Downshift Slowly

One of the times Matt and I ran the Columbus Marathon, we got cocky. We trained for months. We'd both trained for and completed it several times. We knew enough to stick to our training pace, but the live bands and encouraging spectators made us feel strong.

We decided not to hold back and ran way too fast for the first half. Even though I don't care about my finishing times, imagining a more impressive time led to our emotions revising the logical plans our minds had made.

You can probably guess what happened during the second half. We ran out of steam. We couldn't sustain the pace. It became a punishing endurance test, as mile by mile, our split times decreased. The idea of using determination to overcome physical challenges may be helpful for a short sprint, but it isn't sustainable for more than four hours. Our final results matched our expectations from the starting line, but the second half of the race was as difficult as the first half had been enjoyable.

Meditation practice serves as attentional endurance training, and adjusting your effort level can make it more sustainable over time. Calibrating your effort is a visceral challenge. You have to feel your way through it.

Analogies can help. Here are a couple of examples that resonate with me.

• Tuning a guitar string. If the string is too loose, it will sound terrible. If it's too tight, it might snap. There's a skill involved in finding the perfect amount of tension and using your ear to make significant, nuanced adjustments.

• Walking on a tightrope. It's easy to think of mindfulness as a passive activity. It's sometimes described as doing nothing, which has a poetic ring to it, but is misleading. Instead of comparing it to getting a spa treatment, I find it more useful to compare it to walking a tightrope. Microadjustments need to be made, moment by moment, to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

We can also draw from real-life examples, which I find to be even more helpful than analogies.

• Gripping a steering wheel. When you drive, do you ever notice when you're gripping the steering wheel too tightly? What do you do when you spot it happening? There seems to be a survival instinct at play in this context. We don't want to remove the safety impulse, but hypervigilance isn't sustainable or practical. Easing your grip when driving feels a lot like the kind of move required to ease up when we're meditating. It's okay to need to make small adjustments along the way.

• Holding a child's hand while you cross a street. I'm pretty sure I first heard this from Phillip Moffitt. He led the first silent meditation retreat I went on. He instructed us to pay attention to the breath with the same quality of alertness you would need to guide a child across a busy street. Too tight, and the child might panic. Too loose, and they might slip out of the bubble of safety you're providing. It can be helpful to apply this shepherding skill when attending to sensations, especially the challenging ones, which can be eager to dart into narrative traffic.

• Sticking to your training pace. Bad choices make better stories, but we can learn from them and make better choices in the future. I won't run a long-distance race at a faster pace than the one I trained for ever again. Even when I feel stronger than I anticipated, the crowd encourages me, and the music makes me feel invincible.

Coming up with one or two examples from your life can make this skill easier to transfer to your mindfulness practice.

Finding the sweet spot between too much and too little effort enables longer practice durations. Practicing for longer durations leads to bringing more awareness into daily life when we're not meditating. The impact is neither forceful nor sedating. Instead, it's invigorating in a way that we can learn to maintain.

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Exercise

This attention exercise explores gradually easing up on the degree of control you exert on the breathing cycle.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• cooling down after a walk, run, or workout

• right before beginning your workday

• at bedtime