trying to imagine other people’s humanity when they’re actively making my life harder, but sometimes recalling them later can be a powerful practice. At the end of the day, I can reflect on careless drivers, annoying influencers, and celebrities I’m convinced don’t deserve the spotlight, and consider that there’s a human in there I don’t need to like. Humanizing them in whatever big and small ways I can seems to humanize me.

If my practical, down-to-earth approach to mindfulness resonates with you but you’re not ready to subscribe just yet, you can still show your support with a one-time tip on Buy Me a Coffee. Every gesture of encouragement is appreciated, including likes and shares of the posts you enjoy.

Exercise

This exercise offers flexible ways to connect with the humanity you share with everyone, without pressure to like everyone or condone behaviors that conflict with your values.

It also helps undermine the tendency to reject ourselves at a fundamental level without realizing it, especially when we don’t like ourselves or regret what we’ve done.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Before or after boring or contentious meetings

• Before or after medical appointments

• Before or after emotionally charged family time

Read more

1. Some People are Easier to Love

2. Give Humanity More Wiggle Room

3. Our Own Best Enemies

Last week, we explored what happens when we imagine the well-being of people who are easy to love. Friends, family members, mentors, pets, and others whose happiness feels naturally important to us. One of the things I suggested was paying attention to whatever emotional responses arise, rather than treating warm feelings as the goal of the exercise.

This week, I’d like to shift our attention to a different category of people: strangers.

I don’t know what goes on inside most people. That sounds obvious, but I forget it constantly. I’m fascinated by what I can’t know about what makes people tick, and by how little it takes for me to convince myself that I like, dislike, or understand a person I don’t know.

I can spend thirty seconds observing someone in a grocery store, airport, waiting room, or coffee shop and come away with surprisingly strong impressions. I notice how they’re dressed. I catch a fragment of a conversation. I observe an interaction with a cashier or customer service worker. Before long, I find myself dropping them into a bucket of other people they remind me of.

One of the many uncomfortable takeaways from my first silent meditation retreat was how quickly I divided the other meditators into three categories: people I liked, people I had some aversion to, and people I barely noticed. Keep in mind that I made these assignments over several days of not talking at all, mostly sitting in silence together or watching each other walk slowly back and forth across the lawn like people auditioning for a zombie movie or to be welcomed into a cult. What really blew my mind was how much resorting I had to do when we started talking again.

The remarkable thing isn’t that this happens. The remarkable thing is how automatically it happens without our tracking most of it. We’re born storytellers. We’re on the lookout for heroes, villains, and people who don’t warrant our attention at all. We want to understand things we can’t possibly know.

Presented with incomplete information, we fill in the blanks. Sometimes we do this generously. We imagine loving families, meaningful work, interesting hobbies, loyal friends, and personal struggles being navigated with courage.

At other times, we fill in the blanks less generously. We assume selfishness. Carelessness. Entitlement. Ignorance.

The details vary, but the process is remarkably similar. The less information we have, the more imagination we rely on to feel like we know.

One of the reasons I enjoy exercises based on imagining another person’s well-being is that they expose this tendency so clearly.

Try this out in the world without anyone knowing you’re doing it:

1. Pick a person at random.

2. Remind yourself that deep down this person wants to be safe, happy, healthy, and comfortable.

3. Imagine the person thriving. Not because they’ve earned it. Not because you approve of every decision they’ve ever made. Just because they’re human.

4. If possible, temporarily forego policing the person’s appearance and observable behaviors. Let them be different from you, and maybe even shoot for a version of a happy life that doesn’t resemble yours.

5. Remember that deep down you also want. General safety and security. Good health. Connection to other people. A sense of purpose. A little less stress. A little more ease.

6. Notice what happens next. Feel whatever emotional reactions this stirs up for a minute.

If you’re like me, almost immediately, your mind begins generating all sorts of details you don’t have access to. Things about their history, the people in their lives, their job, their mood today, their overall energy level, their baseline honesty or kindness, and their core personality.

The point isn’t that we shouldn’t be curious about strangers. To me, the value of the exercise lies in revealing how much of our experience of other people is shaped by our own imagination. We rarely encounter another person’s full humanity. We encounter fragments and instinctively construct stories around them.

This doesn’t mean our stories are always completely wrong. It just means they’re incomplete. When I’m right, it’s still based on guesswork and quick assumptions.

There is something potentially liberating about recognizing how often we reduce people to fit the categories we’ve developed throughout our lives. The more I practice this exercise, the less interested I become in deciding who deserves basic well-being and the more interested I become in noticing the assumptions I’m carrying around about other people.

Some assumptions create closeness. Others create distance. Many operate completely outside of awareness. What I find most useful isn’t replacing negative stories with positive ones. It’s creating a little more space around all of them.

A little more uncertainty. A little more curiosity. A little more wiggle room.

The goal isn’t to become naïve. It’s to unhook our behavior from the snap judgments we mistake for reality.

The goal is to remember how little information we usually work with to simplify life’s complexity — especially the social aspects of our daily lives.

When we do that, it becomes easier to recognize the humanity we share with people whose lives intersect only briefly with our own. We might start to make room for nuance and even contradictions that aren’t up to us to resolve. We might even notice that the narratives we automatically project onto others reveal more about ourselves than about the strangers.

Here are a few tips I’ve found helpful when I practice this one.

Save the Drama for Your Mama

Imagining the well-being of strangers can feel much less personal and therefore less intense than imagining the well-being of the other categories of people used in this heart practice. Remember to practice letting emotional neutrality be a valid response.

The Benefit of Ignorance

One thing that can make loving-kindness difficult is confusing being able to recognize our shared humanity with condoning specific behaviors or opinions that conflict with our own values. When you find it easier to imagine the well-being of some strangers, could it be at least partly about not knowing enough about them? This also points to something about more difficult people — and often ourselves: we know too much. When you find it more difficult, the stranger probably belongs in the category with challenging people.

Gathering Clues from Strangers

It can be easy to imagine the well-being of people we know the least about. We let them laugh. We give them families. We decorate their homes. Consider how effortlessly we fill in such details. Could we do the same when it comes to the people who are very familiar to us, but we have a difficult time distinguishing fiction from fact when our feelings are stronger, and their lives overlap more directly with our own?

This week’s exercise explores these possibilities.

What happens when you ease up on assuming you already know who someone is and become curious about the many ways their humanity might be expressed in ways that are unobservable by you? Could becoming more aware of the storytelling you do undermine the degree to which you rely on it by default?

Exercise

This exercise lets you watch your imagination at work when you consider the well-being of people you don’t know.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Shopping in a grocery store

• Waiting in a long, slow line

• Driving on the highway

• Navigating air travel

Read more

1. Some People are Easier to Love

2. Give Humanity More Wiggle Room

3. Our Own Best Enemies

Mindfulness is commonly associated with developing focus and relaxation, but there are many related practices designed to nurture other valuable qualities, such as empathy and gratitude. Some of these exercises can feel like an effort to force feelings rather than preparing the ground for them to emerge naturally. It’s a common experience. Many people give up when their emotions don’t match what the teachers describe.

Over time, I’ve adapted traditional exercises to better suit my personality, and I encourage others to do the same. For instance, rather than trying to radiate love from my heart, I focus on stoking my curiosity about the feelings that arise as I picture the people I care about thriving. Of course, if you’re able to beam love out into the world from your chest, please keep doing it. Some of us just need other ways to get into the project.

I discovered loving-kindness practice more than twenty years ago, while training for my first marathon and preparing for my first silent meditation retreat. You could say I was trying to emotionally reboot. After a decade as a social worker, I realized how little I had left to give those I was supposed to help, and how little satisfaction I was getting from trying. Have you tried turning it off and then back on again?

Professional helpers would probably call what I experienced burnout. From my perspective, however, it seemed more like holding myself to the same elusive goal I had so often tried to convince my clients to pursue: gaining insight into the inner stuff that was leaving me feeling empty and defeated. Whatever you want to call it, it was clear I needed to change how I was approaching my life.

I learned a traditional version of loving-kindness by listening to Sharon Salzberg’s audiobook.1 The instructions guided me to imagine the well-being of myself and others—starting with myself, then my supporters and those who loved me unconditionally, followed by close friends and family, acquaintances, and eventually the difficult people in my life.

As my running mileage increased, I used those long stretches to picture the safety, health, and happiness of various people. It was pleasant—and I quickly noticed that some people are simply easier to imagine thriving. This practice made the miles go by more smoothly, providing a welcome distraction from the constant urge to stop running.

But I also noticed that many of the emotional responses generated by the exercises weren’t necessarily pleasant. Imagining the well-being of someone who had died or was no longer in my life made me feel sad. Acknowledging that some of the people I care about most won’t be around forever made me feel joy, tempered by an unpleasant pang of inevitable grief. Some people sparked smiles and even laughter on some days, but very little emotionality on others. Was a flat emotional response a sign I was doing something wrong?

With so much time to reflect, I experimented widely—eventually settling on a customized approach that truly fits the contours of my emotional experience, even if it doesn’t perfectly align with traditional instructions. The key difference is that, for me, loving-kindness is no longer about trying to generate warmth on command. It’s about reconnecting with our shared humanity—a deep sense of relatedness that’s easy to overlook in the rush of daily life.

Rather than trying to micromanage other people’s safety and happiness from within my own mind and body, I like to sit with the complicated reality that, beneath our many differences, we all crave the same basic things: safety, health, vitality, connection, and ease. We really are in these challenges together, whether we remember to acknowledge it or not.

Instead of forcing loving feelings, I use the practice to notice how love unpredictably surfaces in my body as I contemplate the well-being of others—and myself. The results aren’t always pleasant or easy to describe, but they feel more genuine and more alive. I remind myself to feel whatever arises, rather than trying to manufacture a particular experience.

This approach works best when I let my emotional responses unfold naturally, without forcing them to match any preconceived idea of what love should feel like.

I try to attribute equal significance to four distinct feeling tones that might arise:

• pleasant

• unpleasant

• mixed

• neutral

This takes practice. We instinctively misread unpleasant feelings and emotional neutrality as being out of bounds. What if love turns out to be more complicated than we imagined when we were younger?

Here are three tips I’ve found helpful. Maybe you will, too. I’ll share more tips like these in the coming weeks as we explore how to imagine the well-being of people who are a little or a lot less easy to love.

Start Where You Can

Personalize this practice by starting with any category of people that feels natural to you. This flexible approach works for any mindfulness or attentional exercise. If you don’t practice, you can’t experience the results. So do what you need to do to nudge yourself to keep showing up. The benefits will eventually inspire you to continue.

Get creative and stay curious

The more frequently you explore this, the more sense it makes. Especially when it comes to the people you care about the most. Over time, you begin to notice subtleties and shifts in your emotions, without feeling the need to turn every variation into a problem. There’s a certain freedom in having a neutral reaction to someone you love, rather than feeling guilty if today’s feelings aren’t as intense as they were yesterday.

Ignore the Censors

Feel free to tailor the imagined well-being of the beloved, imperfect people in your life based on what you know makes them happy. Let your best friends and supportive family members smoke, read romance novels, and eat French fries in your mind. They won’t suffer the consequences of any behaviors you imagine them indulging. I promise. Instead of policing what makes the imagined activities of other people happy, savor your actual responses to their happiness in your own body.

Today’s exercise is designed to set the stage for exactly this kind of invaluable inner experimentation.

What might shift if you stop grading yourself by the amount of warmth you feel, and instead simply notice whatever arises—without evaluation?

Exercise

This exercise invites you to cultivate affectionate feelings and immerse yourself in their rich, nuanced complexity.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• When you’re the only one awake in the house

• Over coffee or breakfast

• As you settle into bed

Read more

Mindfulness can sound like just one more unforgiving task on your self-care to-do list, one that doesn’t seem worth the effort. One of the trickiest parts of talking or writing about mindfulness practice is making it sound doable and something you’d actually want to do. Not just once, but regularly, in the midst of real life, with people who need you, deadlines creeping up on you, and distractions coming at you from every direction. It’s a tough sell.

The problem isn’t the practice itself but the ideas most of us hold about how it’s supposed to go. The role model we picture is a monk, or at least someone who resembles one, sitting in a serene place, eyes closed and mind quiet. That image’s appeal also creates unrealistic expectations: its simplicity, silence, and absence of daily realities. Although monasteries support transformation, if you don’t plan to live in one, trying to practice like a monk may actually get in your way.

What I find more useful — and more realistic — is the opposite: practicing like a secret agent.

A secret agent is embedded in the real world, surrounded by noise, juggling demands, and navigating interruptions, boredom, and other people—none of whom are aware of what she’s quietly working on. What the secret agent is actually doing is habitually making small, invisible shifts in her attention. Not removing herself from the scene, but choosing, on purpose, to pay closer attention to what’s already there while managing her composure from the inside.

That’s what my practice looks like from the outside. A person loading the dishwasher, picking up the grandkids from preschool, and running errands. Nothing unusual to see. Nothing special or dramatic that anyone around me would stop to notice. What’s invisible to anyone watching me live my life are the frequent shifts inside: from the internal stream of remembering, planning, evaluating, and problem-solving that fills an ordinary day to the direct experience of what I can see, hear, and feel in my body. When I make those shifts, there’s no audience to track them, because they’re unobservable to anyone but me.

I want people to know that this seemingly strange hobby is available to them, too—no need for a quiet mind, a perfectly comfortable body, or a sense of calm to feel like you’re doing something important. Cultivating mindful awareness means working with what you have, wherever you are, at any moment.

Here’s what I think is most misunderstood, especially among people who’ve tried to meditate and quietly given up. The instruction to “return to your breath”—or whatever the focus object is—is often taken as a command to clear the mental field. Without meaning to, this formula turns every thought into an intruder trying to crash your peaceful party. You notice a thought, escort it out, and return. Over and over, you repeat this pattern: notice a thought, show it the door, return to the sensations of breathing.

Before long, this constant monitoring consumes your time and attention. You end up feeling like a bouncer at the door of your own mind, increasingly irritated by the intruder who never seems to get the message. That’s an exhausting way to practice. It misses something important, making it unsustainable. The goal is to be a warm host, not a frustrated security guard. You practice attending to one visitor for a while instead of micromanaging the others.

Thinking doesn’t have to stop. Ambient mental sounds don’t have to be silenced. They’re inevitable. Trying to turn them off only makes them louder. You can learn to let them recede into the background instead. You already know how to do this. In fact, you do it every time you drive, run, or take a walk while listening to a podcast. Your attention is on the road and the conversation, navigating both at once. You’re not eliminating either. You’re giving one stream a little more weight while letting the other recede, just slightly, into the background.

That’s the skill. And it’s more both/and than either/or.

Whether you’re meditating or practicing in the middle of ordinary life, you don’t need to micromanage your thoughts or feelings. You can be aware that your mind is processing something while still giving a bit more attention to what you can directly sense through your eyes, ears, or body. You don’t always need to steer your awareness away from every spontaneous thought. You can practice making room for what’s happening in and around you to live more comfortably together.

The subtlety is exactly what makes it hard to explain. What we’re talking about is so normal, so embedded in capacities you already have, that describing it can make it sound more exotic than it is. The thing that makes it feel special, when it does, is realizing it’s just a human skill that responds to practice in ways you’ll never fully appreciate until it becomes habitual. The more often you intentionally make attentional shifts, the more often you’ll feel more alive and with less internal friction. Not exempt from discomfort or uncertainty. Not floating above the difficulties of being human. But a little less prone to making uncomfortable moments significantly worse than they already are, and a little more capable of enjoying the pleasant ones at a deeper level.

The practice I’m describing has no audience. From the outside, it looks like nothing. There’s nothing to see. You can do it while waiting for the dentist, unloading the dishwasher, watering houseplants, or sitting in traffic.

It doesn’t require silence. It doesn’t require stillness. It doesn’t even require you to believe it’s working. Do you need to believe that three sets of ten push-ups, performed four or five times a week, will change your body composition?

It simply requires that you try, in small doses, to give a little more weight to what’s actually here — and a little less to the insistence that things need to be different from what they are — more often than never.

That’s the ongoing invitation you can always return to whenever you remember it.

Exercise

This exercise invites you to make room for the thoughts and sensations that arise as you listen. It acknowledges the mind’s natural activity, making mindfulness more accessible and grounded in everyday life.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Libraries, bookstores, and coffee shops

• Waiting rooms, grocery stores, and

• Park benches, museums, and couches

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The Artemis II astronauts have gotten a ton of questions from people around the world who are stuck here, with our feet on the ground. One of my favorite exchanges came when The Daily collected children’s questions and played them for the crew, giving the astronauts a chance to respond directly to young voices from across the planet.

The bulk of their inquiries understandably had to do with bodily functions, but Leonardo from New York City asked the crew this beautiful question:

“Is there gravity in your dreams?”

Whether he eventually chooses to become an astrophysicist or not, I hope he continues to nurture his inner poet, remaining curious about what the body might carry into other areas of life, especially those that go beyond the constraints of physics.

Christina Koch responded first, saying, “I think we all dreamed that we were floating at different times. And one really neat thing that happened, I think, to all of us was, when we got back and woke up in our beds at home, we all felt like we were floating for a little while.”

Reid Wiseman added, “Do you ever wake up in, like, a hotel room, and you have to take a few seconds to figure out where you are? Even in my bed at home, I would wake up and look for the displays. I’m like, Oh, wait, where am I? Oh, I’m at home. I’m under gravity. I’m safe.”

They’re both pointing us back to the relatable facts of life on earth. Anyone who’s spent days at sea knows the body learns the ocean’s rhythm, and land feels unfamiliar when you return. That lingering sway is proof that our bodies carry the signatures of every environment we inhabit.

I’ve noticed something similar that happens during extended periods of intensive practice, like what you experience during silent meditation retreats, but it can also happen when you set up similar constraints around your house for the weekend — simplifying your schedule, taking a couple of days off from consuming information and performing your identity. With a bit of practice momentum, something interesting starts to show up in my body as I’m falling asleep and waking up. I notice wavy, undulatory sensations in my body, probably a heightened awareness of the typically subtle bodily functions like circulation and temperature regulation. It feels similar to the phenomenon of getting my sea legs, but it’s as if my whole body is flickering like a flame.

As my ability to focus becomes stronger and more flexible, and a kind of sensory composure deepens, I start to notice nuanced, satisfying sensations I usually miss. Internal friction eases up, and everything sharpens. Colors brighten, the rain sounds musical, and the slightest breeze dances deliciously across my skin.

Meditation doesn’t create exotic experiences. It reveals aspects of experience that were present all along, but in sharper relief.

We don’t need to travel to space or live on a boat to discover how profound the subtle details of our experience can feel. Sometimes a few days of sustained attention are enough to make the body feel unexpectedly alive—and to remind us that the subtle dimensions of experience, the elements of the universe and nature we’re part of, have been right here all along.

Subtle sensations are always in the background. While most of them will never demand your attention, they respond to it. That responsiveness can be cultivated to better reveal what’s already there.

The goal of today’s practice is to notice the quiet, often-overlooked sensations that become observable and surprisingly satisfying when we stop demanding that experience be dramatic.

If my practical, down-to-earth approach to mindfulness resonates with you but you’re not ready to subscribe just yet, you can still show your support with a one-time tip on Buy Me a Coffee. Every gesture of encouragement is appreciated, including likes and shares of the posts you enjoy.

Exercise

This exercise offers a simple, practical way to carry the grounded awareness of sitting meditation into everyday movement, helping you cultivate mindfulness throughout your day. I’ve taken inspiration and used a few direct phrases from “The Small Dance” by Steve Paxton.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Standing in line

• Taking a shower

• Before going for a walk

• After returning from a walk

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1. Feel Change

2. Hear Change

3. See Change

4. Go with the Observable Flow

Cultivating mindful awareness requires forgoing narrative constraints to cultivate a direct, intimate relationship with being alive. When we connect with the important people in our lives, we share details about conflict, difficult people, and yearning for unpleasant circumstances to change—the basic elements of drama and narrative. But practicing mindfulness doesn’t require villains, though we instinctively go looking for them. The usual suspects are our minds, our emotions, or any unpleasant sensation.

I opened this month’s Mindful Monday for Kent State University by inviting participants to share sensory experiences since last month’s session. The word cloud bloomed with sensory details: cobalt-blue skies, morning coffee sipped outside, birds chirping, gentle breezes, and brisk winds. This spontaneous report consisted of raw sensory data, so it read more like poetry. In this context, even itches, aches, and sadness are framed as perceptions to be witnessed rather than as problems to be solved.

One person shared “observing without controlling,” which describes the underlying stance of mindfully experiencing the present as it unfolds. With a bit of practice—less than most people assume—observing without controlling leads to the detection of a fundamental theme that’s a hallmark of all contemplative traditions and practices: impermanence.

The priestly classes within our wisdom traditions have inflated this theme into a philosophical, mystical perspective reserved for a chosen few, but the part of me shaped by Baptist roots rejects that, and my experience of Vipassana meditation tells me it’s available to anyone willing to test their own senses. Habitually paying closer attention to ordinary sensations turns out to be a kind of baptism that can transform your awareness of ordinary phenomena into a phenomenal awareness.

Impermanence operates at every imaginable scale. It stretches from grand geological ages and historical epochs down to the personal rhythms of life stages, seasons, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes. Each level reveals something about the nature of time and awareness. But when we zoom in to the handful of seconds unfolding right now, we develop a rare intimacy with impermanence—one that forms the root of all other scales.

This matters because in looking, listening, and feeling for observable change, we meet parts of ourselves we tend to overlook. There’s a deeply ingrained habit of interfering with whatever is happening, regardless of whether we can actually influence it. Again and again, we confront the urge to micromanage our experience—to fix, tweak, or escape what we notice. In doing so, we often stifle both the discomforts we wish to avoid and the pleasures we hope to preserve.

With practice, you start to spot the gap between what’s happening and what you wish were happening. Children meet the world with fluidity and presence, but adulthood brings a subtle friction—a constant sense that moments should be different from what they are.

To be clear, even after years of directly noticing this dynamic, I’m far from immune to the undertow of its power. While I don’t expect to ever fully outgrow it, I’m committed to spending a little time each day developing attentional skills that gradually erode it. When the friction does ease, life feels more vibrant and alive in ways I couldn’t have predicted before living it for myself. Those moments are hard to put into words, but they’re unmistakable when they arrive.

Once, walking beside a creek, I devoted a significant amount of time to really listening to the raw sensory details—to the splash of water, the sound of my footsteps, and the subtle emotional reactions in my boy. As my focus deepened and I let go of internal interference, the ordinary sounds became astonishingly musical, and my body responded with vivid feelings too nuanced for words. I was so absorbed that the internal micromanager fell asleep, replaced by a visceral awareness of the ancient, universal urge to make music. I realized that I shared the same basic physiology as anyone who ever tried to evoke emotion through music. We all do. We are capable of being comforted and moved, and we want to pass this one. Long before language, mothers hummed lullabies to restless infants; tribes marked sacred moments with rhythm. From ancient times to Beethoven to Sondheim, the musicality in the rushing water and birdsong connected me to every human urge to make music.

Another time, I spent 48 hours alone during a much longer silent canoeing and camping meditation trip in Utah (which was even less fun than it might sound, but also sprinkled with profound moments). I went into those two solo retreat days expecting undisturbed practice surrounded by vast red canyon walls and sleeping under the stars. What I got was a tidal wave of grief the moment I sat down to meditate. My daughter had recently driven off in a U-Haul to start grad school in Chicago, after years of living close by, even throughout college at Ohio State. Raising her has been the most fulfilling experience of my life. I wasn’t ready for this chapter to end, or to admit it already had. Who am I when I’m not caring for someone, when the job quietly transfers into their hands?

Unwillingly, I found myself practicing what can only be called sobbing meditation. It was excruciating—my body, mind, and heart all led with resistance. If it were up to me, I would never have chosen to face this emotional pain at that time. I would have distracted myself or comforted myself with denial. I didn’t want an empty nest or the grief of her successful individuation. I wanted to control the narrative, but what I got was catharsis—the kind of healing that stings while it soothes. That wave of relief made me understand, in my bones, why we make myths and hymns, why we reach for rituals to honor the sacred, fleeting, unrepeatable moments of joy and sorrow life weaves together.

Instead of trying to quiet my mind during those two days, though, I allowed it to play with words and images in whatever way it wanted, and tried to fold them into the flow of what I was trying not to impede. I walked out of the canyon with this poem:

Instincts
by Daron Larson

​There is great comfort
in losing a child
to her own adult life,
naturally,

and yet —

​a little girl is still gone

leaving me to tend
this yearning to nurture
a fragile beginning
toward its gradual

sudden blooming.

Experiences like these remind me that when we scale down to ride the sensory ripples of the present, we tap into the emotional and artistic impulses that live in all of us. It doesn’t matter if it comes out as laughter, tears, singing, dancing, gardening, or making dinner.

Actually allowing myself to feel what’s happening, instead of narrating or fixing it, is both harder and more necessary than I ever imagined. Giving up the illusion of control brings a jolt of vitality—not always pleasant, but always vivid. It’s the same aliveness that fuels our best art, our worst heartbreaks, our laughter, our poetry, our tragedies, and even that one perfect haiku where impermanence glimmers between the lines.

Our distracted, numbed-out, algorithm-driven culture discourages the urge to turn feelings into art—art that doesn’t need an audience. Authentic self-expression now competes with personal branding, reality TV, and the transformation of daily life into advertising.

So, instead of trying to fix the world, start to free yourself in small ways when you can. Give yourself a daily pocket of time—no one can do this for you—where you witness the ordinary, the overlooked, the mundane details that accumulate and make you feel alive. These are the same sparks that have fueled human creativity since the beginning of humanity.

You don’t need to rocket around the moon to taste the universe’s vastness. It’s right here, woven into every ordinary moment, waiting for you to notice.

Practice scaling down: notice the subtle changes unfolding within a handful of seconds. Let them take you where you need to go—break your heart open, stitch it together again, and help you spot the humanity shining behind every face you meet.

Exercise

This exercise helps you tune in to the subtle shifts in your body and the world around you—those small changes in sensation, sight, and sound that are easy to miss but rich with aliveness.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Junior high music recitals

• Movie theaters

• Weekend mornings

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1. Feel Change

2. Hear Change

3. See Change

4. Go with the Sensory Flow

In July 2021, Bob Odenkirk’s heart stopped for 18 seconds while filming Better Call Saul. He talked about it on the Wild Card podcast recently, saying it didn’t actually feel emotionally traumatic.

As he slowly woke up over the next week, he felt a lingering sense of joy and appreciation for life. The world seemed “pretty magical and beautiful and astounding. A marvel to look at and be in.” When that feeling started to fade, he told himself:

“I have to remember this. I have to try to live this way. I have to try to be this, see the world this way.

This ends.”

I’ve been lucky to have moments like the one he described, though nothing as dramatic as surviving a heart attack. Silent meditation retreats can help you face your own mortality and deepen your appreciation for the simple wonder of being alive. These memories tend to stick with you.

I remember being three days into a retreat in California when the internal friction and noise of daily life started to quiet, letting something new in. The orange trees looked more alive, and I could really feel the breeze on my skin. The colors and textures of the sky, clouds, and ocean all seemed richer and more vibrant than before. My thoughts and worries felt lighter and less consequential.

Something had flipped. My perspective shifted, and I saw, heard, and felt everything differently than just a few minutes earlier. It wasn’t like looking through a magical filter. In fact, it felt like the opposite of special. Natural. The shift instantly affected all my senses and perceptions, as well as the rich complexity of their combined parts. I’d experienced this inverted perspective before through similar contemplative efforts, so it felt both foreign and familiar. Relief that comes from setting down something heavy you’ve grown used to carrying, or coming up for air after being underwater for too long. Completely ordinary, yet lighter and more alive. Surprised by embodied joy rather than imagined joy.

It wasn’t like falling into a dream. It was more like waking up from a trance.

Meditation wasn’t adding something new that I’d been missing. Instead, it slowly took away something I hadn’t noticed until it fell away. Day-to-day life had actually been the altered state. Becoming more aware of ordinary sights, sounds, and sensations felt like returning to normal — an unaltered state. Realizing this made me want to send a message in a bottle to my future self, the one who would likely fall back under the old spell again.

When I got home, I searched for the perfect bottle, and eventually found an amber one with a cork. But even after all these years, I still haven’t figured out what to write on the note to put inside it. Maybe what I need the everyday me to remember can’t really be put into words. So the bottle sits empty in my room, reminding me of something I once understood more viscerally than I can fully explain to myself now.

What strikes me now is how this lesson keeps coming back in different disguises. On that retreat, it arrived through stillness and steady practice — something I have to carve out deliberately by stepping away from my ordinary routine. A couple of weeks ago, it arrived in the middle of a downpour.

I was out on a walk with my grandchildren — Frankie on his bike, Quinn walking alongside me, her attention perpetually pulled to pebbles, weeds, and cracks in the sidewalk — when the sky just opened up. Frankie started crying in that desperate, unglued way little kids can get when the world suddenly feels like it’s attacking you. A reaction many adults, understandably, never fully outgrow.” And yet the whole thing felt so alive to me in a remarkably pleasant and ordinary way. Frankie raced home ahead of us as I scooped up Quinn, and we walked through it laughing. I said: “It’s okay. It’s just water. It’s like taking a shower with your clothes on.” And, even though Frankie couldn’t hear my words and Quinnie is too little to comprehend them, we really were okay. Better than okay. Soaked, but a little more alive than we’d been when we’d left the house.

That’s the strange thing about these kinds of moments. They don’t require a near-death experience or a ten-day meditation retreat. Sometimes they arrive unexpectedly, drenching us, with a crying six-year-old, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The quality of aliveness that Odenkirk is describing — that I spent three days paying closer attention in a simplified environment to touch — fell on us right there on the sidewalk by a garden-variety shift in the weather.

The body seems to know how to make this subtle yet significant shift into feeling less trapped by life and more alive in the messy midst of living. We just can’t force ourselves there on demand. But we can familiarize ourselves with it, little by little, over time. We can stop searching for exits and learn to spot quiet invitations to dive into the ordinary sensory details that are always on hand.

During a recent webinar about sneaking mindful awareness into daily life, someone asked what paying attention to ordinary sensations actually does — what it translates to in real life. My first answer was: a richer experience of being alive, especially in ordinary moments. The longer answer is that it also trains something. The ability to toggle back from the narrative running in your head to the raw, immediate living data of what’s happening right now. That capacity — practiced in small, unremarkable moments — is what shows up when it counts. At the extremes: crisis, grief, overwhelming joy. And also, sometimes, in the spring rain.

The visual field is a good place to practice this because it’s always moving and we almost never notice it. Branches sway. Light shifts. Trucks drive by. Whatever we’re looking at is also, if we let it, an ordinary-extraordinary phenomenon we start seeing through.

In today’s exercise, that’s what we’re exploring. Not staring hard to understand. Just seeing — and noticing what changes.

Exercise

This exercise helps you get better at noticing changes and movement in the sights around you. You can adjust this exercise to fit any situation. I encourage you to try it in different places—outside, looking out a window, on vacation, or when you return home.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Sitting on a park bench

• Taking a walk at magic hour

• Sitting at the gate waiting for your flight to board

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1. Feel Change

2. Hear Change

3. See Change

4. Go with the Observable Flow

Mindfulness practice isn’t self-help. We don’t call going to the gym self-help. Physical exercise develops physical capacities — strength, endurance, and flexibility. Attention exercises develop attentional capacities — flexible focus, perceptual clarity, and responsive composure. What this practice builds, over time, is attentional fitness.

The distinction matters more than it might seem. Self-help implies something broken that needs fixing. Fitness implies an innate capacity that becomes stronger when we challenge it. And like physical fitness, attentional fitness requires regular practice, tends to slip when life gets busy, and is easy to defer—not because we don’t value it, but because it’s simply easier not to do it. The consequences of not exercising eventually catch up with us, quietly, in ways we might not immediately connect to the neglect.

Most of us have learned, at least intellectually, that a hard workout is still a good workout. We don’t write off strength training just because our muscles were burning, or abandon a run because a particular run felt labored and slow. We understand that discomfort during exercise is evidence of the exercise working. We even take inspiration from watching other people develop strength or endurance over time because those changes are visible — we can see, measure, and point to them.

Attentional fitness doesn’t offer us that same feedback. Progress here is mostly invisible from the outside. You can’t watch someone become more present. You can’t easily measure the growing ease with which a person meets difficulty, or the gradual softening of their internal relationship with themselves. Occasionally, we see indirect evidence — someone who used to fall apart during public speaking developing quiet composure over time, which we can trace back to practice — but these moments are rare and ambiguous. Most of what you get from this work unfolds quietly, on the inside—sometimes you only realize it’s happened after the fact.

This is one reason we tend to be harder on ourselves about meditation than about the gym. When we feel distracted during practice, we take it as evidence of failure — proof that we’re doing it wrong, or that we’re simply not built for this. The mindfulness industry hasn’t helped. When inner calm and relaxation become the advertised product, distraction starts to look like a defect, when really it’s closer to the burn in your legs on a steep hill. It’s not a sign that something has gone wrong. It’s often a sign that something is happening.

There’s a third layer worth naming. Mindfulness practice has a way of functioning as a mirror. It reflects back the emotional tone of your relationship with yourself — the quality of the internal intimacy you have with simply being alive. That’s not something you can observe in someone else, and it has a quiet, unspectacular quality that nonetheless shapes how you relate to everything and everyone. When the mirror shows you impatience, or restlessness, or self-criticism, the instinct is to look away. But looking, with some gentleness, is the practice.

A few years ago, I led a retreat where construction noise made it nearly impossible to focus on anything else on the first day, so we made listening to the uninvited sounds the focus of our practice. When the builders didn’t return the next day, several participants said the silence was harder to navigate than the persistent noise the day before, that they’d come to hear as almost musical. This isn't a trick or a hack. It’s what happens when resistance softens, and attention becomes genuinely curious about what’s actually here.

That’s the invitation in the exercise below. Let the soundscape — including the sound of your own thinking — be workable material rather than interference. Whatever shows up is the practice. As John Cage1 put it: “When you listen deeply, everything is music.”

Exercise

This exercise helps you get better at noticing how sound shifts and moves—making the ever-changing texture of your environment more vivid and alive.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Waking up in the morning

• Stepping away for a mental break in the middle of the day

• Transitioning into your evening or getting ready for bed

Read more

1. Feel Change

2. Hear Change

3. See Change

4. Go with the Observable Flow

About five minutes into a mindfulness exercise, a familiar pattern often shows up.

People start to notice discomfort — tightness in the shoulders, pressure in the lower back, restlessness in the legs. Understandably, they almost immediately dive into analyzing it as a problem to solve or interpreting it as evidence that they’re doing something wrong:

• I thought this was supposed to be relaxing.

• Why is this making me feel restless?

• Was that itch there before I started meditating?

• Should I scratch it or not?

These reactions make sense. Most of us experience the body as if it’s stable and solid. A sore back feels like a single, unmoving problem. Tension feels stagnant. Pain feels inert.

But when you slow down and look — or feel — more closely, something different starts to emerge.

What you call “tension” or “discomfort” isn’t actually one unchanging sensation. It’s a collection of sensations — pulsing, pressure, warmth, subtle vibration — that are constantly shifting. Some elements intensify. Others fade. Some disappear entirely, replaced by new ones.

The experience isn’t static. It’s active. It might be subtle, but change is occurring.

This is the first step in noticing impermanence in real time. Not as an idea, but as something you can observe directly.

If this approach appeals to you, it’s worth remembering: giving your body permission to feel what it feels isn’t just about comfort. It’s about welcoming a handful of possibilities, some more approachable than others:

• Comfortable sensations that well up and spread

• Comfortable sensations that subside

• Uncomfortable sensations that intensify

• Uncomfortable sensations that weaken and fade away

Treat this like the long game it is, and practice meeting all four possibilities with as much hospitality as you can muster—even if sometimes that hospitality is in short supply. Learn to give yourself grace when you simply don’t have the willingness to allow a sensation. Paradoxically, letting your best effort be enough (even when it feels like not much) is what builds the patience to greet an ever-wider range of dynamic sensations over time.

Sometimes when I’m meditating, I get a charley horse in one of my calves. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it can be excruciating. My first instinct was always to fight it — brace, stretch, pinch my upper lip. None of those things helped.

A clever teacher who I’d come to trust over the years1 recommended something that sounded like a terrible idea: observe the pain as a temporary sensation, and try to meet it with equanimity2 — a neutral response — as it built toward its peak.

At first, I hesitated to follow this guidance. Most of the time it came up, I couldn’t bring myself to try it. But whenever I did, I discovered something invaluable that I still rely on today.

The first thing I noticed was that jumping in as early in the process was key. If I could meet the sensation right as it arrived, before I’d already started bracing against it, it changed the whole trajectory. It still hurt. But whatever misery came with it felt significantly less amplified.

The second thing I noticed was the impact of how much acceptance I could muster when I spotted it. Rather than a cognitive or conceptual acceptance, this variety of acceptance happens at the sensory level. It’s visceral. It’s not about condoning the discomfort or focusing on its cause. It’s getting out of the way so my body can calibrate its ability to process something with less internal friction.

At first, my immediate reaction was always, “Not you again!”

Then, leveraging reluctant curiosity more than courage, it was sometimes, “Okay…show me what you’ve got?”

Eventually, it would be closer to, “Oh, hell, I know you — come on in. Let’s do this!”

The progression was never linear, but the sooner I could offer even reluctant hospitality, the less problematic the encounter became.

And then came the surprise I never expected. If I could stay with the pain all the way to its peak, without fighting it, the relief as it faded was genuinely pleasant—almost like a gentle massage. It wasn’t just the absence of pain, but a sensation that felt surprisingly good in its own right. Most people never get to experience this, simply because it’s so counterintuitive to let go of resistance to pain. Without a trusted, experienced teacher pointing out that this is even an option, why would you ever try?

While mindfulness doesn’t eliminate pain, it can change how it plays out.

And here’s where things really get interesting.

The goal isn’t to get rid of discomfort. The goal is to see what each instance of discomfort is actually made of. Because when you look closely — really closely — even the most stubborn sensation is not as solid as it first appears.

And whether people realize it or not, this same kind of sensory clarity and body-level acceptance also makes pleasant sensations feel richer and more alive.

For some reason, it’s easier to have equanimity with something that’s moving. This is true with relaxation, humor, gratitude, and peace, but it’s also true even when sensations don’t feel good. And allowing a sensation to feel solid sets the stage for it to reveal dynamic qualities lurking behind its stable facade.

That’s what the exercise below is meant to help you discover for yourself. Start with pleasant sensations—no need to wait for discomfort—to build the skill of noticing change. As you get familiar with these subtle shifts, you’ll be better prepared to meet mild or even intense discomfort when it arises. Take your time. This isn’t about bracing against what you don’t like just to get it over with. It’s about learning a new way to relate to any sensation your body can feel. The real surprise? Even the most ordinary sensation can become a doorway to something rich, satisfying, and unexpected.

If my practical, down-to-earth approach to mindfulness resonates with you but you’re not ready to subscribe just yet, you can still show your support with a one-time tip on Buy Me a Coffee. Every gesture of encouragement is appreciated, including likes and shares of the posts you enjoy.

Exercise

This exercise sharpens your ability to detect dynamic body sensations.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Standing in line

• During a conversation

• Watching videos, movies, or television

Read more

We’re all going to die, and when it happens, we’ll be in the middle of something—a season, a month, a week, a day.

We’ll make our exit right in the middle of a news cycle. This is inevitable. We won’t have the chance to see how everything turns out. We’ll leave this world with unresolved conflicts and unfinished business. There will always be people we never properly thanked, and we won’t get to confront everyone who hurt or disappointed us.

And yet — this is the part that really gets my contemplative juices flowing — when a loved one finally gives someone at the end of their life permission to let go, they seem to instinctively understand how to do it. They let go naturally.

You’ve likely heard about this phenomenon. Maybe you’ve even witnessed it. A person nearing the end of their life continues to fight, clinging on long after it seems practical to do so. Then, a loved one leans in and softly says, “It’s okay. You don’t have to keep fighting. We love you. We understand you’re tired. While we don’t want you to leave, it’s perfectly alright for you to go when you’re ready.” And then, quietly, they do—often with a kind of grace that those watching describe as peaceful and even comforting.

I think about this a lot. Not the dying, but the persistent releasable grip against whatever we don’t want to be happening. We are all walking around with some degree of gripping all of the time, whether we realize it or not. It’s a grip that signals the gap between what’s happening at any given moment and what we’d prefer were happening instead.

By default, most of us need things to be reasonably comfortable and settled before we allow ourselves to relax. This means we spend a lot of time waiting to unwind at some vague future time. We hold tightly to how things should have gone, how someone should have behaved, and how we’d like circumstances to arrange themselves before we can finally relax into our lives.

The most challenging situations for practicing this are when I’m sick or recovering from an injury. As with visiting difficult family members, I’m okay for a day or two, but then I start to wrestle with the part that’s outside my control: the unknowable amount of time it will take for the symptoms—physical or emotional—to run their course. Instead of pretending I’m okay with being uncomfortable, I practice noticing what the discomfort actually feels like to ease my resistance. I know it may not sound helpful, but it’s something you have to test for yourself.

Practicing mindfulness keeps teaching me this lesson: you don’t have to wait for ideal conditions to practice loosening your internal grip. In fact, waiting for conditions to be right is itself a form of gripping.

From the outside, mindfulness practice can seem abstract, even trivial. Who doesn’t know how to see what’s in front of their eyes, hear sounds around them, or notice that they’re breathing? But it’s actually a tangible way to develop what I’d call greater intimacy with being alive—different from relaxation, and more durable than a good mood. It includes the uncomfortable moments, the unresolved ones, and those that might never be resolved. I’m not talking about performing peace, but about developing attentional skills that help us meet whatever is present with a little less resistance.

Most guidance in this space sounds like an instruction to force yourself into a state you don’t naturally inhabit: Be grateful. Be peaceful. Let it go. The implicit message is that discomfort or uncertainty can be easily shucked off without practice. But the gap between what you’re feeling and what spiritual influencers claim you’re supposed to feel can become just one more source of internal friction. What actually helps is almost the opposite—getting genuinely curious about what’s already here: the tension, the uncertainty, whatever you’re quietly gripping.

Raising children has a way of helping us spot when we wish the present were unfolding differently. I’ve got plenty of examples of practicing this when my daughter was a teenager, but now I’m learning to explore it when I spend time with my grandchildren. It comes up when my grandson acts disappointed by a meal I prepared for him, is underwhelmed by a gift I picked up for him, or when he pushes back when I ask him to put his toys away. Cultivating a relationship with my grandchildren means navigating the emotional discomfort of keeping them safe, maintaining realistic boundaries, and easing up internally as toddlers gradually learn to express their feelings. It means catching the impulse to clench against the present, and trying to stay open to its messiness instead.

Most of us tacitly trust that nature will guide us through easing up inside on our deathbeds. But if relaxing this grip at the very end of life allows things to wind down with some ease, isn’t it worth asking whether we could spread that lesson across the years we have left? Instead of saving it for a dramatic final act, we can practice in millions of small, ordinary doses—waiting for the dentist, unloading the dishwasher, reading one more story to your kid, running errands, watering houseplants, calling a friend you haven’t talked to in a while.

At any given moment, you can ask yourself, What would this moment feel like if I relaxed my grip on it and allowed it to unfold on its own?

It’s okay. You’re tired. You’ve been fighting long enough. It’s okay if you decide not to sometimes—even when death is a long way off.

You can explore this subtle, significant shift in both pleasant and unpleasant moments. Try to get curious about what shifts when you ease up even slightly on the need for things to be other than they are.

When you can’t ease up, it’s simply not within your control. Try to ease up on not being able to ease up.

You have the rest of your life to explore, in this way, the beauty, heartbreaking vulnerability, and wonder of being alive.

Exercise

This exercise invites the body to soften its grip and experience relaxation, not by force, but through gentle permission.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Waking up in the middle of the night

• Taking a walk on a brisk spring day

• Warming up after being cold

• Cooling down after physical exercise

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The title poem from ’s new collection, A Suit or a Suitcase, contains a delicious question that resonates with a puzzle I’ve been playing with in my mindfulness practice:

my body hasn't traveled with me.
I've traveled inside it. Do I wear it 

or does it carry me? Is the body a suit
or a suitcase? 

She’s trying to locate herself — the “me of me,” she calls it — and finding that the borders are genuinely unclear. She’s not trying to be evasive.1 She means it.

I don’t know what to call it.

I find this reassuring, because too often mindfulness instruction gives the opposite impression: that the self is a fixed entity, a trick of perception, or an illusion to be seen through and moved beyond. While there’s some truth in that perspective, the framing can create its own confusion. If the sense of self is an illusion, it’s an extraordinarily useful and persistent one. Going to war with it doesn’t help. Trying to eliminate it isn’t realistic. What helps — at least in my experience — is developing greater intimacy with it. When I observe it closely and with less interference, it becomes more tangible and almost legible. The paradox is that we can only see through it by looking at it — over and over.

What I’ve come to notice is that the sense of self isn’t fixed; it’s more like a weather system—more like a verb than a noun. During my meditation a few mornings ago, I sat outside listening to the sounds from our backyard. My attention moved almost like a tide: sometimes pulling inward toward bodily sensations and the low hum of concerns and plans, then releasing outward toward shifting light, the creak of tree trunks, a distant ambulance. There were moments when I heard birds singing, and after a few seconds of savoring their music, I’d catch myself thinking about buying a feeder, where I might hang it, and then a growing list of yard-related tasks. The activity of my mind, set off by the singing, would quickly mute the soothing sounds. Sometimes, though, the two weren’t separate at all. There were moments when the two worlds overlapped rather than competing for my attention: I was briefly aware of the bird choir and myself as its attentive audience at the same time.

The same thing happens in less comfortable circumstances. I recently swam with other adventurous travelers in a beautiful lagoon in Mexico. The conditions were ideal, but these swim trips, while easy for my husband, are just beyond my ability.2 The sensation of turquoise water enveloping my body was delicious, and the rhythm of breathing and moving felt soothing. But eventually, I realized I was falling behind the others in my group of “least-fast” swimmers, and that awareness drew my attention away from swimming and into my mind.

The story of being the weakest swimmer — an informal ranking that shifted depending on who was in the water — made me wonder how others were assessing me. Was I slowing them down? Etiquette prevents anyone from ever admitting it, so the data I wanted was unknowable, and the need to know felt emotionally charged. That’s the thing about the self-narrative: it’s compelling, and it’s often partly right, but it tends to reach for information it can’t actually have.

The struggle of being caught in this existential undertow was a sense of my self getting tangled up with my sense of the other—specifically, my thoughts and feelings blending with those I imagined the other swimmers were having. While invisible to everyone else, those are some choppy-ass waters to swim in.

Shinzen Young, whose work has shaped how I approach untangling all of this, invites practitioners to simply notice — moment by moment — whether present experience appears to be focused on self, other, or both at once. There’s no preference between the three. No goal of eliminating any of them. It’s about developing intimacy with the possible configurations and learning to erode your resistance to whatever is happening.

That’s what the exercise below invites you to explore. It’s a practice of noticing, not solving. The self doesn’t need to be banished. It needs to be seen — in all its flickering, shifting, sometimes-useful, sometimes-sticky aliveness.

In the middle of her poem, Maggie wonders if she could breathe deeply enough to distribute herself more fully throughout her whole body:

I’ve always thought of who I am
as being concentrated in my head & chest,

as if there’s a waterline at my ribcage
& contrary to their density, thoughts

& feelings stay afloat. You asked
what I’ll miss about this life, & now

I’m way down a rabbit hole, wondering
if I could breathe deeply enough

to redistribute my mind more evenly
throughout my body—or soul rather

than mind? Or self? I don’t even know
what to call the me of me. I imagine

filling my body completely, filling it,
every inch, to the skin. Shh. Listen.

Ideas are whispering in my wrists
& all along the slopes of my calves.

What a confounding and liberating riddle! A puzzle we don’t have to solve, but can live in and keep unpacking for the rest of our lives.

Exercise

This exercise invites you to notice how your sense of self and your awareness of the outside world overlap and influence each other.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Swimming in a lagoon in Mexico

• Listening to birds sing at dawn

• Walking around your neighborhood

• Wondering what other people are thinking about you

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A meditation goal is not an oxymoron.

Goals help you create focused, sustainable plans, but your day-to-day attention should remain on the process itself. When things are going well, your mindful awareness goals can motivate you to keep showing up—even as you set them aside.

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, in his new book The Score, captures this tension between pursuing goals and staying present in the process by distinguishing between two kinds of motivation:

“There are two very different motivational states in which we can play a game. There’s striving play, and then there’s also achievement play. The achievement player is trying to win because they actually value winning. The striving player, on the other hand, doesn’t actually care about the win, deep down. They are only trying to win because they value the struggle. The achievement player cares about the win itself; the striving player cares about the process of trying to win.”

When you set a goal for your mindfulness practice, you’re not trying to become an achievement player. You’re not playing to win. You’re playing to get better at playing, which leads to getting better at paying attention. You’re using the goal the way a striving player uses the rules of a game—as a structure that generates the very experience you’re after.

Designing a physical fitness routine

Decide what you want to develop. Find exercises and activities to develop them.

• To build muscular strength, lift weights and progress through sets of exercises, paying close attention to each repetition as you go.

• To improve flexibility, ease into a series of stretches, holding each one as you ride out the clock.

• To build endurance in the pool, focus on the rhythm of each stroke as you swim your laps.

Once you’ve designed your program, you can keep redirecting your energy toward following through on the planned workouts.

Designing an attentional fitness routine

When it comes to your mindfulness practice, start by identifying which attentional capacities you want to strengthen, then choose targeted exercises to develop them.

• To sharpen your focus, try exercises that train you to repeatedly return your attention to chosen sensations for set blocks of time.

• To enhance relaxation, practice exercises that help you notice, cultivate, and savor restful sensations.

• To increase emotional awareness, intentionally observe your responses to a variety of pleasant and unpleasant emotional triggers.

Whether you’re building physical or attentional fitness, progress comes from consistently practicing the exercises you’ve chosen.

But here’s the deeper insight. Nguyen points out that the most valuable states we seek—relaxation, absorption, genuine presence—can’t be achieved by chasing them directly:

“We often use striving play to sneak up sideways on these delicate mental states. A lot of the time, my true purpose in [rock] climbing is to relax. But if I aim at relaxation directly — if I consciously try to relax — I’ll absolutely fail... To actually relax, I have to forget that I’m trying to relax. I have to put my true purpose out of my head and focus on a very simple, very narrow goal: to get to the top of the cliff. Philosophers have a term for this kind of thing: a self-effacing end, which is an end that cannot be pursued directly. Games help us achieve self-effacing ends — relaxation, meditation, absorption — by providing us with smaller goals to focus on.”

This is why having a goal in meditation isn’t a contradiction. The goal isn’t the destination—it’s the set of handholds that guides your attention. By focusing on these handholds, you give your mind something concrete to engage with, allowing the deeper qualities you seek to emerge naturally.

Perhaps the most valuable meditation goal of all is simply to fall in love with the process itself—to become so absorbed in the experience that the urge to reach any particular outcome gradually withers away.

You can explore this for yourself with the attention exercise below.

If my practical, down-to-earth approach to mindfulness resonates with you but you’re not ready to subscribe just yet, you can still show your support with a one-time tip on Buy Me a Coffee. Every gesture of encouragement is appreciated, including likes and shares of the posts you enjoy.

Exercise

This exercise targets three distinct attentional skills simultaneously: flexible focus, perceptual clarity, and responsive composure.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Bored

• Frustrated

• Relaxed

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Noticing ordinary phenomena directly is a natural capacity that gets stronger with practice. If you wait for dramatic changes in your attention skills, you might overlook the quieter ways your efforts are supporting you. Instead, notice the small, subtle improvements—these are what truly help you feel more alive.

When you start a running program, you track small signs of progress: step count, stride length, pace, and heart rate recovery. Weekly mileage offers tangible evidence that you’re improving, even on days you have to drag yourself out the door.

So, how will you know when your awareness is becoming phenomenal?

Noticing becomes more effortless

At first, direct noticing involves a lot of thinking and second-guessing. That’s because it’s deceptively simple. Observing sensations is simple, but recognizing the value of attentional shifts takes time.

As you sneak mindful awareness into your daily life, something interesting happens. It feels like you’re forgetting to do something important. It seems like you should be worrying about something. That’s actually a good sign. When a single repetition of noticing feels too simple to accomplish anything important, you’re exactly where you need to be. Keep collecting chunks of sensory data while forgoing the constant evaluation of your investment.

When it feels too simple, let it. Savor the effortlessness rather than overthinking it.

Remember how clumsy it felt to learn every skill you now take for granted—typing, driving, supporting a friend in pain. Let it feel clumsy. Whenever you overthink, second-guess, or trip over yourself, get back up. Put your fingers back on those home row keys and let simple moves quietly accumulate into empowering capacities.

More counts than you think

When we start noticing differently on purpose, we assume almost nothing qualifies.

That’s not true. Everything you notice counts.

Anything you can see, hear, or feel—directly, in the present—counts. Even watching images flicker on your mental screen or hearing your mind spit out sentences counts. If you’re observing for a few seconds without diving into interpretation and evaluation, it counts.

Noticing takes almost no time. Telling yourself a story takes time. Making decisions takes time.

Noticing directly? That usually lasts about as long as a single breath.

The more you practice, the more you’ll realize that you’re surrounded by options all the time.

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Noticing becomes more frequent

Remembering to notice begins with forgetting.

You’ll remember that you forgot to notice. You’ll forget that you remembered. You’ll notice several times a day for a week, then completely lose track of the intention for days.

That’s fine. The next time you remember that you forgot—right at that moment—stop and notice something. Anything. A sight, a sound, a sensation, or a feeling.

Notice what forgetting felt like. Notice what remembering feels like.

That’s all it takes to get back in the game.

Before long, you’ll remember more often. The world will start reminding you that it’s just sitting there waiting for you to notice.

Better technique, better results

When in doubt, return to the basic technique of distinguishing sensations from situations.

Getting better means noticing more frequently that your imagination has captured your attention—and choosing, in those moments, to look around or listen instead.

Getting better means toggling off autopilot more frequently and with less effort.

Getting better means letting go of the idea that you need to wait for the perfect conditions. You don’t need to be perfectly calm, or for the world to be quieter, or for life to settle down.

Can you forego the seduction of ideal or better moments for a handful of seconds right now?

Try.

Try again.

Keep trying.

A willingness to keep trying is the entire game.

Feeling more alive isn’t something you acquire instantly. It’s something that seeps in—gradually, quietly—when you stop chasing it and start noticing instead.

Exercise

This exercise helps you connect with the subtle support of gravity, your body, and the everyday details we often overlook.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Waiting

• Watching

• Reading

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Most mindfulness instruction, the kind that sells a lot of app subscriptions, is built around a single strategy. Find the perfect conditions, and try to feel something you don’t currently feel.

The Dominant and Profitable Model: Mindfulness as Escape

The guided meditations often ask you to find a quiet space, sit comfortably, close your eyes, and relax. The app might provide some ambient music you wouldn’t normally listen to. The teacher has a more soothing voice than anyone you’ve ever known, which makes them sound as if they live in a different world than you do. Everything is designed to help you arrive at a calm, clear, and unperturbed state that stands in stark contrast to the one you started with, and the implication is that it should only take you about ten minutes to get there.

This approach views mindfulness practice as a way to recover from life. A break from routine. A method to step outside the noise and restore yourself to some elusive, mythical balance.

I understand why this is attractive. The world and other people can be relentless. Adult life can be draining. The idea of a dependable escape route has an obvious and relatable appeal. However, there are serious issues with this profitable model.

Trying to force yourself to feel something you’re not actually experiencing isn’t mindfulness. It’s internal micromanagement that overlooks the real issue of how we react to things outside our control. It’s an attempt to make yourself feel differently without learning to respond differently.

The result is a practice that appeals to almost everyone in theory and works for almost no one in practice. It's not that people aren’t trying, but because the model doesn’t actually teach them how to practice relating to however they really feel.

Also, when the guided instruction is seen as an antidote to what makes life challenging, the student learns to meditate with the training wheels on permanently. They don’t learn to practice in the constantly fluctuating circumstances of their lives. They learn how to follow along as if the context is irrelevant.

When you take away the guidance, there’s no internalized skill to draw from.

The Challenging but Liberating Model: Mindfulness as a Skill

A less popular but more empowering approach frames the practice as a way to connect with being alive, no matter what is happening at any moment. It views mindfulness not as a special feeling but as a trainable skill. And like any skill, it must be cultivated intentionally, practiced imperfectly, and used in the real conditions you face rather than the ones you wish for.

This reframing has three practical implications.

The first is about the context. Instead of waiting for or creating perfect circumstances, you work with whatever is available. An anxious mind. The ten minutes between meetings. Listening to the insurance company’s hold music and intermittent reminders about how important your call is. The skill is learning to adapt the practice to the situation, not to change the situation until it’s suitable for practice.

The second is about your internal state. Instead of trying to generate a feeling you don’t have, start with whatever you’re feeling, whether or not there’s a good reason or a clear way to describe it. If you’re tense, begin with tension. If you’re distracted, start with distraction. The instruction isn’t “become relaxed” — it’s “notice what’s actually here, and see what happens when you stop fighting it.” Surrender to your current state instead of waiting for an exemption from it.

The third is about agency. Good instruction should eventually make itself unnecessary. Think about how you’d teach someone to do a physical therapy exercise to increase their range of motion and reduce their pain. You might need to describe it multiple times, demonstrate what it looks like when done correctly, and provide a picture and written description for them to refer to. The goal isn’t for them to need the physical therapist to follow through with the plan, but for them to eventually have a clear enough understanding of the movement so they can perform and adjust it on their own, even when it’s difficult.

That’s what mindfulness instruction should do. It should help you internalize the coaching so you can develop your attention skills in ways that fit your life.

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Why This Is Hard to Market

This approach is hard to turn into a business.

The mainstream model is appealing because it promises relief and claims to provide a more pleasant experience quickly and effortlessly. You can build an app around it. You can sell courses. You can promote subscriptions. You can gather feedback from people who report feeling calmer. Whether that calmness lasts or quickly evaporates is harder to measure and easier to overlook.

What I’m describing is messier. Individual results vary. Transformation is gradual and often feels elusive. The daily effort is small, but it adds up over months and years. The results aren’t usually dramatic.

The practice asks a lot from people. Not to be soothed, but to be curious. Not to escape their experience, but to inhabit it more fully. Not to eliminate uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, but to learn to relate to them more effectively.

That’s a tougher pitch. It probably won’t appeal to everyone, or even most people.

But for the people it reaches—the ones who are willing to experiment without a guaranteed outcome, to invest without a clear timeline, and to sit with discomfort rather than try to engineer it away—the return is something the other model can’t offer.

What the Reward Actually Looks Like

The benefit of a skill-based approach to mindfulness practice isn’t revealed when everything is going well. It comes at the moments you didn’t expect—the situations you didn’t want, the circumstances you’d rather wish away.

Someone who has practiced this way long enough will find themselves, without having planned it, in difficult moments—a conflict, a loss, an unexpected grief—and instead of freezing, fleeing, or pushing through on autopilot, they will notice what it’s like to be alive in it. Not necessarily transcendently, even though sometimes it can feel temporarily transcendent. Not without pain, but maybe a little less downstream misery. Not without alarm, but also with a kind of presence and composure that doesn’t require ideal conditions.

That's the grace this practice guides you toward. Not a feeling you micromanage alone in silent rooms, but a liberating ability that can emerge even when quiet isn't available.

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Exercise

This exercise helps you develop equanimity by training you to spread your attention so broadly that you don’t get caught up resisting any one detail.

If you find yourself waiting for it to “work” or feel a certain way, that’s worth noticing. The instruction isn’t designed to produce a specific state. It’s designed to help you become more familiar with the one you’re already in.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Before a difficult conversation

• During a boring or stimulating meeting

• After a workout

Settle into practice. Find a comfortable position. Don’t try to relax. Before you do anything, just notice what’s present. Tension? A busy mind? Tiredness?

Ask yourself: What does my body feel like right now?

If possible, try to name it loosely, without approaching it as a problem to solve.

This is your starting material — not an obstacle to the practice, but the practice itself.

Notice your whole body. Try to notice as many sensations as possible, all at once. Don’t try to soften tension, breathe fatigue away, or replace what you feel with something more comfortable. Let it be exactly what it is, for a little longer than feels comfortable.

Zoom in and out simultaneously. Choose a specific body sensation to notice closely. You can pick one that calls out to you, or just pick one at random. Explore both of these options and treat them as equally valid.

Now, try to observe the sensation for a few seconds while also staying in touch with the whole body.

Sensations, when met with sustained, non-coercive attention, rarely remain static. They shift, soften, clarify, or intensify — often in surprising ways. You don’t need to interpret this. Just observe. Give them plenty of room to behave however they need to.

Carry into daily life. As you go through your day, periodically bring this theme into ordinary moments without anyone noticing.

• When you notice a challenging emotional feeling, acknowledge it while also feeling the rest of your body.

• When you notice an itch, ache, or some other discomfort, notice it and the whole body.

• When you notice warmth, relief, or another pleasant sensation, hold it and your whole body in your awareness at the same time.

The goal is to hold both the specific and the whole at once, gently and curiously.

“Lost”
by David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

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Practicing mindfulness isn’t about perfecting what you experience. It’s about feeling more alive despite the inevitably imperfect circumstances we all face.

During my first meditation retreat, the teacher suggested an experiment.

I’d explained that when meditating became physically uncomfortable, I often struggled with the urge to make the discomfort go away. I noticed that compassion exercises, rather than breath awareness, helped me stay present with my agitation instead of trying to eliminate it.

“When you get home,” he said, “you could try doing the technique you’ve found useful for five minutes a day. Give it a couple of years and see if you notice any impact.”

I laughed. I’d been working in the mental health field for a decade and had never heard of any approach with a two-year trial period.

Plus, I didn’t even have a consistent meditation routine.

When I realized he was serious, I considered it might be one of the wisest suggestions I’d ever been given. I decided to try it.

I planned to give him a report at the end of my informal, longitudinal study.

That was October 2002. I’ve been meditating daily ever since, not because every session feels profound or peaceful, but because I learned to approach whatever arises with openness, including discomfort, boredom, and restlessness.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this experimental approach helped me avoid a common impulse to constantly fix, judge, or perfect my experience, which often undermines consistency.

In fact, working with confusion and emotional discomfort has taught me more than savoring relaxation. Just as strength training reveals its value when you need to move furniture, take the stairs, or walk across a parking lot, cultivating a warm relationship with discomfort prepared me to have better disagreements with my spouse, set boundaries with my daughter, and develop better work habits.

The trap of constant self-monitoring

Practicing mindfulness means being present with whatever is happening, without rushing to change it. That includes feeling:

• calm and agitated

• focused and scattered

• energetic and fatigued

• emotionally pleasant and unpleasant

The complexity of our humanity makes interpreting our efforts precarious. It’s easy to misinterpret agitation or fatigue as failure when, in fact, they come with the territory.

Occasionally reflecting on organic outcomes

Be on the lookout for subtle shifts in how you’re responding when you’re not meditating. Those moments when you notice yourself pausing, softening, or simply being with an uncomfortable sensation without immediately trying to change it.

Rather than constantly evaluating your progress, it’s more helpful and sustainable to periodically schedule specific times on your calendar to reflect on any changes you’ve observed over the weeks, months, or years.

Once every three months, ask yourself if you’ve noticed yourself:

• Savoring pleasant moments more?

• Wrestling with unpleasant moments less?

• Pausing before responding more often?

• Recognizing the humanity you share with others

Mindfulness is often marketed as a way to relax with your eyes closed to escape or recover from life’s challenges, but its true heart lies in noticing what’s happening without trying to change it and in cultivating the composure to respond wisely.

Exercise

After considering the possibility of noticing sensations without rushing to interpret what they mean about how mindful you are, let’s explore what it feels like in practice. The goal isn’t to relax or feel better, but to cultivate awareness of what’s present, whether it’s pleasant or not.

This exercise helps calibrate equanimity by practicing a paradoxically neutral response to whatever you hear and feel. It involves a bit of pretending in order to undermine the impulse to interfere with what you notice. Your mind will push back, but try to gently persuade it to treat it as a game, similar to the internal shifts cultivated by actors and improv groups.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Feeling tired or rested

• Feeling grumpy or agreeable

• Feeling lonely or connected

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1. Observing the mental screen

2. Hearing thoughts as sounds

3. Detecting emotional feelings in the body

4. Combining all three of these challenges into a single exercise

Even though we spend so much of our lives inside our heads, it’s surprisingly difficult to notice what’s actually happening there while it’s happening. We remember the narrative content—the gist of whatever story we’re constructing from our memories and predictions—but we have difficulty describing the building blocks—mental images, verbal thoughts, and emotional body sensations—that make up those thoughts and feelings.

It’s difficult to track the visual, auditory, and emotional components as they unfold, but it’s not impossible. This challenge is similar to remembering dreams: while dreaming, details are vivid, but as soon as we try to recall them, they evaporate. Improving dream recall by quickly jotting down details can sharpen accessibility over time—the same holds true for noticing our waking thoughts.

If you’ve ever tried to improve your dream recall, you probably noticed how details that are initially unavailable can quickly begin to emerge after you start writing down even the faintest details as soon as you wake up. After a few days, scenes, sounds, fragments of dialogue, and even feelings start to become clearer and more accessible, regardless of whether they make logical sense.

When I start writing down my dreams, sometimes the only clue I have is a vague emotion I can’t put into words. When I stick with it, it eventually seems like mentally conjuring a movie from the perspective of a character living in the scenes. Many people notice that at first, the only clue is a vague emotion or image, but with patience, more details emerge. You may find this, too, whether trying to remember your dreams or get better at objectively observing your thoughts and feelings.

Being able to observe yourself thinking and feeling when you’re awake involves a similar process. Using mindful awareness strategies can help. Verbal thoughts often come into focus first, but with steady attention, images and emotional feelings become easier to detect. The more we practice observing mental images, verbal thoughts, or emotional body sensations, the more clearly we can perceive them.

Learning to observe these fleeting details isn’t just a curiosity—it can help you become less entangled in your thoughts and more able to respond with clarity and composure. This ability contributes to all the areas of life that matter most, including our relationships, responsibilities, and the quality of our contribution to the world.

When we talk about our thoughts and feelings, we typically focus on what they mean:

• I’m worried about a medical symptom.

• My co-worker hurt my feelings.

• I need to call my mom, but I don’t want to.

When we try to observe our thoughts and feelings mindfully, the focus is on the sensory details:

• I heard myself narrating a story about cancer and chemotherapy.

• I saw my co-worker’s face in my mind.

• I heard myself mentally saying, “I should call my mom.” I pictured her looking at her phone and calendar, being disappointed, and I felt mild emotional discomfort in my stomach and on my face.

We start by noticing specifics and build more distance from the content while focusing on the sensory category as if the meaning were irrelevant:

• hearing thoughts

• seeing thoughts

• feeling emotions

We get better by exploring these sensory categories separately and together.

Today’s exercise brings together the three previous attention exercises for observing visual thoughts, verbal thoughts, and bodily emotions. It’s an invitation to cultivate greater awareness of the full landscape of your inner experience, not by forcing clarity, but by gently tuning in and making note of whatever arises.

Over time, you may find that what once seemed blurry or inaccessible becomes surprisingly vivid, offering new insights into how your mind works.

Exercise

This exercise aims to enhance your ability to observe your subjective experiences without getting too caught up in the meanings of your thoughts and feelings.

Although it may seem intimidating at first, it can be liberating with practice. Keep things playful, set aside any expectations, and let curiosity guide your exploration. Remember, attention exercises are more effective when approached as games rather than tests.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Going to bed

• Feeling alert in the middle of the night

• Waking up in the morning

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1. Observing the mental screen

2. Hearing thoughts as sounds

3. Detecting emotional feelings in the body

4. Combining all three of these challenges into a single exercise

We tend to overthink our feelings. When we talk about our emotions, we tell stories about who caused them or focus on strategies to get rid of the ones we don’t like and to hold onto the ones we do.

Mindfulness takes a different approach: investigating the phenomena underlying what we feel. Instead of trying to improve pleasant feelings or eliminate unpleasant ones, we temporarily suspend that impulse to recognize feelings with less internal interference.

This approach is counterintuitive and not widely understood by those who haven’t practiced it, but it offers a powerful alternative to worry and rumination. It turns the theory of pausing between stimulus and response into an accessible, real-life skill.

A common misconception is that we’ll quickly develop the precision to identify what we feel and find the right words to describe it. When we try to stop our minds from solving our feelings, they often pivot to curating them, sorting emotions into neat categories borrowed from pop psychology or social media.

Curiosity about feelings is where the relief comes from. Being willing not to know exactly what you’re feeling—and to make lots of guesses—is key.

Here's an approach to begin exploring your emotional feelings that can keep you guessing in liberating ways for years.1

• Start by noticing your energy level. Feel it for a few seconds without evaluating it or trying to change it.

• Next, notice the presence of pleasant and unpleasant feelings without evaluating them or trying to change them.

At any given moment, there are four possibilities for your mood: pleasant, unpleasant, mixed, or neutral.

When you find yourself worrying, overthinking, or catastrophizing, look for sensations in your body that connect to what’s on your mind. You can’t force yourself to stop thinking, but you can explore how your mental activity shows up as emotional feelings in the body. With practice, this becomes transformative.

The mind doesn’t need to be an enemy in developing emotional awareness. It can actually become a valuable ally. The key is to accept that your feelings may remain coarse and vague even as your ability to spot emotionality increases. This isn’t a reflection of a personal shortcoming but evidence of your messy human complexity. Allowing yourself to experience unpleasant feelings with less resistance, even those you can’t put into words, makes them less likely to escalate and feel personal.

The exercise below will help you develop this capacity to feel what’s on your mind without getting lost in stories about it. By distinguishing between physical and emotional sensations, you’ll build the skill to stay present with your feelings—even the difficult ones—with more clarity and less reactivity.

If my practical, down-to-earth approach to mindfulness resonates with you but you’re not ready to subscribe just yet, you can still show your support with a one-time tip on Buy Me a Coffee. Every gesture of encouragement is appreciated, including likes and shares of the posts you enjoy.

Exercise

This practice helps you build the skill of distinguishing emotional from physical sensations, empowering you to navigate your feelings with greater ease and clarity.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Walking

• Waiting

• Worrying

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1. Observing the mental screen

2. Hearing thoughts as sounds

3. Detecting emotional feelings in the body

4. Combining all three of these challenges into a single exercise

Listening to your thoughts as sounds seems impossible. It’s the kind of thing mindfulness teachers say that makes them sound enigmatic or high. They insist that most of our mental chatter is worthless static we’ve inherited from instincts that kept our ancient ancestors alive. While this perspective resonates, I don’t find it very useful, and it can actually get in the way of developing genuine mindful awareness. The voice in your head isn’t a jerk. Not all thoughts are noise.

Thinking is definitely a double-edged sword, though. It’s a mind-blowing capacity for making sense of the world we take for granted that has made every human advancement possible. But this same ability, shaped by how our families nurtured our basic nature, often comes loaded with unwarranted criticism and can make difficult situations feel even more miserable.

Our inner voice echoes the outer voices we heard in our formative years.1 We absorbed scripts repeated by our caregivers, threats from playground bullies and siblings, and the tones and murky messages of our influential and sometimes inscrutable teachers. The words and phrases we heard repeatedly took root in our minds, forming the scaffolding for what we say to ourselves in our daily lives as adults.

Hopefully, there were also people along the way who encouraged us with their words and showed us how to distinguish between what we feel and who we are. Part of growing up involves revising the way we talk to ourselves, especially as we confront challenges, uncertainty, and emotional pain. Our friends and mentors can help us rewrite internalized scripts. So can therapists and even writers whose voices we hear only in our minds as we read their work. Sometimes, we have to imagine the gentle encouragement we haven’t found in the world to cultivate a kinder inner voice.

Practicing mindfulness can change how you relate to thoughts and feelings, not by trying to force yourself to think differently, but by teaching you to sometimes focus on the composition of your thoughts rather than just their meaning. This helps you become more objective about what’s happening in your mind, experience less internal friction, and strengthen habits that actually align with your values.

We’re not always great at talking about the mind and how it works, but I’ve learned some things over two decades of practicing mindfulness that have really helped me, and I hope they’ll help you too.

Your brain isn’t your mind. Your brain processes sensory information in various ways to manage a highly sophisticated metabolic budget—it’s involved in every bodily process. Mental activity is just one of many functions, and honestly, it’s not the most essential one.

Think of it this way: your heart, lungs, and digestive system each have their own unique missions, but they all work together.

In his book Sanshindo: Integrating the Three Minds, Blake Ashley puts it beautifully:

“The human psyche is united in its mission to derive meaning from the continuous stream of sensory experiences that arise anew in each moment of life.”2

Your mind processes visual and auditory information. You think in pictures and sounds. Most of the auditory processing you’re consciously aware of is linguistic (words and language), but you can also mentally conjure sounds and melodies.

Every poem, song, or symphony you’ve ever heard was processed through the verbal side of your thinking. Emotional processing helped shape them and make them resonate, but let’s put feelings aside for now. I want to help you distinguish between verbal and visual thinking first, which sets the stage for learning to actually hear yourself think.

Thinking can be spontaneous and intentional. You can deliberately picture things from the past, and images can also appear in your mind unbidden or triggered by associations. The same is true for the verbal side of thinking. You can intentionally think in words, and verbal thoughts can spontaneously emerge.

Blake Ashley offers a simple test: “For our practical purposes, the litmus test for determining whether mental talk is intentional or not is simply this: if you can stop it at will, it is intentional. If not, it is spontaneous.”

Here’s the good news: you don’t need to eliminate spontaneous thoughts to be mindful. You couldn’t even if you tried. In fact, trying to get rid of thoughts you didn’t intend to think is like playing Whac-A-Mole—it’s a game you’ll never win.

You can learn to listen to spontaneous thoughts with less resistance. I know this might sound surprising. It’s not what most beginning meditators expect. Experienced meditators aren’t special. They’ve simply stayed with the practice long enough to call a truce with spontaneous thoughts.

Instead of only focusing on what thoughts mean, I’ve learned to observe them—both the verbal chatter and the visual images—similar to the way they see with their eyes and hear with their ears. I try to refrain from habitually fighting my mind anymore and instead observe its activity—the flicker of images on my mental screen, the sound of sentences in the loudspeakers of my mind—as objectively as I can.

One way my mindfulness practice has changed how I live is by gradually revealing that the ways I wrestle with my mind can turn spontaneous thoughts into intrusive ones. This is especially true when the thoughts conflict with my core values. When my daughter was a baby, my mind filled with ideas of her getting hurt or dying on my watch. I checked and double-checked her breathing in a way I now see as excessive, and each time I did, I unintentionally strengthened the grip my thoughts had on me.

The familiar mental patterns and messages reappeared when my grandchildren were infants. By this time, however, I interpreted the fear-based thoughts as evidence of a hypersensitive concern for their safety and practiced letting them trail off as sounds as I focused on playing with them, feeding them, carrying them up the stairs, and singing to them at bedtime. Counterintuitively, calling off the battle with alarming thoughts weakens them.

When you combine this with the ability to observe emotional feelings in your body—without getting tangled up in them—you become better equipped to focus on what’s actually within your control. You’ll start recognizing wiser responses to challenging circumstances, and you’ll feel less at the mercy of those thoughts and feelings that are unfairly harsh about you and the world you live in right now.

Try listening to your thoughts as you would to the hum of a big city—present, but not necessarily demanding that you analyze every detail.3 Sometimes, you can just let it wash over you, and let it ‘massage’ the part of your mind that wants to turn everything into a puzzle you need to solve.

Exercise

This exercise sharpens your ability to listen to verbal thinking as just another sound.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Walking

• Waiting

• Wondering

Read more