Expand Your Awareness Range

Mindfulness is a flexible and generous contemplative practice that can initially seem strict and unforgiving.

It's a liberating practice riddled with paradoxical challenges. The attention exercises designed to cultivate focus and composure can make you feel scattered and restless. Believing that your mind must be completely quiet for your efforts to be effective leads to frustration. Focusing too heavily on the potential benefits hinders your ability to fully experience them, which seems unfair.

Mindful awareness is an inherent ability that improves with regular practice. Teaching someone to observe their subjective experiences can be challenging due to the limitations of language. The distinction between literal and poetic descriptions often becomes blurred, and different teachers employ various terminology to address these complexities. What clarifies the instructions for one individual may confuse another.

During my first meditation retreat, I thought the walking meditation instructions were a prank. How could anything so tedious possibly reduce my suffering? It seemed only to increase it. What were we going to do next? Watch paint dry?

Sitting meditation wasn't any easier. Sometimes it went okay, but at least half of the time it felt more like torture than peace. I confided in the teacher that my knees were hurting so badly from sitting that I was concerned I might be causing permanent damage. He assured me that he didn't want me to injure myself and asked whether my knees still hurt when the bell rang at the end of the meditation sessions.

I hadn’t noticed, but was open to finding out. He asked me to consider how subtle resistance to the physical discomfort might be amplifying my experience of it.

The next sitting period started comfortably. About halfway through, my knees started to ache again. The discomfort eventually grew so strong that it felt like they might split open. When the bell rang to signal the end of the practice period, though, the pain eased significantly. After a bit of stretching and moving, it was gone entirely.

Meditation became a laboratory for observing my perceptions after this experiment, which is one of the many game-changing shifts that have made it consistent and sustainable for more than two decades.

As a teacher and coach, my goal is to encourage individuals to experience these types of paradoxical shifts on their own. While I can’t meditate on their behalf, I can try to describe the instructions as clearly as possible and encourage their curiosity.

When they are open to experimentation over time, they will become better at noticing aspects of themselves that they were previously unaware of. This awareness won't unfold in the logical, therapized way we typically discuss psychological growth, but rather from a deeper, more visceral understanding that feels more embodied than intellectual.

One thing that has helped me is keeping the emphasis on developing sensory awareness of ordinary phenomena, rather than trying to be calm or chasing epiphanies.

Phenomena are the objects of perception—what we take in through our senses. They encompass both external experiences, such as what we can see and hear, and internal experiences, including our thoughts and emotions.

Comparing these inner and outer perceptions has been particularly beneficial for me. My visual thoughts compete for attention with what I see with my eyes, while my verbal thoughts want the attention I could be giving to sounds around me.

I feel lucky to have found a teacher who was committed to precision in his language and consistency in his terminology. However, poets have also helped me understand what he’s trying to convey.

Consider this haiku by Jim Malloy:

I'm wondering why
the birds stop singing when I'm
absorbed in my thoughts.

It's difficult to hear sounds when we're thinking in words. It's challenging to think in words when we're surrounded by loud or irritating sounds.

This insight also applies to seeing. It's difficult to see the road in front of me when I'm rehashing an awkward conversation in my mind while I drive. It's also challenging to think through a project when news, politics, and advertisements all constantly compete for my eyeballs.

Breath awareness exercises are powerful, but multi-sensory exercises can set the stage for you to discover, for yourself, how generous, flexible, and forgiving this practice can be if you're willing to experiment and experience it firsthand.

Exercise

This attention exercise explores expanding your awareness one sensory category at a time.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Taking a walk somewhere new or familiar

• Looking out a window

• Sitting on your porch or a park bench