Photo by Gabriele Diwald on Unsplash
unpolished thoughts 2/4/19
As I do each morning, today I began with 15 minutes of sitting meditation.
As usual, I was mostly thinking with only a few isolated moments of truly finding the gaps between thoughts.
But it was still useful. It always is.
I usually find structure in the different levels of sound in my head: the sounds of my own body, the little sounds in my apartment, and the larger sounds outside my window.
I can usually perceive a half dozen different sounds any given moment. But as my attention keeps shifting, I’m always realizing there are other sounds that I’ve been missing.
I think what happens is that as new sounds enter the container of my attention, other sounds fall out. It seems that there is only so much my attention can hold on to at once.
There is another daily experience that mirrors my meditation. It’s what happens in each human encounter.
You speak, and I listen – but do I really listen?
How many other sounds live in the container of my attention as we talk?
How many other thoughts pass through my mind while you express yourself?
It is of no small importance whether we can distinguish between the words that people say to us and the voice in our head, dying to say what it wants to say.
We don’t always find it so easy.
How much of our attention do we reserve for purely listening, without reference to our opinion about the speaker, the other topic of conversation we had in mind, or our curiosity about other phenomena in the environment?
Of course, we can never really act purely. Things are always shifting and recognizing these shifts is central to our survival as living organisms. But it helps to understand the dynamic of what’s happening – so we can escape the experience that something is happening to us.
Moshe Feldenkrais, teaching at his Amherst training program in the early 1980s, repeatedly emphasized the importance of being able to simultaneously pay attention to the foreground and background of our experience.
To illustrate the point, while teaching Awareness Through Movement, he would give movement instructions, then launch into tangential discussions on the human experience.
But every so often he would remind his students that he expected them to continue exploring the movements, sensing and feeling themselves, even while listening to the other things he spoke about.
The nature of attention is that it must always be in some kind of flux, but Feldenkrais was demonstrating that we can be more intentional in our relationship with different levels of stimuli.
So we might well realize that we have something to say while someone speaks to us, but still maintain our listening posture. We can allow enough of the light bulb to remain glowing over our heads that we don’t’ forget the idea – without needing to surrender to impulse to interrupt or stop listening.
This is important not just because we want to be polite. There may well be certain situations where it is in our best interest to interrupt.
But it’s another thing when we interrupt ourselves – when the train of our own thinking takes us off the rails and we forget our purpose in the present moment.
We live in an era of incredible distraction, yet we are simultaneously more prepared to live in this historical moment than any generation before us. After all, we get to practice every day.
One thing that can help us is to understand that there is always a background and a foreground to our experience.
It’s possible to grow our awareness of the interaction of the two, so that we can move through the world free from the restrictions of our thinking.
Our thoughts are not the only sounds deserving of our attention.
************************
If you would like to explore the ordering of your attention, here’s a 10-minute video that can help you make some new discoveries and find more calm.
************************
¡Reimagine Yourself! 2019 online classes start March 25
A movement practice to rewrite the story of how you move through the world
************************
You can now receive my unpolished thoughts in your email on a daily basis when you subscribe to my mailing list.
New subscribers also receive a series of welcome emails which include two free full-length Feldenkrais audio lessons.
Click here to subscribe (and make sure to check the box to get the unpolished thoughts RSS feed just below where you enter your email address)