In Focus
Any sensation or perception can move into the spotlight of your awareness or recede into the background.
It’s tough to find the right words to perfectly capture the kind of noticing we do in mindfulness. We often end up relying on vague analogies or going into too much detail just to make things clear—but eventually, that lack of clarity catches up with us.
Over the past two decades, I’ve benefited from having instructions overexplained to me. This is partly because the right words are hard to find, but also because I couldn’t fully appreciate them the first dozen or hundred times I heard them.
On the other side of this learning curve, I discovered the ability to quickly improvise mindfulness exercises for any situation.
When I lead exercises, I try to be as clear and literal as possible. By addressing the nuances, paradoxes, and limitations in terminology from the beginning, I hope to help you navigate these often counterintuitive complexities with greater confidence over time. Much like learning to type or play the piano, the instructions need to be followed repeatedly until the movements become second nature.
I see myself as a talky meditation teacher (having learned from an even wordier teacher1) who wants you to be as clear as possible about your options. I also want to help you avoid interpreting metaphors and analogies too literally—because that can obscure both your expectations and your understanding of what you’re actually experiencing.
For example, you’ll often hear teachers describe “spotlighting” your attention by focusing on a particular sensation, such as the physical sensations related to breathing. It’s a visual metaphor we have to stretch to apply to other sensory categories, such as hearing and feeling.
It also creates confusion about the many sensations and perceptions that fall outside the spotlight. Whenever we attempt to focus on a sensation closely, we’re simultaneously learning how to let all other sensations remain in the background of our awareness. We’re selecting a figure that stands out in contrast with the ground.
It’s important to remember that we don’t push certain experiences into the background because they’re undeserving of attention—all phenomena are equally worthy of our attention. We can choose to direct our focus or let it recede, fostering a deeper understanding of all our perceptions. It’s not a value judgment. It’s about sharpening sensory clarity.
When the sensations of breathing are the only focus object you work with, it’s easy to form an oppositional relationship with other sensations (sights, sounds, emotional sensations) and perceptions (verbal and visual thoughts). You can mistakenly parse the world into what’s good and worthy of focus versus what’s problematic or bad—and therefore always needs to be relegated to the background.
My favorite way to describe focusing on body sensations comes from my friend and colleague Steve James2:
“Just for a moment, feeling the sensations that reveal the presence of your body. You can’t see your body if your eyes are closed, but there is a cocktail of sensations that reveals its presence.”
He doesn’t suggest that we only feel pleasant sensations. Instead, the emphasis is on closely experiencing whatever sensations are available. The truth is that no sensation or perception is inherently good or bad—all sensations are eligible to be observed or to fade into the background. There’s something powerful and enlivening about repeatedly spotlighting as many different sensations as we can in our daily lives.
Today’s exercise is an attempt to illustrate this through direct experience.
Exercise
This exercise sharpens sensory clarity by inviting sensations into the foreground and background of your awareness.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Taking a walk in crisp, snowy air
Warming up by a cozy fireplace
Waiting for a friend at a restaurant
