One night several years ago, I found myself alone in a hospital room recovering from shoulder surgery. My friends and family had gone home. Despite the flowers and cards, the room felt sterile and lonely.

Everything around me seemed cold, mechanical, and sterile. There’s something cliché about the details. The adjustable bed. The IV pole. The call button. The constant beeping that gradually sounded less alarming.

Eventually, I got tired of taking an inventory of how sad everything felt. So I started looking at the contents of the room differently. The space is small, and everything has to earn its keep. There’s little room for anything unrelated to medical care.

As I considered the function of each object, one at a time, I began to see the room differently. Every object existed because someone, somewhere, wanted to reduce suffering.

An adjustable tray on wheels. Blinds designed to help patients sleep even when it was sunny outside. Even the pillow and blanket, while not luxurious in a hotel way, seemed invested in helping me rest and recover.

I started to imagine the people behind each object. Someone imagined a problem.

Someone attempted to solve it. Over time, someone found ways to improve it. Someone tested it. Someone refined it. Behind every object were people solving practical problems within the limits of space, safety, and cost.

Instead of seeing medical equipment, I began to sense generations of human beings quietly caring for strangers, with every object representing countless attempts to reduce suffering. Instead of feeling like a conceptual or theoretical exercise, it gradually became more personal. Even warm.

I didn’t want to be a patient. I didn’t want to need to be taken care of. I didn’t want to get injured or navigate the uncertainty of physical therapy having no impact on my range of motion. I didn’t want to be in pain indefinitely. But as I excavated the furniture, machinery, and objects in the room for evidence of anonymous people behind them, I started to feel less alone. I connected with a kind of invisible warmth that was there when I searched for it.

But in that seemingly impersonal moment, I was experiencing the future they could not predict with precision. I was one of many imagined beneficiaries they would never meet or know directly, but reducing my discomfort had been at the heart of their work all along.

I was surprised to discover that my shabby hospital room felt less lonely when I noticed how many people were already in it. While they weren’t physically present, the evidence of their efforts was..

It’s easy to lose sight of this, but I’m convinced that we live our lives surrounded by invisible acts of care. We’re so often lost in headlines, catastrophe, and emotion-numbing distraction that we overlook the ongoing creativity focused on providing for the inevitable comfort we will all eventually need.

Human beings you will never meet worked together over decades to create and improve the design of each of these elements. Each contribution was part of a greater collaborative effort— stretching back into the past and continuing into the future— to decrease human suffering.

We spend much of our lives sitting inside support we no longer recognize. The objects haven’t changed. Our way of seeing them and relating to them has.

Kitchen utensils. Comfortable shoes. Windows. Ballpoint pens. Coffee mugs. Blankets. Door handles.

None of these objects can care about us.

But every one of them carries traces of people who cared.

Today’s practice is an invitation to notice those traces—and see whether an ordinary object feels just a little more alive after you’ve spent a few quiet minutes reflecting on it. The goal isn't to admire objects or necessarily feel grateful. It's to notice the humanity quietly living inside them.

Exercise

This guided attention exercise invites you to notice the hidden humanity embedded in ordinary objects. By exploring a piece of clothing, the chair supporting you, and a nearby everyday object, you’ll practice seeing beyond their function to the countless acts of imagination, craftsmanship, and care that made the current moment possible.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• When your surroundings feel cold or impersonal.

• When ordinary life starts feeling repetitive.

• When you're feeling isolated or disconnected.

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It’s never been easier to spend an entire day thinking about life without actually feeling connected to it.

We check the weather, our calendars, and our email. We schedule and reschedule appointments. We read headlines and flag articles to read later. We plan vacations, replay conversations, and worry about our families, communities, the country, and the world.

According to philosopher Agnes Callard, we humans are best at managing our attention in bottom-up ways, which means we’re good at focusing on whatever demands our attention. Because so much of modern life happens online, we’re constantly required to manage our attention in top-down ways.1

“We find ourselves constantly deciding how to manage our attention—whether to allow ourselves to get distracted by one thing or another—and feeling like we’re always letting ourselves get too distracted.

So instead of responding naturally to what’s happening around us, we’re constantly trying to manage our own attention—deciding what deserves it, fighting distractions, feeling guilty about where our minds wander.

This can lead us to navigate our lives in increasingly abstract ways. We become managers of our experience instead of participants in it.

This reminds me of similar language David Whyte used years ago when he observed that we spend astonishing amounts of time abstracting ourselves out of our bodies and out of our direct experience.2

Being lost in thought comes naturally to me. I’m a gifted worrier with big feelings and a creative imagination. I can walk through a park on a beautiful afternoon and realize halfway through that I’m completely focused on some worst-case-scenario fear playing out instead of feeling the breeze on my skin and listening to the sounds around me.

Luckily, after decades of relying on these default habits, I stumbled upon tools and strategies that help me decide where to allocate my attention. Using them takes effort—it’s always easier not to.

The goal isn’t to turn off your thoughts and feelings. It’s to become more interruptible by the reality playing out in and around you. Mindfulness isn't an escape from life. It's training to participate in it more fully.

While this might sound like it takes a lot of effort, it’s actually the opposite. It leads to a mode of attention you’ve experienced countless times—a gentle focus that psychologists call soft fascination.

Psychologist Netta Weinstein describes soft fascination as the gentle way our attention is naturally drawn into the present through our senses.3 Nature often evokes this state, but it isn’t limited to forests and hiking trails. The warmth of a coffee mug, the sound of rain, a grandchild’s laughter, the movement of sunlight across a wall, or the feeling of air on your skin can invite the same kind of effortless awareness.

It’s easier to access soft fascination on vacation. Away from our usual routine and responsibilities, our attention has permission to notice details it has never noticed before. I noticed this while spending time on a tiny island in Croatia a couple of weeks ago. My attention wandered to the play of sunlight on the Adriatic Sea, the sound of church bells, laughter, and singing, and the contrast between the warmth of the sun on my skin and the coolness of the shade.

While taking care of my grandchildren this week while their parents are away, I've noticed that soft fascination sometimes arrives effortlessly, and sometimes it's much harder to find. When the children are playing, sharing observations, or asking me to watch them draw or do somersaults, it’s effortless. But when they rail against a limit I set—one I know is reasonable—it becomes much harder to remember to notice the air on my skin or the other sounds around us.

Soft fascination isn't something you force. When it's available, enjoy it. When it isn't, your practice simply becomes responding to the moment you're in.

Being immersed in nature can make it easier to experience soft fascination, but we can learn to invite its ordinary magic into any circumstance. It requires curiosity, willingness, and the habit of practice.

Just like riding a bike, my talent for spinning out in anger, fear, sadness, embarrassment, or boredom comes naturally. Shifting my awareness to sensory details takes practice. I’m convinced I’ll be practicing for the rest of my life. As with physical exercise, we’re never done. And, as with physical exercise, the return on investment is feeling stronger, more flexible, and more alive.

Exercise

This guided exercise explores soft fascination by gently shifting your attention toward visual details, sounds, and body sensations that spark your interest. Rather than concentrating harder, you'll practice letting your senses naturally draw you back into the present.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• When ordinary life begins to feel too conceptual.

• When you’re somewhere beautiful and don’t want to miss it.

• When strong emotions make it difficult to notice anything except your thoughts.

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One of the easiest ways to make relaxation elusive is deciding you need to be relaxed.

This is problematic—not because relaxing is bad, but because we get in the habit of constantly evaluating, every few seconds, “Am I relaxed yet?”

That question quietly turns mindfulness into yet another chore—something that’s supposed to be good for you, but ends up making you feel like you lack an innate aptitude that others possess.

A coaching client recently described feeling frustrated in his efforts to reestablish a meditation routine because so many sessions felt restless rather than focused. He remembered having more momentum in the past and wondered if that ability had disappeared.

Even though he knew that every meditation was beneficial, just as every physical workout is worth the effort, he started to wonder whether the fragmented feeling meant his previous approach no longer worked.

One of the biggest hurdles to starting or returning to a meditation practice is yearning for a desired outcome that feels just out of reach. Ironically, craving the momentum and flow that regular practice can bring often hinders the very process that leads to it.

We used what we both know about adjusting expectations with physical exercise to find a way through his current frustration.

We talked about how both physical and attentional fitness exercises play out in phases.

Sometimes a session is mostly about arriving. We enter the gym, jump into the pool, or start running, carrying the residue of what came before and the time since our last workout.

Sometimes things settle. If you know the difference between warming up and being warmed up, you’re less likely to interpret the discomfort you feel while warming up as a sign to spend your time and energy elsewhere.

Sometimes, momentum develops. Most people who consistently work out or meditate have tasted what it’s like on the other side of warming up. Even when traction doesn’t appear, we trust that if we keep showing up, it will resurface and remind us why we persist, even on the harder days.

Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that every session will unfold in our favorite blend of arrival, settling, and traction. Self-care is a long game, and eventually we make peace with sessions that feel like nothing but arrival.

Or we don’t, and risk missing out on what’s possible if we learned to celebrate simply showing up, rather than chasing the flow we hope to rediscover.

We can’t always relax deeply.

We can’t always feel comfortable from head to toe.

But we can always look for a comfortable sensation somewhere in the body. It’s usually there somewhere, and it’s essential to develop the willingness to look.

And we can practice inviting the body to relax—even just a little—whether it accepts the invitation or not.

Today’s exercise isn’t asking you to become relaxed.

It’s asking you to notice where relaxation already exists—even if it’s just in your hands, your jaw, or a single foot.

Partial, low-key relaxation can sound like a consolation prize, but savoring it—instead of trying to force it to be more—actually creates the ideal conditions for relaxation to spread naturally, at its own pace.

You don’t have to wait until your mind and your whole body cooperate before mindfulness begins.

If all you do today is arrive, notice one comfortable sensation, and soften the impulse to argue with the rest of your experience, you’ve already practiced something worthwhile—one you won’t regret.

Exercise

It’s easy to get fixated on outcomes and lose sight of the process that gets us there. This exercise shifts attention from forcing relaxation to meeting experience with gentle awareness, letting relaxation emerge in its own time.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Before starting your workday

• During a midworkday break

• At the end of your workday to ease into the evening

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A few years ago, during an online mindfulness practice session, someone shared a story I still think about.

We’d just done an exercise involving listening to ambient sounds and feeling bodily sensations, and a woman who was new to the group said it reminded her of an experience from a family vacation when her kids were little.

She described driving from Las Vegas to Death Valley one summer. Her husband was in the passenger seat, and her kids were in the back. The temperature was well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

At one point, she noticed there were no other cars in sight.

She turned off the radio, rolled down her window, and asked her family, “Do you hear that?”

Everyone was confused as she slowed to a stop, turned off the engine, and said, “Listen.”

Her kids rolled down their windows, but her husband asked her what she was doing. “What if the car won’t start back up?”

She decided not to argue. They just sat together in the middle of the desert, surrounded by quiet.

The experiment didn’t last long, but all these years later, she was still grateful that she paused their adventure to hear the silence when they’d had the chance.

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This is one of my favorite kinds of reactions to an attention exercise — the recognition of how ordinary and accessible mindfulness really is.

Spontaneous mindful awareness happens all the time, but we're usually so busy making sense of things that we forget to notice what it actually sounds and feels like to be alive.

Is there any silence where you are right now? Take a few seconds to see if you can hear it.

If not, look for it somewhere else—under your chair, in another room, just outside a window, or even in the brief spaces between sounds.

Silence is easy to miss. So are most sounds.

The more often you remember to look — or in this case, listen— the more ordinary moments have to offer.

I’d love to hear about it.

Here are my three favorite documentaries about listening to silence:

• In Pursuit of Silence

• Into Great Silence

• Touch the Sound

All three had an impact on the quality of my listening for hours afterward and have lingered in my imagination for years — the auditory equivalent of muscle memory.

While it’s not a documentary, Sound of Metal is another film that will change the way you hear.

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When I mine my life for things that I’ve been surprised to discover over twenty-some years of consistent mindfulness practice, I often come up with observations and lessons learned on silent meditation retreats. What rarely makes it into those stories is just how unbelievably tedious they can be.

Every one of them starts the same, with two contrasting feelings arriving at once:

1. Yay! I’m so excited to be here.

2. Oh, my god. What have I done? Get me out of here!

Both are sincere and understandable.

The truth is that retreats are incredibly boring. Unbelievably, stifling, structurally boring. The schedule is fixed, the meals are fixed, the sits are fixed, and when you’re not meditating while sitting down, you’re meditating while walking slowly, doing yoga, or eating.

What’s the payoff of yielding to such a simple, repetitious routine? I’ve consistently been rewarded with greater focus, sharper perceptual clarity, and a kind of internal composure that builds over days, which makes me feel more rested and alive than any regular vacation ever has.

On retreat, you’re constantly being invited to make contact with what’s available to notice through your senses. Nearly every sit presents this speed bump: are you sure you want to do this? It’s god-awful boring. Remember? But if you navigate past those gatekeepers, something can open up that’s genuinely hard to imagine from the other side.

Maybe emotions don’t always need to be resolved. Sometimes, conflicting feelings can alert us that the conditions are right for practical insights if we're willing to stay with boredom, discomfort, and confusion.

Luckily, you don’t have to go on a silent retreat to find or accept such invitations. Life presents us with plenty of conflicting emotions and challenging moments. We can get better at spotting them and fiddling with how we respond to them.1

A few summers ago, I was six miles into a hot training run when my body abruptly alerted me that I needed to find a bathroom as soon as possible. Since it wasn’t a situation I could quickly address behind a tree, it seemed highly possible that this could be the fearful day that I pooped my running shorts on the Olentangy Bike Path. I held on as long as I could to the flimsy hope that if I kept running, maybe the urge would subside.

It didn’t.

I remember something resembling a desperate prayer forming — not really addressed to anyone, just pure, animal please, please, not here, not today — and morphing into a desperate chant as I did my best to keep things safely inside. A few minutes into my desperation, I turned a corner and saw it: a porta-potty, alone in a field, as if the sky had opened, and my prayer had been answered. I sprinted for it with relief and glee but didn’t want to waste a single second.

As soon as I was inside, though — completely safe and hidden, exactly like I’d begged to be a few minutes earlier — I hated it. It was unbearably hot and smelled aggressively foul, with evidence of careless visitors splashed on its plastic surfaces.

Is this really what an answer to prayer looks like these days?

That’s when it clicked. I’d gone from intensely grateful for getting precisely what I’d asked for, which had been highly unlikely. Everything I needed was there — privacy, a place to sit cautiously, toilet paper, hand sanitizer — but it had all arrived in a condition I immediately rejected. Everything inside me weighed in with a big, fat NO!

I quickly decided to try a different response. It wasn't about pretending to like the situation. It was more like getting that bodily NO to a YES — or even a shaky MAYBE. Maybe I could live here long enough to do what needs to be done.

Instead of trying to improve the moment, I just let myself notice what was actually available in it. I said to myself, If this is the lifeboat you were yearning for a minute ago, what if you didn’t act like it was somehow worse than being lost at sea?

I was reminded of a line from the mindfulness teacher Eric Harrison that I appreciate:

“‘Being ‘present’ is not just about smelling the roses. It is also about smelling the shit. Persuading people to sit still for a long time trains them to be more comfortable within their less-than-perfect, present moment experience as it occurs during the meditation.“2

I wasn’t trying to be more present by excluding the disgusting stew of sights, sounds, and sensations, but by including the stifling heat, filth, and foul smell. But I started to notice other things mingled with them. The palpable relief in my body. The pressure I’d been carrying for a mile, now completely gone. The sweat cooling me as it dripped dramatically from my skin. I didn’t force myself to accept the situation. I tried to make room for the variety of sensations inside a very small, unsavory chamber designed exactly for the kind of relief I needed.

The experience felt much shorter with less of a fight raging inside me. And what lingered afterward wasn’t the discomfort but the relief I felt when I was outside again, back on the running path. I laughed about my instinct to micromanage the details of my rescue. I felt the summer air moving across my skin, almost unbearably pleasant in a way ordinary air rarely feels — like how unbelievably delicious food can taste after some time not eating. The contrast made the ordinary summer air feel vivid. My willingness to lean into the uncomfortable moment had made the subsequent moments sharper, richer, and more satisfying.

I didn't become happier inside that porta-potty. I became more curious.

Summer is my hard season; I know people for whom it’s winter, or the dreary gray middle of March. There’s no time of year, no hour of a day, that’s universally pleasant for everyone.

Most of us, most of the time, have the tools to stay pretty comfortable — heat when it’s cold, air conditioning when it’s not, a screen to disappear into whenever the moment feels dull. There's nothing wrong with making ourselves comfortable, but if we're never willing to be a little uncomfortable, our senses slowly lose some of their sharpness. We can unintentionally blunt the very instrument — our senses — making us feel half-alive and calling it living.

As one saying puts it:

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

Noticing the air on your skin is a tiny, almost embarrassingly simple practice. It won’t feel urgent. That’s the point. It offers a low-stakes opportunity to practice the same willingness the porta‑potty demanded from me: relaxing your grip on the moment for a few seconds and meeting it as it is.

Exercise

Most of us notice air only when it's uncomfortable. This exercise helps you become sensitive to it even when nothing seems remarkable. You can do it while sitting, standing, or walking, and an oscillating fan could stir up some surprisingly interesting sensations.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Too hot

• Too cold

• Just right

• Moving from cooler environments to warmer ones

• Moving from warmer environments to cooler ones

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Watching my grandchildren play reminds me of when I was a kid, not just the stories I remember but the rich sensory details that live in my memory without coalescing into clear storylines. Quinn gets excited by spotting a purple crayon in the batch. Frankie gets nervous when the sky darkens, or he hears thunder rumbling in the distance. Both of them giggle uncontrollably when they hide from a parent returning home from work, even though neither can resist gleefully announcing they’re hiding.

When we’re at the swimming pool, I find myself listening to the blend of squeals and splashes that evoke countless similar sensory experiences, coming alive in my imagination even without conjuring any associated beginnings, middles, or endings.

A lot of our time gets spent on making sense of what’s happening, and for good reason—it’s how we solve problems, understand one another, and find our way through a complicated world. Yet when interpretation takes over, we can drift away from the raw experience of living.

There’s another way to be here. Rather than letting the impulse to explain and solve everything dominate, we can discover how deeply satisfying it is to meet what’s happening directly through our senses.

Let’s break it down.

Pause

Try, now and then, to briefly set aside the urge to make sense—not because it’s bad, but because perception has something to teach us that interpretation can’t.

You don’t have to stop what you’re doing. Just shift into a slightly more observant stance toward whatever is already happening.

Notice

In the midst of whatever is happening in the present, most of us tend to ask immediately: "What does this mean?"

For a few seconds, play with a different question: ”What is actually here?”

You're temporarily shifting from making sense to sensing directly.

This kind of noticing takes practice because it requires setting aside, even briefly, the compelling drama playing out in your mind so you can observe real life unfolding in and around you.

This shift is somehow both unbelievably simple and surprisingly difficult. What makes it difficult is remembering to do it—and then not overthinking it. The simplicity comes from how natural it is to reconnect through our senses.

It’s a way of coming back to your senses—in the most literal sense of the phrase.

Real-time sensory details

When you pause to notice what’s happening in any moment, what comes into the foreground is what you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell:

• The taste of the coffee you’re sipping.

• The warmth of the mug in your hands.

• The touch of a breeze on your skin.

• The play of sunlight on the wall.

• The sounds of people in other rooms—talking, laughing, or arguing.

• The hum of the air conditioner.

• The feeling of your body registering boredom or frustration during a meeting.

Your senses are doorways inviting you to briefly set aside the need to make sense of what’s on your mind.

The pull toward interpretation and internal commentary is strong. Instead of waiting for it to quiet down, you can practice letting the sensory details fascinate you. This is a trainable skill, and it doesn’t require perfect conditions to cultivate.

When you approach moments this way—pausing, noticing, and letting real-time sensory details come to the foreground—you’re not doing a fancy new technique. You’re reclaiming a built-in capacity you’ve always had. And as simple as it seems, this small shift in how you pay attention can quietly change your relationship with everyday life.

Why this shift matters

This habit isn’t just about collecting interesting details.

Pausing to notice real-time sensory details strengthens your natural capacity to make direct contact with being alive as experience unfolds.

This layer of experience is always available—hiding in plain sight—waiting for you to notice. Yet we tend to postpone this kind of contact by default, assuming some ideal future moment will be more worthy of our attention.

Children notice these details without being told they’re important. Adults forget, and have to reprioritize them intentionally—even though we have plenty of evidence that they matter.

The good news is that this tiny, capacity-building shift becomes easier through repetition.

There are two ways I think about strengthening attention:

• Through longer, dedicated practice.

• Through hundreds of brief repetitions woven into ordinary life.

You don’t have to choose one or the other. They reinforce each other, much like structured exercise and simply moving more throughout the day.

Some people thrive with a daily meditation practice. Others rarely sit formally but become remarkably consistent about noticing throughout the day. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

You don’t have to find the perfect blend to benefit. Any way you practice this shift—longer sessions, tiny moments, or a mix of both—can help you come back to your senses more often than never.

Exercise

This exercise explores sights, sounds, and bodily sensations to strengthen your capacity to pause, notice real-time sensory details, and feel more alive.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• While waiting.

• While moving from one activity to another.

• When you feel like your own mind is yanking you around.

Settle into practice. When we shift into formal practice, we don’t need to wait for ideal surroundings, turn thinking off, or numb any emotional residue percolating from the preceding hours. We need to gently steer our attention away from making sense and toward making contact with what’s happening in and around us.

Notice visual details. Pay special attention to sights around you. How might an artist, a young child, or an animal investigate their experience of seeing? If you were forced to wear bandages on your eyes for several days following a medical procedure, how would you take in the scene? Try to emulate these types of curiosity.

If your eyes are open, pick a specific object to look at for a few seconds. Notice its shape, color, and texture without rushing to evaluate it as a whole. You can broaden your gaze to take in some part of what’s in front of you, or take in your entire field of vision, again emphasizing color, form, and the quality of the light rather than trying to describe what you see or make a list of tasks related to it.

If your eyes are closed, gaze into the darkness, or at the swirling mixture of light and dark you discover there. Even with your eyes closed

In this moment, seeing is like this.

Notice auditory details. Pay special attention to sounds around you. Let your attention be pulled to specific sounds—nearby, farther away, or off in the distance. Listen in one direction and then the opposite—right and left, in front and behind, above and below. Listen for fleeting sounds and the silence that occupies the space when they’re gone.

If you notice your attention being pulled into verbal thinking, instead of trying to get rid of it, try to listen to it as just another sound in nature. Try to focus on its volume, rhythm, and tone rather than on what it means. The meaning will be obvious, of course, but try to let it be secondary to what you’re curious about.

In this moment, hearing is like this.

Notice body sensations. Pay attention to whatever you can feel in your body. Notice what feels purely physical, obviously emotional, or some inextricable blend of both. Explore sensations that are comfortable, uncomfortable, stable, and changing.

While your visual and auditory senses expand your awareness of the space around you, they remind you how little physical space you actually occupy in any situation—even though that space feels so personal and important.

In this moment, feeling is like this.

Focus on one external sensory category at a time. Pick one or two sensory domains to explore—or focus on all three—one sensory detail at a time. Practice in a way that feels like strengthening a shift you could make out in the world as you go about your business.

Life practice. Come back to your senses—more often than never—by making contact with sights, sounds, and body sensations throughout the day. While this might seem trivial or too easy to make a real impact, I encourage you (I dare you) to stay open to the possibility that habitually paying closer attention to the mundane details of being alive can bring ordinary moments to life.

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Most people who quit meditating aren't short on motivation. They're running into a design problem.

They sit down, set a timer for ten or twenty minutes, and try to pay attention to their breath — continuously, without interruption — for the entire time. When their attention wanders (which it will!), they treat it as failure and start again. The gap between how the session is supposed to feel and how it actually feels is discouraging enough that many people don’t return.

But sustained attention isn’t a switch you flip. It’s a capacity you train—and like any physical training, it responds well to interval training.

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One repetition of mindful awareness takes only a handful of seconds. You notice the sensation of a breath. That’s it. That’s a complete rep. It’s simple—not easy, but simple. The challenge isn’t the individual rep. It’s riding out the clock with one rep after another, especially when you’re scattered.

Many athletes structure workouts into manageable segments.

Runners alternate fast and easy intervals. Cyclists alternate climbing and recovery. Swimmers divide workouts into manageable sets.

Imagine swimming twenty uninterrupted laps as fast as you can. Most beginners would be exhausted after a few laps.

Instead, coaches divide workouts into sets:

• swim two laps, rest twenty seconds

• swim four laps

• rest

• repeat

You gradually build endurance without feeling defeated.

Interval training works because it asks you to work hard in doses you can sustain.

What works in physical fitness offers more realistic ways to develop attentional fitness through mindfulness. You can structure a mindfulness session so it’s challenging but never overwhelming.

Before you give up on meditation, try redesigning your workouts. Instead of asking yourself to sustain attention for twenty uninterrupted minutes, break the challenge into a series of small, manageable steps—one breath at a time.

Try this five-minute experiment:

Set a timer for five minutes with a bell that chimes at the end of each minute. The Insight Timer and Waking Up apps make this easy with customizable interval timers. Many fitness watches also support one-minute interval alerts. If none of those options are available, set a one-minute timer on your phone or watch and restart it after each round.

Each minute, you'll briefly pay close attention to your breathing, then let your attention wander however it naturally wants until the next bell. For now, don't worry about whether you're controlling your breathing. You probably will, and that's perfectly fine. Learning to observe the breath without influencing it takes practice.

• Minute 1: Notice one full breath. Feel the body as it inhales and exhales once, as clearly as you can.

• Minute 2: Notice two breaths. Track the start, middle, and end of each one.

• Minute 3: Notice three breaths. See if you can follow them all the way through without rushing or tightening up.

• Minute 4: Notice four breaths. Let it feel like a short set, not a test.

• Minute 5: Notice five breaths. By now you're spending most of the minute paying attention rather than waiting for the next bell.

That’s the design. The challenge should feel more structured and less relentless.

Between bells, let your mind do whatever minds naturally do. You don't need to stop thinking or pull your attention back. If you happen to notice your breathing again before the bell, that's perfectly fine. By the final round, you’re tracking five consecutive breaths—with very little idle time left.

Every interval bell is a fresh start. Instead of spending five minutes wondering whether you're "doing it right," you get five opportunities to begin again. Learning to restart without getting worked up about how attention works is one of the most valuable mindfulness skills you'll ever develop.

Once this approach feels comfortable, add five additional minutes, treating the initial five as a warm-up. To extend it, you can double each segment for a ten-minute session, or triple for fifteen. If you finish feeling settled, give yourself an extra couple of unrushed cooldown minutes—unstructured, no counting.

When meditation seems like it isn’t for you, it may be worth questioning the design rather than your ability. Most forms of physical training get easier when you break them into manageable intervals. You can strengthen attention the same way.

If you try this experiment, I'm curious what you notice. Does meditation feel different when the challenge comes in small, manageable segments rather than a single uninterrupted stretch?

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Meditation apps can help establish a consistent practice. They offer structure, guidance, and encouragement to begin—or begin again.

But they can also make mindfulness seem like something that only counts when you have a timer running and an unbroken streak.

You don’t need an app to develop flexible focus, perceptual clarity, or responsive composure. You need small intervals that already exist in your day, a way to recognize when they begin and end, and a plan for what to notice while they last.

What you need:

• slivers of time

• a way to track them as they pass

• sensory options

It seems like we don’t have time to strengthen our attention. More often, we resist giving up even a few of the fragments we already spend rehashing conversations, overthinking decisions, and rehearsing worst-case scenarios.

It seems like we need an official timer. In reality, unofficial timers are better suited to developing mindful awareness and are surprisingly abundant when we start looking for them.

It seems like we shouldn’t need to plan to be more present. In reality, without a plan, we tend to waste potential practice time because we are not prepared to dive into our perceptions.

Shoot for more than zero seconds

A twenty-minute meditation is valuable. But it can become the enemy of noticing you’re alive more often than never if it convinces you that practice only counts when it is formal.

Stolen seconds add up to richer moments.

Notice how many times a day you’re waiting for something to begin or end. Allocate two or three of them to track sensory details. This requires foregoing a few seconds of figuring out yourself or the world.

Trust me. You can afford it.

Scout for fragments with obvious endpoints

Over the next few days, secretly spot ordinary situations that don’t last very long.

Your bathroom is full of them:

• brushing your teeth

• taking a shower

• relieving your bladder

So is your kitchen:

• making coffee

• chopping vegetables

• unloading the dishwasher

Your workday is littered with them, too:

• your commute

• waiting for a website to load

• waiting for a meeting to begin

The best candidates are ordinary, recurring, and long enough to hold a sensory pause without requiring your full problem-solving attention.

Once you have a list of contenders, pick two or three to convert into mindful awareness timers. Explore them for two or three weeks and see what you discover.

Decide what you’ll notice before the timer starts

Before the moment arrives, choose one kind of experience you can explore while the clock runs out: sounds, sights, body sensations, taste, smell, thoughts, or emotional pressure.

Examples:

• While I brush my teeth, I will notice the changing sensations in my mouth, hands, and face.

• While I heat something in the microwave, I will notice how many sounds I can hear around me and try to listen to them closely.

• While I wait for a green light, I will watch the flow of cars moving through the intersection.

• While I wait for a Zoom meeting to begin, I will secretly savor any relaxation that I’m able to find in my body.

You might be surprised by how many satisfying details have been quietly waiting in the background for a few seconds of your less-divided attention.

The point is not to turn every spare moment into a self-improvement project. It is to remember that ordinary life already contains more texture, richness, and possibility than your planning mind can keep track of.

Exercise

This exercise uses your breathing both to explore a variety of body sensations and to parse out a realistic, tangible duration for each repetition of close noticing.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• before reaching for your device

• while waiting for something to begin or end

• before deciding how to spend the evening

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1. Some People are Easier to Love

2. Give Humanity More Human Wiggle Room

3. Our Own Best Enemies

While mindfulness teachers tend to emphasize focus-building strategies more than other approaches, I’ve always found that mixing things up with empathy- and gratitude-strengthening exercises brings the exploration to life. It’s similar to how cross-training works in physical fitness: each capacity strengthens the others and elevates the whole game. The results somehow become more than the sum of their parts.

Loving-kindness is usually positioned as a self-compassion tool, but it’s often taught in a way that feels more like an intellectual exercise than an experiment in emotional awareness—one that can set the stage for a different kind of relationship with yourself, without trying to force your emotional responses to line up with some spiritual-sounding ideal.

I like to deconstruct this puzzle to make it more accessible to anyone who cringes at other explanations, which is what I’m attempting in this three-part series. In the first week, we explored imagining the well-being of people we find easier to love, while observing whatever emotional reactions arose. Last week, we watched how our minds work when we try to conjure up happiness for people we don’t know well, again noticing whatever we feel as we do.

When I first learned how to practice loving-kindness, I quickly noticed that the emotional warmth directed toward likable people created momentum that made it easier to cultivate similar feelings as I worked my way along the continuum. I had to get clever about imagining difficult people, even aging them in reverse to much younger versions of themselves. I was surprised by the complexity of my emotional reactions when I pictured my enemies as children, safe in the arms of an adoring young parent.

The most challenging part for me turned out to be considering my own well-being. Respected teachers insisted that you have to begin with yourself before moving on to other groups of people. I understood the logic of starting with myself, but I simply couldn’t do it. It was beyond challenging. It was impossible. Reciting the traditional phrases felt empty. My typically active visual imagination went blank. I felt nothing. I had to ignore the rule of beginning with myself to explore the technique at all.

It occurred to me that the reason it was so difficult to consider my own well-being was that I was approaching myself as if I were someone I liked. When I like someone, it’s easy to picture them safe, happy, and healthy. When I don’t like someone, I’m forced to turn to creative ways to navigate my resistance to focusing on whether or not the person deserves to have their basic needs met. I’ve imagined presidents of both parties as little children playing in the snow, warming up with tomato soup afterward, or having lullabies sung to them unironically by their mothers who hoped they’d have satisfying adult lives.

I couldn’t imagine my own happiness until I eventually realized that, rather than being someone I found likable, I was actually one of my difficult people. I might even be my most difficult person, which was a real bummer to realize. Forget about trying to love myself. What am I supposed to do with the realization that I’ve been actively loathing myself for most of my adult life without realizing it? Had I been recruiting others to play that role, sometimes just to make it easier to live with?

This proved to be a significant insight that led to exploring creative ways to solve the challenge. I came up with a strategy that worked for me and felt grounded in the essence of the traditional exercise. I pictured all the people in my life gathered in a circle around me. I abandoned the rote script I’d been instructed to say and tried to really imagine what their individual thriving might look, sound, and feel like. The shift in perspective invigorated me and sparked even more creativity.

Next, I imagined them taking turns putting the loving-kindness phrases into their own words, but aimed at me. I could see them. I could see myself. And when I let them speak in their own voices, I began to feel something. What I felt wasn’t comfortable. It felt raw, tender, and excruciatingly vulnerable. It felt awkward and embarrassing. I wanted to resist feeling it because it hurt too much. But when I began to actually take in the possibility that none of the people in my life had ever wanted me to suffer, even as they tried to reconcile how they thought my life was supposed to be instead of how it actually played out. The grief embedded in that gap was theirs to feel. I had my own heartbreak to navigate. Not even the strangers or enemies were actively trying to curse or reject me. I probably wasn’t even on their radar at all most of the time. This wasn’t based on logic. I wasn’t trying to talk myself into rationality. It was something tangible and complicated that I could feel in my body.

Regardless of our conflicts, the people in my life want me to thrive. There was no actual evidence that they intended for me to live my life alone outside the circle of humanity. I was left wondering if I could be the one keeping my persistent fear of being ostracized alive and fueling it with stories that resonated emotionally.

Once I had allowed a bit of basic human kindness to flow toward me, I jumped into the circle to offer it to myself. It didn’t feel peaceful, unless serenity is supposed to sting. It felt shattering and cathartic. It must have been odd to see a runner sobbing on the bike path that day, but it felt as natural as sweating and discovering what my muscles and lungs were capable of doing when given a chance. It was only in the flood of imagined acceptance that I realized the depth of my self-loathing. Observing it seemed to weaken its grip.

Looking back, this insight tied the whole exercise together and made its value pop in a practical yet profound way.

The challenge wasn’t really learning to love difficult people. It was noticing where I’d stopped seeing people—including myself—as fully human.

This has changed the way I hear the aphorism shared across all wisdom traditions that we should love our enemies. I need lovable people, but they don’t exercise my heart the way my enemies do. I hate to admit it, but noticing myself constructing narratives about people I don’t know—and working through my resistance to being internally hospitable toward the challenging people in my life—has deepened the closeness I feel with my family and friends. I feel genuinely grateful to my enemies for this surprising gift. You might even say I love them for it.

It’s amazing how impactful this exercise can be when I practice it regularly, even for a few minutes here and there, and even more fascinating to me is how often I forget to include it in the mix. Even my resistance to doing it can be a sign that it might be exactly what I need.

Here are some surprisingly effective ways I’ve discovered to recognize the basic humanity hiding in difficult people, which can be ourselves sometimes.

Avoiding Eye Contact

When considering the well-being of the people who are easy to love, I like to imagine their faces and facial expressions. It can feel wonderful. But when we imagine difficult people, it can help to avoid picturing their faces. Try turning them around or imagining observing them from behind or from a safe distance, and see how much less challenging the task becomes.

Using the Benjamin Button Method

Imagining my difficult people as young adults, teens, and children can be a powerful way to connect with their humanity. When all else fails, I can try to remember that they were once babies whose parents loved them and wanted the best for them. Putting this universal image to work can really help me step down from my self-appointed judge of who deserves to be part of the larger human family.

Objects in the Rear-View Mirror Feel Less Personal than They Appeared

I stopped trying to imagine other people’s humanity when they’re actively making my life harder, but sometimes recalling them later can be a powerful practice. At the end of the day, I can reflect on careless drivers, annoying influencers, and celebrities I’m convinced don’t deserve the spotlight, and consider that there’s a human in there I don’t need to like. Humanizing them in whatever big and small ways I can seems to humanize me.

If my practical, down-to-earth approach to mindfulness resonates with you but you’re not ready to subscribe just yet, you can still show your support with a one-time tip on Buy Me a Coffee. Every gesture of encouragement is appreciated, including likes and shares of the posts you enjoy.

Exercise

This exercise offers flexible ways to connect with the humanity you share with everyone, without pressure to like everyone or condone behaviors that conflict with your values.

It also helps undermine the tendency to reject ourselves at a fundamental level without realizing it, especially when we don’t like ourselves or regret what we’ve done.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Before or after boring or contentious meetings

• Before or after medical appointments

• Before or after emotionally charged family time

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We’re all great mind-readers—at least, we pretend to be. Every day, we act as if we have a backstage pass to other people’s inner worlds.

A smile? They must be happy. A faraway gaze? Probably bored. Someone meditating? Surely, they’re feeling peaceful inside. A bold opinion? That must be confidence, right? We leap to conclusions based on surface signals, mistaking them for truth.

The reality: we’re flying blind. Our judgments are guesses, not facts. We speculate by habit, unaware of the rich, messy complexity inside anyone else.

And when it comes to our own minds, we fall into another trap: believing that mindfulness means quieting our thoughts. This myth leaves us feeling like we’re failing whenever our minds are busy. But mindfulness doesn’t demand silence; it invites you to notice what’s actually there, moment by moment.

When you see someone meditating, it may appear calm or mysterious, but the only thing you can know for sure about their mental state is that something is happening. They might be remembering the past, imagining the future, focusing intently, or drifting between thoughts.

You don’t get access to the live feed, so you never truly know what’s happening inside another person’s mind, no matter what you’re picking up on from surface clues.

And we're not just blind to what someone is thinking. We're also blind to how their thinking is happening. They might be thinking in words, imagining pictures, doing both, or moving back and forth between them.

Not only is it impossible to know what’s happening in someone else’s mind, but most of us aren’t fully aware of our own thoughts and emotions, either.

And by default, we’re completely caught up in what we’re thinking about rather than observing how our thinking works its magic.

We know the story. We miss the mechanics.

This really popped for me during the closing talking circle of a silent retreat several years ago. During one of the longer sits that week, I struggled and opened my eyes, breaking my posture for some relief. I noticed a woman sitting more still than I’d ever seen anyone sit before. It was the first time I can remember realizing that stillness exists on a continuum, and I could only guess that her composure was the result of lots of practice—and that she was experiencing deep, pervasive serenity on the inside.

When we broke the silence to share observations and reflections, however, she apologized for distracting others with her restlessness. She told us she’d recently lost her father and was grieving. I couldn’t believe it and had trouble reconciling her subjective report with what I’d observed. It left me with a question I've been playing with ever since: Could it be possible to maintain a high degree of external composure regardless of what the heart and mind are processing?

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Recognizing and tracking your own mental state in real time is a subtle skill—one that takes patience and repeated effort to cultivate. We usually focus on what we’re thinking rather than on how our thinking is put together.

An underappreciated aspect of mindfulness is that it can be practiced to get intimately familiar with the raw ingredients of experience.

Over time, this nudges us away from our constant craving for certainty and into the vibrant, messy complexities of being human.

You can know for certain that a meditator’s mental state will shift from moment to moment.

It’s also safe to assume that their thoughts will be impacted by what came before they sat down to practice, what’s going on around them, and by any emotions they’re feeling. All of these elements tend to be in flux, too.

Try this

When you see someone meditating—whether in person, in a photograph, or in a live online practice session—imagine their mind being full of thoughts.

Instead of wondering what it must be like to not have thoughts, imagine what it would be like to develop skills for responding to whatever arises in your mind and to wrestle less with your thoughts as they play out.

Embrace not knowing. There’s a quiet yet profound freedom—and a doorway to genuine mindfulness—in accepting the mysteries that live within yourself and others.

It isn’t gaining access to hidden answers.

It’s becoming more comfortable living without them.

Note: The header image was inspired by Ann Hamilton's reflection (1999).

1. Some People are Easier to Love

2. Give Humanity More Wiggle Room

3. Our Own Best Enemies

Last week, we explored what happens when we imagine the well-being of people who are easy to love. Friends, family members, mentors, pets, and others whose happiness feels naturally important to us. One of the things I suggested was paying attention to whatever emotional responses arise, rather than treating warm feelings as the goal of the exercise.

This week, I’d like to shift our attention to a different category of people: strangers.

I don’t know what goes on inside most people. That sounds obvious, but I forget it constantly. I’m fascinated by what I can’t know about what makes people tick, and by how little it takes for me to convince myself that I like, dislike, or understand a person I don’t know.

I can spend thirty seconds observing someone in a grocery store, airport, waiting room, or coffee shop and come away with surprisingly strong impressions. I notice how they’re dressed. I catch a fragment of a conversation. I observe an interaction with a cashier or customer service worker. Before long, I find myself dropping them into a bucket of other people they remind me of.

One of the many uncomfortable takeaways from my first silent meditation retreat was how quickly I divided the other meditators into three categories: people I liked, people I had some aversion to, and people I barely noticed. Keep in mind that I made these assignments over several days of not talking at all, mostly sitting in silence together or watching each other walk slowly back and forth across the lawn like people auditioning for a zombie movie or to be welcomed into a cult. What really blew my mind was how much resorting I had to do when we started talking again.

The remarkable thing isn’t that this happens. The remarkable thing is how automatically it happens without our tracking most of it. We’re born storytellers. We’re on the lookout for heroes, villains, and people who don’t warrant our attention at all. We want to understand things we can’t possibly know.

Presented with incomplete information, we fill in the blanks. Sometimes we do this generously. We imagine loving families, meaningful work, interesting hobbies, loyal friends, and personal struggles being navigated with courage.

At other times, we fill in the blanks less generously. We assume selfishness. Carelessness. Entitlement. Ignorance.

The details vary, but the process is remarkably similar. The less information we have, the more imagination we rely on to feel like we know.

One of the reasons I enjoy exercises based on imagining another person’s well-being is that they expose this tendency so clearly.

Try this out in the world without anyone knowing you’re doing it:

1. Pick a person at random.

2. Remind yourself that deep down this person wants to be safe, happy, healthy, and comfortable.

3. Imagine the person thriving. Not because they’ve earned it. Not because you approve of every decision they’ve ever made. Just because they’re human.

4. If possible, temporarily forego policing the person’s appearance and observable behaviors. Let them be different from you, and maybe even shoot for a version of a happy life that doesn’t resemble yours.

5. Remember that deep down you also want. General safety and security. Good health. Connection to other people. A sense of purpose. A little less stress. A little more ease.

6. Notice what happens next. Feel whatever emotional reactions this stirs up for a minute.

If you’re like me, almost immediately, your mind begins generating all sorts of details you don’t have access to. Things about their history, the people in their lives, their job, their mood today, their overall energy level, their baseline honesty or kindness, and their core personality.

The point isn’t that we shouldn’t be curious about strangers. To me, the value of the exercise lies in revealing how much of our experience of other people is shaped by our own imagination. We rarely encounter another person’s full humanity. We encounter fragments and instinctively construct stories around them.

This doesn’t mean our stories are always completely wrong. It just means they’re incomplete. When I’m right, it’s still based on guesswork and quick assumptions.

There is something potentially liberating about recognizing how often we reduce people to fit the categories we’ve developed throughout our lives. The more I practice this exercise, the less interested I become in deciding who deserves basic well-being and the more interested I become in noticing the assumptions I’m carrying around about other people.

Some assumptions create closeness. Others create distance. Many operate completely outside of awareness. What I find most useful isn’t replacing negative stories with positive ones. It’s creating a little more space around all of them.

A little more uncertainty. A little more curiosity. A little more wiggle room.

The goal isn’t to become naïve. It’s to unhook our behavior from the snap judgments we mistake for reality.

The goal is to remember how little information we usually work with to simplify life’s complexity — especially the social aspects of our daily lives.

When we do that, it becomes easier to recognize the humanity we share with people whose lives intersect only briefly with our own. We might start to make room for nuance and even contradictions that aren’t up to us to resolve. We might even notice that the narratives we automatically project onto others reveal more about ourselves than about the strangers.

Here are a few tips I’ve found helpful when I practice this one.

Save the Drama for Your Mama

Imagining the well-being of strangers can feel much less personal and therefore less intense than imagining the well-being of the other categories of people used in this heart practice. Remember to practice letting emotional neutrality be a valid response.

The Benefit of Ignorance

One thing that can make loving-kindness difficult is confusing being able to recognize our shared humanity with condoning specific behaviors or opinions that conflict with our own values. When you find it easier to imagine the well-being of some strangers, could it be at least partly about not knowing enough about them? This also points to something about more difficult people — and often ourselves: we know too much. When you find it more difficult, the stranger probably belongs in the category with challenging people.

Gathering Clues from Strangers

It can be easy to imagine the well-being of people we know the least about. We let them laugh. We give them families. We decorate their homes. Consider how effortlessly we fill in such details. Could we do the same when it comes to the people who are very familiar to us, but we have a difficult time distinguishing fiction from fact when our feelings are stronger, and their lives overlap more directly with our own?

This week’s exercise explores these possibilities.

What happens when you ease up on assuming you already know who someone is and become curious about the many ways their humanity might be expressed in ways that are unobservable by you? Could becoming more aware of the storytelling you do undermine the degree to which you rely on it by default?

Exercise

This exercise lets you watch your imagination at work when you consider the well-being of people you don’t know.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Shopping in a grocery store

• Waiting in a long, slow line

• Driving on the highway

• Navigating air travel

Read more

1. Some People are Easier to Love

2. Give Humanity More Wiggle Room

3. Our Own Best Enemies

Mindfulness is commonly associated with developing focus and relaxation, but there are many related practices designed to nurture other valuable qualities, such as empathy and gratitude. Some of these exercises can feel like an effort to force feelings rather than preparing the ground for them to emerge naturally. It’s a common experience. Many people give up when their emotions don’t match what the teachers describe.

Over time, I’ve adapted traditional exercises to better suit my personality, and I encourage others to do the same. For instance, rather than trying to radiate love from my heart, I focus on stoking my curiosity about the feelings that arise as I picture the people I care about thriving. Of course, if you’re able to beam love out into the world from your chest, please keep doing it. Some of us just need other ways to get into the project.

I discovered loving-kindness practice more than twenty years ago, while training for my first marathon and preparing for my first silent meditation retreat. You could say I was trying to emotionally reboot. After a decade as a social worker, I realized how little I had left to give those I was supposed to help, and how little satisfaction I was getting from trying. Have you tried turning it off and then back on again?

Professional helpers would probably call what I experienced burnout. From my perspective, however, it seemed more like holding myself to the same elusive goal I had so often tried to convince my clients to pursue: gaining insight into the inner stuff that was leaving me feeling empty and defeated. Whatever you want to call it, it was clear I needed to change how I was approaching my life.

I learned a traditional version of loving-kindness by listening to Sharon Salzberg’s audiobook.1 The instructions guided me to imagine the well-being of myself and others—starting with myself, then my supporters and those who loved me unconditionally, followed by close friends and family, acquaintances, and eventually the difficult people in my life.

As my running mileage increased, I used those long stretches to picture the safety, health, and happiness of various people. It was pleasant—and I quickly noticed that some people are simply easier to imagine thriving. This practice made the miles go by more smoothly, providing a welcome distraction from the constant urge to stop running.

But I also noticed that many of the emotional responses generated by the exercises weren’t necessarily pleasant. Imagining the well-being of someone who had died or was no longer in my life made me feel sad. Acknowledging that some of the people I care about most won’t be around forever made me feel joy, tempered by an unpleasant pang of inevitable grief. Some people sparked smiles and even laughter on some days, but very little emotionality on others. Was a flat emotional response a sign I was doing something wrong?

With so much time to reflect, I experimented widely—eventually settling on a customized approach that truly fits the contours of my emotional experience, even if it doesn’t perfectly align with traditional instructions. The key difference is that, for me, loving-kindness is no longer about trying to generate warmth on command. It’s about reconnecting with our shared humanity—a deep sense of relatedness that’s easy to overlook in the rush of daily life.

Rather than trying to micromanage other people’s safety and happiness from within my own mind and body, I like to sit with the complicated reality that, beneath our many differences, we all crave the same basic things: safety, health, vitality, connection, and ease. We really are in these challenges together, whether we remember to acknowledge it or not.

Instead of forcing loving feelings, I use the practice to notice how love unpredictably surfaces in my body as I contemplate the well-being of others—and myself. The results aren’t always pleasant or easy to describe, but they feel more genuine and more alive. I remind myself to feel whatever arises, rather than trying to manufacture a particular experience.

This approach works best when I let my emotional responses unfold naturally, without forcing them to match any preconceived idea of what love should feel like.

I try to attribute equal significance to four distinct feeling tones that might arise:

• pleasant

• unpleasant

• mixed

• neutral

This takes practice. We instinctively misread unpleasant feelings and emotional neutrality as being out of bounds. What if love turns out to be more complicated than we imagined when we were younger?

Here are three tips I’ve found helpful. Maybe you will, too. I’ll share more tips like these in the coming weeks as we explore how to imagine the well-being of people who are a little or a lot less easy to love.

Start Where You Can

Personalize this practice by starting with any category of people that feels natural to you. This flexible approach works for any mindfulness or attentional exercise. If you don’t practice, you can’t experience the results. So do what you need to do to nudge yourself to keep showing up. The benefits will eventually inspire you to continue.

Get creative and stay curious

The more frequently you explore this, the more sense it makes. Especially when it comes to the people you care about the most. Over time, you begin to notice subtleties and shifts in your emotions, without feeling the need to turn every variation into a problem. There’s a certain freedom in having a neutral reaction to someone you love, rather than feeling guilty if today’s feelings aren’t as intense as they were yesterday.

Ignore the Censors

Feel free to tailor the imagined well-being of the beloved, imperfect people in your life based on what you know makes them happy. Let your best friends and supportive family members smoke, read romance novels, and eat French fries in your mind. They won’t suffer the consequences of any behaviors you imagine them indulging. I promise. Instead of policing what makes the imagined activities of other people happy, savor your actual responses to their happiness in your own body.

Today’s exercise is designed to set the stage for exactly this kind of invaluable inner experimentation.

What might shift if you stop grading yourself by the amount of warmth you feel, and instead simply notice whatever arises—without evaluation?

Exercise

This exercise invites you to cultivate affectionate feelings and immerse yourself in their rich, nuanced complexity.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• When you’re the only one awake in the house

• Over coffee or breakfast

• As you settle into bed

Read more

Mindfulness can sound like just one more unforgiving task on your self-care to-do list, one that doesn’t seem worth the effort. One of the trickiest parts of talking or writing about mindfulness practice is making it sound doable and something you’d actually want to do. Not just once, but regularly, in the midst of real life, with people who need you, deadlines creeping up on you, and distractions coming at you from every direction. It’s a tough sell.

The problem isn’t the practice itself but the ideas most of us hold about how it’s supposed to go. The role model we picture is a monk, or at least someone who resembles one, sitting in a serene place, eyes closed and mind quiet. That image’s appeal also creates unrealistic expectations: its simplicity, silence, and absence of daily realities. Although monasteries support transformation, if you don’t plan to live in one, trying to practice like a monk may actually get in your way.

What I find more useful — and more realistic — is the opposite: practicing like a secret agent.

A secret agent is embedded in the real world, surrounded by noise, juggling demands, and navigating interruptions, boredom, and other people—none of whom are aware of what she’s quietly working on. What the secret agent is actually doing is habitually making small, invisible shifts in her attention. Not removing herself from the scene, but choosing, on purpose, to pay closer attention to what’s already there while managing her composure from the inside.

That’s what my practice looks like from the outside. A person loading the dishwasher, picking up the grandkids from preschool, and running errands. Nothing unusual to see. Nothing special or dramatic that anyone around me would stop to notice. What’s invisible to anyone watching me live my life are the frequent shifts inside: from the internal stream of remembering, planning, evaluating, and problem-solving that fills an ordinary day to the direct experience of what I can see, hear, and feel in my body. When I make those shifts, there’s no audience to track them, because they’re unobservable to anyone but me.

I want people to know that this seemingly strange hobby is available to them, too—no need for a quiet mind, a perfectly comfortable body, or a sense of calm to feel like you’re doing something important. Cultivating mindful awareness means working with what you have, wherever you are, at any moment.

Here’s what I think is most misunderstood, especially among people who’ve tried to meditate and quietly given up. The instruction to “return to your breath”—or whatever the focus object is—is often taken as a command to clear the mental field. Without meaning to, this formula turns every thought into an intruder trying to crash your peaceful party. You notice a thought, escort it out, and return. Over and over, you repeat this pattern: notice a thought, show it the door, return to the sensations of breathing.

Before long, this constant monitoring consumes your time and attention. You end up feeling like a bouncer at the door of your own mind, increasingly irritated by the intruder who never seems to get the message. That’s an exhausting way to practice. It misses something important, making it unsustainable. The goal is to be a warm host, not a frustrated security guard. You practice attending to one visitor for a while instead of micromanaging the others.

Thinking doesn’t have to stop. Ambient mental sounds don’t have to be silenced. They’re inevitable. Trying to turn them off only makes them louder. You can learn to let them recede into the background instead. You already know how to do this. In fact, you do it every time you drive, run, or take a walk while listening to a podcast. Your attention is on the road and the conversation, navigating both at once. You’re not eliminating either. You’re giving one stream a little more weight while letting the other recede, just slightly, into the background.

That’s the skill. And it’s more both/and than either/or.

Whether you’re meditating or practicing in the middle of ordinary life, you don’t need to micromanage your thoughts or feelings. You can be aware that your mind is processing something while still giving a bit more attention to what you can directly sense through your eyes, ears, or body. You don’t always need to steer your awareness away from every spontaneous thought. You can practice making room for what’s happening in and around you to live more comfortably together.

The subtlety is exactly what makes it hard to explain. What we’re talking about is so normal, so embedded in capacities you already have, that describing it can make it sound more exotic than it is. The thing that makes it feel special, when it does, is realizing it’s just a human skill that responds to practice in ways you’ll never fully appreciate until it becomes habitual. The more often you intentionally make attentional shifts, the more often you’ll feel more alive and with less internal friction. Not exempt from discomfort or uncertainty. Not floating above the difficulties of being human. But a little less prone to making uncomfortable moments significantly worse than they already are, and a little more capable of enjoying the pleasant ones at a deeper level.

The practice I’m describing has no audience. From the outside, it looks like nothing. There’s nothing to see. You can do it while waiting for the dentist, unloading the dishwasher, watering houseplants, or sitting in traffic.

It doesn’t require silence. It doesn’t require stillness. It doesn’t even require you to believe it’s working. Do you need to believe that three sets of ten push-ups, performed four or five times a week, will change your body composition?

It simply requires that you try, in small doses, to give a little more weight to what’s actually here — and a little less to the insistence that things need to be different from what they are — more often than never.

That’s the ongoing invitation you can always return to whenever you remember it.

Exercise

This exercise invites you to make room for the thoughts and sensations that arise as you listen. It acknowledges the mind’s natural activity, making mindfulness more accessible and grounded in everyday life.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Libraries, bookstores, and coffee shops

• Waiting rooms, grocery stores, and

• Park benches, museums, and couches

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Every seasoned meditator knows that insights from a recent retreat will make you wince next year. Sometimes it takes less time.

Not Thirsty

Before they become teachers, they’re just succulents simmering in the desert. The small ones who live indoors don’t need much water. The homely brown one doesn’t appear to want any. I wipe muddy streaks from the wall with paper towels before anyone notices. I use the hose outside, and try not to get tangled up in the hills burning across the valley. The only precipitation on the horizon drops from planes. I drizzle indiscriminately. The varieties of thirst scattered around here reveal themselves slowly. On the last day, I offer even fewer drops to the one who taunted me three mornings before. In my rush to redirect the immediate overflow, the prickly friend sitting beside him bites my hand.

no rain on the way
still the smallest succulent
spills over again

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The Artemis II astronauts have gotten a ton of questions from people around the world who are stuck here, with our feet on the ground. One of my favorite exchanges came when The Daily collected children’s questions and played them for the crew, giving the astronauts a chance to respond directly to young voices from across the planet.

The bulk of their inquiries understandably had to do with bodily functions, but Leonardo from New York City asked the crew this beautiful question:

“Is there gravity in your dreams?”

Whether he eventually chooses to become an astrophysicist or not, I hope he continues to nurture his inner poet, remaining curious about what the body might carry into other areas of life, especially those that go beyond the constraints of physics.

Christina Koch responded first, saying, “I think we all dreamed that we were floating at different times. And one really neat thing that happened, I think, to all of us was, when we got back and woke up in our beds at home, we all felt like we were floating for a little while.”

Reid Wiseman added, “Do you ever wake up in, like, a hotel room, and you have to take a few seconds to figure out where you are? Even in my bed at home, I would wake up and look for the displays. I’m like, Oh, wait, where am I? Oh, I’m at home. I’m under gravity. I’m safe.”

They’re both pointing us back to the relatable facts of life on earth. Anyone who’s spent days at sea knows the body learns the ocean’s rhythm, and land feels unfamiliar when you return. That lingering sway is proof that our bodies carry the signatures of every environment we inhabit.

I’ve noticed something similar that happens during extended periods of intensive practice, like what you experience during silent meditation retreats, but it can also happen when you set up similar constraints around your house for the weekend — simplifying your schedule, taking a couple of days off from consuming information and performing your identity. With a bit of practice momentum, something interesting starts to show up in my body as I’m falling asleep and waking up. I notice wavy, undulatory sensations in my body, probably a heightened awareness of the typically subtle bodily functions like circulation and temperature regulation. It feels similar to the phenomenon of getting my sea legs, but it’s as if my whole body is flickering like a flame.

As my ability to focus becomes stronger and more flexible, and a kind of sensory composure deepens, I start to notice nuanced, satisfying sensations I usually miss. Internal friction eases up, and everything sharpens. Colors brighten, the rain sounds musical, and the slightest breeze dances deliciously across my skin.

Meditation doesn’t create exotic experiences. It reveals aspects of experience that were present all along, but in sharper relief.

We don’t need to travel to space or live on a boat to discover how profound the subtle details of our experience can feel. Sometimes a few days of sustained attention are enough to make the body feel unexpectedly alive—and to remind us that the subtle dimensions of experience, the elements of the universe and nature we’re part of, have been right here all along.

Subtle sensations are always in the background. While most of them will never demand your attention, they respond to it. That responsiveness can be cultivated to better reveal what’s already there.

The goal of today’s practice is to notice the quiet, often-overlooked sensations that become observable and surprisingly satisfying when we stop demanding that experience be dramatic.

If my practical, down-to-earth approach to mindfulness resonates with you but you’re not ready to subscribe just yet, you can still show your support with a one-time tip on Buy Me a Coffee. Every gesture of encouragement is appreciated, including likes and shares of the posts you enjoy.

Exercise

This exercise offers a simple, practical way to carry the grounded awareness of sitting meditation into everyday movement, helping you cultivate mindfulness throughout your day. I’ve taken inspiration and used a few direct phrases from “The Small Dance” by Steve Paxton.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Standing in line

• Taking a shower

• Before going for a walk

• After returning from a walk

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1. Feel Change

2. Hear Change

3. See Change

4. Go with the Observable Flow

Cultivating mindful awareness requires forgoing narrative constraints to cultivate a direct, intimate relationship with being alive. When we connect with the important people in our lives, we share details about conflict, difficult people, and yearning for unpleasant circumstances to change—the basic elements of drama and narrative. But practicing mindfulness doesn’t require villains, though we instinctively go looking for them. The usual suspects are our minds, our emotions, or any unpleasant sensation.

I opened this month’s Mindful Monday for Kent State University by inviting participants to share sensory experiences since last month’s session. The word cloud bloomed with sensory details: cobalt-blue skies, morning coffee sipped outside, birds chirping, gentle breezes, and brisk winds. This spontaneous report consisted of raw sensory data, so it read more like poetry. In this context, even itches, aches, and sadness are framed as perceptions to be witnessed rather than as problems to be solved.

One person shared “observing without controlling,” which describes the underlying stance of mindfully experiencing the present as it unfolds. With a bit of practice—less than most people assume—observing without controlling leads to the detection of a fundamental theme that’s a hallmark of all contemplative traditions and practices: impermanence.

The priestly classes within our wisdom traditions have inflated this theme into a philosophical, mystical perspective reserved for a chosen few, but the part of me shaped by Baptist roots rejects that, and my experience of Vipassana meditation tells me it’s available to anyone willing to test their own senses. Habitually paying closer attention to ordinary sensations turns out to be a kind of baptism that can transform your awareness of ordinary phenomena into a phenomenal awareness.

Impermanence operates at every imaginable scale. It stretches from grand geological ages and historical epochs down to the personal rhythms of life stages, seasons, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes. Each level reveals something about the nature of time and awareness. But when we zoom in to the handful of seconds unfolding right now, we develop a rare intimacy with impermanence—one that forms the root of all other scales.

This matters because in looking, listening, and feeling for observable change, we meet parts of ourselves we tend to overlook. There’s a deeply ingrained habit of interfering with whatever is happening, regardless of whether we can actually influence it. Again and again, we confront the urge to micromanage our experience—to fix, tweak, or escape what we notice. In doing so, we often stifle both the discomforts we wish to avoid and the pleasures we hope to preserve.

With practice, you start to spot the gap between what’s happening and what you wish were happening. Children meet the world with fluidity and presence, but adulthood brings a subtle friction—a constant sense that moments should be different from what they are.

To be clear, even after years of directly noticing this dynamic, I’m far from immune to the undertow of its power. While I don’t expect to ever fully outgrow it, I’m committed to spending a little time each day developing attentional skills that gradually erode it. When the friction does ease, life feels more vibrant and alive in ways I couldn’t have predicted before living it for myself. Those moments are hard to put into words, but they’re unmistakable when they arrive.

Once, walking beside a creek, I devoted a significant amount of time to really listening to the raw sensory details—to the splash of water, the sound of my footsteps, and the subtle emotional reactions in my boy. As my focus deepened and I let go of internal interference, the ordinary sounds became astonishingly musical, and my body responded with vivid feelings too nuanced for words. I was so absorbed that the internal micromanager fell asleep, replaced by a visceral awareness of the ancient, universal urge to make music. I realized that I shared the same basic physiology as anyone who ever tried to evoke emotion through music. We all do. We are capable of being comforted and moved, and we want to pass this one. Long before language, mothers hummed lullabies to restless infants; tribes marked sacred moments with rhythm. From ancient times to Beethoven to Sondheim, the musicality in the rushing water and birdsong connected me to every human urge to make music.

Another time, I spent 48 hours alone during a much longer silent canoeing and camping meditation trip in Utah (which was even less fun than it might sound, but also sprinkled with profound moments). I went into those two solo retreat days expecting undisturbed practice surrounded by vast red canyon walls and sleeping under the stars. What I got was a tidal wave of grief the moment I sat down to meditate. My daughter had recently driven off in a U-Haul to start grad school in Chicago, after years of living close by, even throughout college at Ohio State. Raising her has been the most fulfilling experience of my life. I wasn’t ready for this chapter to end, or to admit it already had. Who am I when I’m not caring for someone, when the job quietly transfers into their hands?

Unwillingly, I found myself practicing what can only be called sobbing meditation. It was excruciating—my body, mind, and heart all led with resistance. If it were up to me, I would never have chosen to face this emotional pain at that time. I would have distracted myself or comforted myself with denial. I didn’t want an empty nest or the grief of her successful individuation. I wanted to control the narrative, but what I got was catharsis—the kind of healing that stings while it soothes. That wave of relief made me understand, in my bones, why we make myths and hymns, why we reach for rituals to honor the sacred, fleeting, unrepeatable moments of joy and sorrow life weaves together.

Instead of trying to quiet my mind during those two days, though, I allowed it to play with words and images in whatever way it wanted, and tried to fold them into the flow of what I was trying not to impede. I walked out of the canyon with this poem:

Instincts
by Daron Larson

​There is great comfort
in losing a child
to her own adult life,
naturally,

and yet —

​a little girl is still gone

leaving me to tend
this yearning to nurture
a fragile beginning
toward its gradual

sudden blooming.

Experiences like these remind me that when we scale down to ride the sensory ripples of the present, we tap into the emotional and artistic impulses that live in all of us. It doesn’t matter if it comes out as laughter, tears, singing, dancing, gardening, or making dinner.

Actually allowing myself to feel what’s happening, instead of narrating or fixing it, is both harder and more necessary than I ever imagined. Giving up the illusion of control brings a jolt of vitality—not always pleasant, but always vivid. It’s the same aliveness that fuels our best art, our worst heartbreaks, our laughter, our poetry, our tragedies, and even that one perfect haiku where impermanence glimmers between the lines.

Our distracted, numbed-out, algorithm-driven culture discourages the urge to turn feelings into art—art that doesn’t need an audience. Authentic self-expression now competes with personal branding, reality TV, and the transformation of daily life into advertising.

So, instead of trying to fix the world, start to free yourself in small ways when you can. Give yourself a daily pocket of time—no one can do this for you—where you witness the ordinary, the overlooked, the mundane details that accumulate and make you feel alive. These are the same sparks that have fueled human creativity since the beginning of humanity.

You don’t need to rocket around the moon to taste the universe’s vastness. It’s right here, woven into every ordinary moment, waiting for you to notice.

Practice scaling down: notice the subtle changes unfolding within a handful of seconds. Let them take you where you need to go—break your heart open, stitch it together again, and help you spot the humanity shining behind every face you meet.

Exercise

This exercise helps you tune in to the subtle shifts in your body and the world around you—those small changes in sensation, sight, and sound that are easy to miss but rich with aliveness.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Junior high music recitals

• Movie theaters

• Weekend mornings

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1. Feel Change

2. Hear Change

3. See Change

4. Go with the Sensory Flow

In July 2021, Bob Odenkirk’s heart stopped for 18 seconds while filming Better Call Saul. He talked about it on the Wild Card podcast recently, saying it didn’t actually feel emotionally traumatic.

As he slowly woke up over the next week, he felt a lingering sense of joy and appreciation for life. The world seemed “pretty magical and beautiful and astounding. A marvel to look at and be in.” When that feeling started to fade, he told himself:

“I have to remember this. I have to try to live this way. I have to try to be this, see the world this way.

This ends.”

I’ve been lucky to have moments like the one he described, though nothing as dramatic as surviving a heart attack. Silent meditation retreats can help you face your own mortality and deepen your appreciation for the simple wonder of being alive. These memories tend to stick with you.

I remember being three days into a retreat in California when the internal friction and noise of daily life started to quiet, letting something new in. The orange trees looked more alive, and I could really feel the breeze on my skin. The colors and textures of the sky, clouds, and ocean all seemed richer and more vibrant than before. My thoughts and worries felt lighter and less consequential.

Something had flipped. My perspective shifted, and I saw, heard, and felt everything differently than just a few minutes earlier. It wasn’t like looking through a magical filter. In fact, it felt like the opposite of special. Natural. The shift instantly affected all my senses and perceptions, as well as the rich complexity of their combined parts. I’d experienced this inverted perspective before through similar contemplative efforts, so it felt both foreign and familiar. Relief that comes from setting down something heavy you’ve grown used to carrying, or coming up for air after being underwater for too long. Completely ordinary, yet lighter and more alive. Surprised by embodied joy rather than imagined joy.

It wasn’t like falling into a dream. It was more like waking up from a trance.

Meditation wasn’t adding something new that I’d been missing. Instead, it slowly took away something I hadn’t noticed until it fell away. Day-to-day life had actually been the altered state. Becoming more aware of ordinary sights, sounds, and sensations felt like returning to normal — an unaltered state. Realizing this made me want to send a message in a bottle to my future self, the one who would likely fall back under the old spell again.

When I got home, I searched for the perfect bottle, and eventually found an amber one with a cork. But even after all these years, I still haven’t figured out what to write on the note to put inside it. Maybe what I need the everyday me to remember can’t really be put into words. So the bottle sits empty in my room, reminding me of something I once understood more viscerally than I can fully explain to myself now.

What strikes me now is how this lesson keeps coming back in different disguises. On that retreat, it arrived through stillness and steady practice — something I have to carve out deliberately by stepping away from my ordinary routine. A couple of weeks ago, it arrived in the middle of a downpour.

I was out on a walk with my grandchildren — Frankie on his bike, Quinn walking alongside me, her attention perpetually pulled to pebbles, weeds, and cracks in the sidewalk — when the sky just opened up. Frankie started crying in that desperate, unglued way little kids can get when the world suddenly feels like it’s attacking you. A reaction many adults, understandably, never fully outgrow.” And yet the whole thing felt so alive to me in a remarkably pleasant and ordinary way. Frankie raced home ahead of us as I scooped up Quinn, and we walked through it laughing. I said: “It’s okay. It’s just water. It’s like taking a shower with your clothes on.” And, even though Frankie couldn’t hear my words and Quinnie is too little to comprehend them, we really were okay. Better than okay. Soaked, but a little more alive than we’d been when we’d left the house.

That’s the strange thing about these kinds of moments. They don’t require a near-death experience or a ten-day meditation retreat. Sometimes they arrive unexpectedly, drenching us, with a crying six-year-old, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The quality of aliveness that Odenkirk is describing — that I spent three days paying closer attention in a simplified environment to touch — fell on us right there on the sidewalk by a garden-variety shift in the weather.

The body seems to know how to make this subtle yet significant shift into feeling less trapped by life and more alive in the messy midst of living. We just can’t force ourselves there on demand. But we can familiarize ourselves with it, little by little, over time. We can stop searching for exits and learn to spot quiet invitations to dive into the ordinary sensory details that are always on hand.

During a recent webinar about sneaking mindful awareness into daily life, someone asked what paying attention to ordinary sensations actually does — what it translates to in real life. My first answer was: a richer experience of being alive, especially in ordinary moments. The longer answer is that it also trains something. The ability to toggle back from the narrative running in your head to the raw, immediate living data of what’s happening right now. That capacity — practiced in small, unremarkable moments — is what shows up when it counts. At the extremes: crisis, grief, overwhelming joy. And also, sometimes, in the spring rain.

The visual field is a good place to practice this because it’s always moving and we almost never notice it. Branches sway. Light shifts. Trucks drive by. Whatever we’re looking at is also, if we let it, an ordinary-extraordinary phenomenon we start seeing through.

In today’s exercise, that’s what we’re exploring. Not staring hard to understand. Just seeing — and noticing what changes.

Exercise

This exercise helps you get better at noticing changes and movement in the sights around you. You can adjust this exercise to fit any situation. I encourage you to try it in different places—outside, looking out a window, on vacation, or when you return home.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Sitting on a park bench

• Taking a walk at magic hour

• Sitting at the gate waiting for your flight to board

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1. Feel Change

2. Hear Change

3. See Change

4. Go with the Observable Flow

Mindfulness practice isn’t self-help. We don’t call going to the gym self-help. Physical exercise develops physical capacities — strength, endurance, and flexibility. Attention exercises develop attentional capacities — flexible focus, perceptual clarity, and responsive composure. What this practice builds, over time, is attentional fitness.

The distinction matters more than it might seem. Self-help implies something broken that needs fixing. Fitness implies an innate capacity that becomes stronger when we challenge it. And like physical fitness, attentional fitness requires regular practice, tends to slip when life gets busy, and is easy to defer—not because we don’t value it, but because it’s simply easier not to do it. The consequences of not exercising eventually catch up with us, quietly, in ways we might not immediately connect to the neglect.

Most of us have learned, at least intellectually, that a hard workout is still a good workout. We don’t write off strength training just because our muscles were burning, or abandon a run because a particular run felt labored and slow. We understand that discomfort during exercise is evidence of the exercise working. We even take inspiration from watching other people develop strength or endurance over time because those changes are visible — we can see, measure, and point to them.

Attentional fitness doesn’t offer us that same feedback. Progress here is mostly invisible from the outside. You can’t watch someone become more present. You can’t easily measure the growing ease with which a person meets difficulty, or the gradual softening of their internal relationship with themselves. Occasionally, we see indirect evidence — someone who used to fall apart during public speaking developing quiet composure over time, which we can trace back to practice — but these moments are rare and ambiguous. Most of what you get from this work unfolds quietly, on the inside—sometimes you only realize it’s happened after the fact.

This is one reason we tend to be harder on ourselves about meditation than about the gym. When we feel distracted during practice, we take it as evidence of failure — proof that we’re doing it wrong, or that we’re simply not built for this. The mindfulness industry hasn’t helped. When inner calm and relaxation become the advertised product, distraction starts to look like a defect, when really it’s closer to the burn in your legs on a steep hill. It’s not a sign that something has gone wrong. It’s often a sign that something is happening.

There’s a third layer worth naming. Mindfulness practice has a way of functioning as a mirror. It reflects back the emotional tone of your relationship with yourself — the quality of the internal intimacy you have with simply being alive. That’s not something you can observe in someone else, and it has a quiet, unspectacular quality that nonetheless shapes how you relate to everything and everyone. When the mirror shows you impatience, or restlessness, or self-criticism, the instinct is to look away. But looking, with some gentleness, is the practice.

A few years ago, I led a retreat where construction noise made it nearly impossible to focus on anything else on the first day, so we made listening to the uninvited sounds the focus of our practice. When the builders didn’t return the next day, several participants said the silence was harder to navigate than the persistent noise the day before, that they’d come to hear as almost musical. This isn't a trick or a hack. It’s what happens when resistance softens, and attention becomes genuinely curious about what’s actually here.

That’s the invitation in the exercise below. Let the soundscape — including the sound of your own thinking — be workable material rather than interference. Whatever shows up is the practice. As John Cage1 put it: “When you listen deeply, everything is music.”

Exercise

This exercise helps you get better at noticing how sound shifts and moves—making the ever-changing texture of your environment more vivid and alive.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Waking up in the morning

• Stepping away for a mental break in the middle of the day

• Transitioning into your evening or getting ready for bed

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1. Feel Change

2. Hear Change

3. See Change

4. Go with the Observable Flow

About five minutes into a mindfulness exercise, a familiar pattern often shows up.

People start to notice discomfort — tightness in the shoulders, pressure in the lower back, restlessness in the legs. Understandably, they almost immediately dive into analyzing it as a problem to solve or interpreting it as evidence that they’re doing something wrong:

• I thought this was supposed to be relaxing.

• Why is this making me feel restless?

• Was that itch there before I started meditating?

• Should I scratch it or not?

These reactions make sense. Most of us experience the body as if it’s stable and solid. A sore back feels like a single, unmoving problem. Tension feels stagnant. Pain feels inert.

But when you slow down and look — or feel — more closely, something different starts to emerge.

What you call “tension” or “discomfort” isn’t actually one unchanging sensation. It’s a collection of sensations — pulsing, pressure, warmth, subtle vibration — that are constantly shifting. Some elements intensify. Others fade. Some disappear entirely, replaced by new ones.

The experience isn’t static. It’s active. It might be subtle, but change is occurring.

This is the first step in noticing impermanence in real time. Not as an idea, but as something you can observe directly.

If this approach appeals to you, it’s worth remembering: giving your body permission to feel what it feels isn’t just about comfort. It’s about welcoming a handful of possibilities, some more approachable than others:

• Comfortable sensations that well up and spread

• Comfortable sensations that subside

• Uncomfortable sensations that intensify

• Uncomfortable sensations that weaken and fade away

Treat this like the long game it is, and practice meeting all four possibilities with as much hospitality as you can muster—even if sometimes that hospitality is in short supply. Learn to give yourself grace when you simply don’t have the willingness to allow a sensation. Paradoxically, letting your best effort be enough (even when it feels like not much) is what builds the patience to greet an ever-wider range of dynamic sensations over time.

Sometimes when I’m meditating, I get a charley horse in one of my calves. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it can be excruciating. My first instinct was always to fight it — brace, stretch, pinch my upper lip. None of those things helped.

A clever teacher who I’d come to trust over the years1 recommended something that sounded like a terrible idea: observe the pain as a temporary sensation, and try to meet it with equanimity2 — a neutral response — as it built toward its peak.

At first, I hesitated to follow this guidance. Most of the time it came up, I couldn’t bring myself to try it. But whenever I did, I discovered something invaluable that I still rely on today.

The first thing I noticed was that jumping in as early in the process was key. If I could meet the sensation right as it arrived, before I’d already started bracing against it, it changed the whole trajectory. It still hurt. But whatever misery came with it felt significantly less amplified.

The second thing I noticed was the impact of how much acceptance I could muster when I spotted it. Rather than a cognitive or conceptual acceptance, this variety of acceptance happens at the sensory level. It’s visceral. It’s not about condoning the discomfort or focusing on its cause. It’s getting out of the way so my body can calibrate its ability to process something with less internal friction.

At first, my immediate reaction was always, “Not you again!”

Then, leveraging reluctant curiosity more than courage, it was sometimes, “Okay…show me what you’ve got?”

Eventually, it would be closer to, “Oh, hell, I know you — come on in. Let’s do this!”

The progression was never linear, but the sooner I could offer even reluctant hospitality, the less problematic the encounter became.

And then came the surprise I never expected. If I could stay with the pain all the way to its peak, without fighting it, the relief as it faded was genuinely pleasant—almost like a gentle massage. It wasn’t just the absence of pain, but a sensation that felt surprisingly good in its own right. Most people never get to experience this, simply because it’s so counterintuitive to let go of resistance to pain. Without a trusted, experienced teacher pointing out that this is even an option, why would you ever try?

While mindfulness doesn’t eliminate pain, it can change how it plays out.

And here’s where things really get interesting.

The goal isn’t to get rid of discomfort. The goal is to see what each instance of discomfort is actually made of. Because when you look closely — really closely — even the most stubborn sensation is not as solid as it first appears.

And whether people realize it or not, this same kind of sensory clarity and body-level acceptance also makes pleasant sensations feel richer and more alive.

For some reason, it’s easier to have equanimity with something that’s moving. This is true with relaxation, humor, gratitude, and peace, but it’s also true even when sensations don’t feel good. And allowing a sensation to feel solid sets the stage for it to reveal dynamic qualities lurking behind its stable facade.

That’s what the exercise below is meant to help you discover for yourself. Start with pleasant sensations—no need to wait for discomfort—to build the skill of noticing change. As you get familiar with these subtle shifts, you’ll be better prepared to meet mild or even intense discomfort when it arises. Take your time. This isn’t about bracing against what you don’t like just to get it over with. It’s about learning a new way to relate to any sensation your body can feel. The real surprise? Even the most ordinary sensation can become a doorway to something rich, satisfying, and unexpected.

If my practical, down-to-earth approach to mindfulness resonates with you but you’re not ready to subscribe just yet, you can still show your support with a one-time tip on Buy Me a Coffee. Every gesture of encouragement is appreciated, including likes and shares of the posts you enjoy.

Exercise

This exercise sharpens your ability to detect dynamic body sensations.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Standing in line

• During a conversation

• Watching videos, movies, or television

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We’re all going to die, and when it happens, we’ll be in the middle of something—a season, a month, a week, a day.

We’ll make our exit right in the middle of a news cycle. This is inevitable. We won’t have the chance to see how everything turns out. We’ll leave this world with unresolved conflicts and unfinished business. There will always be people we never properly thanked, and we won’t get to confront everyone who hurt or disappointed us.

And yet — this is the part that really gets my contemplative juices flowing — when a loved one finally gives someone at the end of their life permission to let go, they seem to instinctively understand how to do it. They let go naturally.

You’ve likely heard about this phenomenon. Maybe you’ve even witnessed it. A person nearing the end of their life continues to fight, clinging on long after it seems practical to do so. Then, a loved one leans in and softly says, “It’s okay. You don’t have to keep fighting. We love you. We understand you’re tired. While we don’t want you to leave, it’s perfectly alright for you to go when you’re ready.” And then, quietly, they do—often with a kind of grace that those watching describe as peaceful and even comforting.

I think about this a lot. Not the dying, but the persistent releasable grip against whatever we don’t want to be happening. We are all walking around with some degree of gripping all of the time, whether we realize it or not. It’s a grip that signals the gap between what’s happening at any given moment and what we’d prefer were happening instead.

By default, most of us need things to be reasonably comfortable and settled before we allow ourselves to relax. This means we spend a lot of time waiting to unwind at some vague future time. We hold tightly to how things should have gone, how someone should have behaved, and how we’d like circumstances to arrange themselves before we can finally relax into our lives.

The most challenging situations for practicing this are when I’m sick or recovering from an injury. As with visiting difficult family members, I’m okay for a day or two, but then I start to wrestle with the part that’s outside my control: the unknowable amount of time it will take for the symptoms—physical or emotional—to run their course. Instead of pretending I’m okay with being uncomfortable, I practice noticing what the discomfort actually feels like to ease my resistance. I know it may not sound helpful, but it’s something you have to test for yourself.

Practicing mindfulness keeps teaching me this lesson: you don’t have to wait for ideal conditions to practice loosening your internal grip. In fact, waiting for conditions to be right is itself a form of gripping.

From the outside, mindfulness practice can seem abstract, even trivial. Who doesn’t know how to see what’s in front of their eyes, hear sounds around them, or notice that they’re breathing? But it’s actually a tangible way to develop what I’d call greater intimacy with being alive—different from relaxation, and more durable than a good mood. It includes the uncomfortable moments, the unresolved ones, and those that might never be resolved. I’m not talking about performing peace, but about developing attentional skills that help us meet whatever is present with a little less resistance.

Most guidance in this space sounds like an instruction to force yourself into a state you don’t naturally inhabit: Be grateful. Be peaceful. Let it go. The implicit message is that discomfort or uncertainty can be easily shucked off without practice. But the gap between what you’re feeling and what spiritual influencers claim you’re supposed to feel can become just one more source of internal friction. What actually helps is almost the opposite—getting genuinely curious about what’s already here: the tension, the uncertainty, whatever you’re quietly gripping.

Raising children has a way of helping us spot when we wish the present were unfolding differently. I’ve got plenty of examples of practicing this when my daughter was a teenager, but now I’m learning to explore it when I spend time with my grandchildren. It comes up when my grandson acts disappointed by a meal I prepared for him, is underwhelmed by a gift I picked up for him, or when he pushes back when I ask him to put his toys away. Cultivating a relationship with my grandchildren means navigating the emotional discomfort of keeping them safe, maintaining realistic boundaries, and easing up internally as toddlers gradually learn to express their feelings. It means catching the impulse to clench against the present, and trying to stay open to its messiness instead.

Most of us tacitly trust that nature will guide us through easing up inside on our deathbeds. But if relaxing this grip at the very end of life allows things to wind down with some ease, isn’t it worth asking whether we could spread that lesson across the years we have left? Instead of saving it for a dramatic final act, we can practice in millions of small, ordinary doses—waiting for the dentist, unloading the dishwasher, reading one more story to your kid, running errands, watering houseplants, calling a friend you haven’t talked to in a while.

At any given moment, you can ask yourself, What would this moment feel like if I relaxed my grip on it and allowed it to unfold on its own?

It’s okay. You’re tired. You’ve been fighting long enough. It’s okay if you decide not to sometimes—even when death is a long way off.

You can explore this subtle, significant shift in both pleasant and unpleasant moments. Try to get curious about what shifts when you ease up even slightly on the need for things to be other than they are.

When you can’t ease up, it’s simply not within your control. Try to ease up on not being able to ease up.

You have the rest of your life to explore, in this way, the beauty, heartbreaking vulnerability, and wonder of being alive.

Exercise

This exercise invites the body to soften its grip and experience relaxation, not by force, but through gentle permission.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Waking up in the middle of the night

• Taking a walk on a brisk spring day

• Warming up after being cold

• Cooling down after physical exercise

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