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The Master Skill

To be everywhere is to be nowhere

 —  Seneca

Perhaps you discovered that maintaining the intended focus was difficult. Novices usually experience frustration by their repeated failures, and many abandon the practice on the grounds that they are not good at meditation. In fact, over-riding the influence of distracting but salient stimuli is a deceptively difficult challenge for everyone. That is why regular exercise is a discipline.

How to get good at aiming your attention

There are payoffs for enhancing the power of your mental faculties, just as there are for enhancing your physical powers. The ability to over-ride the pull of powerful distractions and direct your attention to an intended target requires a mental power that is analogous to physical strength; the ability of maintaining that focus for a period of time is analogous to physical stamina. The exercises on this page will help you enhance the power and stamina of your will.

The Master Skill

Your emotional/motivational state is largely determined by what you are attending to at the moment. Normally, your attention is captured by the most salient stimulus. The critical act of will occurs when you purposely aim your attention to stimuli that elicit a psychological state consistent with your interests and principles, despite the pull of more salient stimuli that promote a less advantageous reaction to the events you encounter.

Each of the exercises on this page, like most meditation exercises, offers a specific target for your attention. The subjective state that you will experience as a result of doing the exercise is a function of the target. Our current goal is exercising the mental faculty rather than evoking a particular psychological state, but you may find the phenomena that emerge from these exercises and the method to achieve them to be valuable in their own right.

A Progression of Focused Attention Exercises:

  1. Counting natural process (like the first exercise on the previous page) or the redundancy of a mantra (like the second exercise) are good places to start. Working with these targets is analogous to working out with weights to strengthen the body.

  2. Focused attention on physical sensations of your muscles as you ask them to relax [see Progressive relaxation script] can be effective in producing physical relaxation. Working with this method is a good way to enhance mindful control over your level of arousal and stress.

  3. You can learn about yourself and the human condition by focused attention on abstract concepts such as compassion. For example, exercise your faculty of imagination to visualize your child self as clearly as you can at the youngest age you can remember. Send feelings of love and compassion to this child. Perhaps imagine yourself hugging this child and telling it what it needs to hear. Next picture yourself as an older child and do the same thing. Cultivate a compassionate perspective toward yourself until it has become your default. As compassion and acceptance of yourself strengthens, episodes of harsh, self-critical mind-chatter becomes more obviously creative fictions that you have invented rather than valid depictions of reality.

  4. "Labeling" exercises provide a good transition to another major category of meditation: Mindfulness. The goal of labeling exercises is to view thoughts and emotions as subjective phenomena you can observe.
    • Exploring Desire: Agree with yourself to notice and label any type of desire thought or image that comes into mind.  Label the thought by silently saying something like: "Ah yes, there's desire again."  There is no need to judge the thought, or analyze it, or try to change it.  Just label it as soon as you've identified it. See if you can define what desire feels like.  Does a part of your body tense?  Does your breathing feel different? What thoughts, sensations, and imagery is associated with desire? Is desire permanent, or does it fade away if you simply observe it rather than give in to it?

Doing Mode & Being Mode

Each of these Focused Attention exercises have a purpose: You are doing them in order to achieve a particular outcome. Doing comes with the possibility of failure [not getting to the intended outcome]. The objective of focused attention meditation is to keep your mind on a particular target, but we know it will wander away. These lapses of attention give you the opportunity to redirect your attention back to the target. Here Doing Mode [evaluating and correcting], like all skill development exercises, strengthens your ability to control your attention.

To develop willful control of your attention, it is important to accept (without punishing yourself) these "failures" and your disappointment with the speed of your progress. Paradoxically, self-judgment — the very tendency we are attempting to rise above— is the primary cause of prematurely abandoning the practice.

So, an important and intended byproduct of Focused Attention meditation is learning to accept self-appraisal for what it is: a passing phenomenon that you create. Judgments such as "failure" or "I'm progressing too slowly" come from you and is not part of the objective world. Becoming free of the emotional reactions to the fictions you create is the objective of a different kind of meditation: Mindfulness practice.

In contrast to Focused Attention meditation  —  in which you are vigilant for the mind wandering away so you can redirect it back to the intended target — the Mindfulness approach is to give up trying to accomplish anything and let the mind go wherever it goes and notice whatever happens. This perspective of dispassionately observing the unfolding experience of being a living creature, without trying to evaluate or change anything, is an alternative mode to the usual pleasure seeking— pain avoidance mind set.

The problem-solving orientation [Doing Mode] is the default. Unless we do something to get out of it, we are constantly and automatically trying to succeed and not fail. Naturally, there are benefits to bringing about the outcomes we want. However, there are also benefits to acceptance of what is [especially if you have no control over it]. Paradoxically, the peace that comes with mindfulness is not available to those who are asleep at the wheel.

Naturally, if you are working toward a particular outcome, you want to achieve it. It is hard to imagine a less controversial statement than: "Success if better than failure." However, sorrow, fear, and bondage are the consequenes of allowing your happiness to depend upon success.

 

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