Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
enjoying your morning coffee
sitting in the car
waiting for a meeting or an appointment to begin
getting ready for bed
Mindfulness practice enhances attentional skills that might seem abstract initially but become tangibly evident and empowering as you cultivate them.
The skills include deciding where to focus your attention, noticing the richness in simple perceptions, and reducing internal interference with whatever unfolds in the present. The third one, the attentional skill called equanimity, sounds the most conceptual and is often mistaken for indifference, but it’s neither.
Equanimity is a paradoxically neutral way of relating to sensations. Practicing non-interference with various sensations teaches you to enjoy the pleasant ones more deeply and manage the unpleasant ones with less struggle. The experience is visceral rather than cognitive.
When people learn about this skill, it’s normal to want to rush ahead to gain more satisfaction from their favorite pleasures and alleviate the suffering they experience due to their worst pain.
Unfortunately, this relatable impulse leads to frustration. As with any physical capacity, developing it requires consistent exercise.
You don't start weightlifting by using weights too heavy to lift. You don't increase flexibility by forcing your body to stretch beyond its limits. You don't build endurance by running up a dozen flights of stairs.
Savoring neutral body sensations is a great place to begin. This is a deceptively powerful way to enhance equanimity, as there is naturally less internal pressure to interfere with sensations that aren’t strongly pleasant or unpleasant.
The challenge lies in our tendency to focus on pleasure and pain. Neutral sensations don't pack dramatic punches. There’s nothing to fix, no problem to solve, and no conflict to resolve, so your attention gets lured away into the more immediate entertainment of stories.
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