This is the third installment of Find Rest in the Unrest, a ten-part series exploring how to notice and savor restful sensations amid ordinary life. Explore the series.

I've noticed how quickly physical or emotional discomfort can become the headline story of my internal news cycle.

An ache, an itch, tightness, fatigue—whatever feels wrong tends to announce itself uninvited. A stubbed toe or hurt feelings can quickly blot everything else out. As they start to subside, I often wonder how long I can hold on to the appreciation I feel for their absence.

Comfortable sensations don’t call attention to themselves. They don’t carry the seed of juicy stories, which makes them easy to ignore. They're often there, but like that quiet, fascinating person at the party, you have to go looking for them.

And when I do, I’m sometimes surprised by how much of my body feels perfectly okay while something else doesn’t. My hands may feel warm. My feet may feel pleasantly heavy. Part of my face may feel soft. None of that makes the uncomfortable sensation less real. It simply makes my map of what I’m feeling more complete.

I’ve mentioned before the anticipatory dread my grandson Frankie feels as the classes he eagerly signed up for actually begin. A few weeks ago, I was helping him get ready for a swimming lesson. Fear gnawed at him. As he took off his shirt, the fear seemed to settle into the chill he felt in his body. The two blended into uncomfortable shivers. He was looking for a way out, both directly and indirectly. We’re obviously related.

I asked him the kind of question any grandpa who is also a mindfulness teacher would ask: Do you feel scared all over or just in certain places?

He looked at me as if he’d been expecting Po and was suddenly wondering whether he’d gotten Master Shifu.

He told me he felt scared all over.

I said, “Sometimes I notice that even though my face, chest, and stomach feel scared, my hands and feet don’t. My arms and legs don’t feel as scared as my face and chest. Weird, right?”

Nothing in his expression suggested he was convinced, but he—like the rest of us— will have to navigate a lot of inevitable emotional discomfort over the years. I doubt I changed how he felt that morning. But I hope the question stays with him. When discomfort seems to fill the entire body, is there somewhere that feels different?

I’m dancing around two important attention skills here—perceptual clarity and responsive composure. The first means sharpening sensory details, and the second means acknowledging them with less internal friction. We can develop both by paying close attention to a sensation without trying to change it and without asking what it means

One way to build the skills we need when facing discomfort is to start by developing clarity and composure in response to what feels comfortable. When we savor a comfortable sensation, we’re actually working on a relationship skill. It's the less familiar ability to observe what happens without insisting on a particular outcome. It can feel delicious to practice this with comfortable sensations, and it becomes empowering when we transfer the skill to what’s not comfortable.

Imagine you're watering a plant. The water is your attention, and the plant is a comfortable sensation. There's no need to weed out thoughts or discomfort. For a few seconds, let your attention soak into the same place. Aim. Soak. Repeat.

Lately I’ve become interested in what happens when I don’t just notice one of those comfortable sensations and move on, but return to the same one several times. Can I recognize it more quickly? Detect more detail? Savor it without needing it to intensify or spread?

That begins to feel less like trying to relax and more like developing a palate for rest.

This is the third exercise in our Find Rest in the Unrest series. We’ve experimented with hearing silence amid sounds and finding rest in the visual field. Now we’re exploring how to notice and savor comfort in a body that doesn’t feel entirely comfortable.

Rather than moving quickly from one pleasant sensation to another, we'll practice returning to the same one repeatedly, without requiring it to become stronger, spread, or last.

We’re not trying to make discomfort disappear. We’re letting what’s comfortable begin to teach us how to relate to what’s uncomfortable. Even when something in the body is lobbying for more attention, it may not be the only thing there.

There’s also comfort. We can practice getting better acquainted with it.

Exercise

This attention exercise explores physical rest by finding a comfortable sensation, returning to it repeatedly, and noticing what happens when you pour your attention into something that already feels okay.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• When pain, tension, or another uncomfortable sensation begins to dominate your awareness

• When you notice yourself starting to brace for a stressful or demanding situation

• During quiet, ordinary moments when you want to strengthen your ability to notice and savor what already feels okay

Read more

This is the second installment of Find Rest in the Unrest, a ten-part series exploring how to notice and savor restful sensations amid ordinary life. Explore the series.

Closing your eyes is one of the most familiar ways to signal that you need a break.

We close them to sleep, to withdraw, to recover from too much stimulation. When our eyes are tired enough, keeping them open can feel like work.

As David Whyte describes in his poem “Sweet Darkness”:

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

That association can complicate mindfulness practice. When you close your eyes, relax your body, and sit still for a minute, your nervous system might understandably assume you’re initiating a power-down sequence. Anyone who practices mindfulness consistently will recognize this.

Unfortunately, falling asleep while you meditate can feel like failing an important test you need to pass before moving on to an elusive next level. Especially the first hundred times. Even though experienced teachers consistently remind us not to treat drowsiness as an enemy or as evidence of a uniquely personal shortcoming, it remains a stubbornly persistent challenge for most of us.

Resting without falling asleep is a strangely private skill. We can watch someone sit still with their eyes closed, but we have no idea whether they’re deeply alert, drifting toward sleep, or mentally planning dinner. These shifts in attention happen almost entirely out of view. Attention is annoyingly private that way.

Rest, it turns out, is behind the eyes of the beholder.

My theory is that resting the eyes and falling asleep are simply activities we’ve practiced together so many thousands of times that the body expects one to lead to the other.

But with practice, they don’t have to.

There’s a familiar moment in a theater just before a film or play begins. The lights dim. The room disappears into darkness. Nothing is happening on the screen yet, but your attention doesn’t fade to black along with the room.

If anything, it becomes more available.

I’ve started thinking of visual rest the same way—not exclusively as a step toward powering down, but as an exploration of the restful side of an ordinary sensory phenomenon. Instead of turning the lights off, it’s more like shining a light on the darkness.

We sometimes stumble into this state accidentally when we stare out a rainy window or across a bustling restaurant and realize we’ve stopped looking at anything. We call it zoning out. Our eyes are open, but our habit of reaching toward objects, reading, identifying, comparing, and searching loosens for a moment. Our attention is aimed somewhere else.

That spontaneous pause may be revealing a useful, transferable skill.

The interesting experiment is to see whether we can learn to intentionally enter a state like that without disappearing into thought. Instead of zoning out because attention has gone down a narrative rabbit hole, we can focus on the less active side of seeing—the visual field itself, rather than whatever happens to occupy it.

With the eyes closed, there may be darkness, light, color, depth, graininess, movement, or shapes that are difficult to describe. With the eyes open, an entire field of light extends beyond whatever object is most visually interesting. As our gaze softens, the urge to analyze, interpret, and evaluate what we see thins out.

Most of the time, I barely notice the field. I pay attention to what occupies it.

But when I stop treating vision mainly as a way to identify objects and start exploring its boundaries and nuances, something can change. I can investigate my experience of the peripheries. I can notice what feels near and what feels distant. With my eyes closed, I can even become curious about the apparent shape of darkness.

None of this requires my thoughts to stop.

This matters because the aim of mindfulness practice has never been to make the mind go blank. It’s about developing an intimacy with sensory phenomena and human perception that we have to experience rather than imagine. Every category of perception has an active and inactive side. We can hear a sound or hear silence. We can feel an uncomfortable physical sensation or relaxation. We can see what’s in front of our eyes, close them, or even look past them with our eyes open.

Becoming more familiar with restful sensations reveals places for our attention to rest that most people don’t realize are available.

Learning to rest your eyes doesn’t have to mean withdrawing from life. In fact, it can make the opposite possible. Practicing with your eyes open can blur the line between formal meditation and the rest of your life. You can soften your gaze at a desk, in a waiting room, on a park bench, or while watching the sun go down. You can notice that your eyes are straining and invite them to soften a bit without stopping what you’re doing.

We need genuinely restful situations to recover and thrive. But it can also be liberating to notice moments of rest within almost any situation. The central theme of this series is learning to recognize and savor those sensations—even in the middle of ordinary, sometimes restless, life—instead of waiting for ideal circumstances.

We need genuinely restful situations to recover and thrive. But it can also be liberating to notice moments of rest within almost any situation. This week, I wrote about an interruption during morning meditation that became an unexpected demonstration of this. The central theme of this series is learning to recognize and savor those sensations—even in the middle of ordinary, sometimes restless, life—instead of waiting for ideal circumstances.

This also begins to prepare us for something we’ll explore later in this series. Images often appear on the mind’s internal movie screen. Sometimes nothing is being projected there to look at. Learning to rest with ordinary visual experience can eventually make it easier to notice the visual side of thinking without immediately getting drawn into the plot and fighting it.

Today’s assignment is simpler.

See what happens when you permit your eyes to rest without assuming your attention needs to drift completely away.

Explore the shape of darkness with your eyes closed, or the shape of light with them open.

And later, notice the small moments when your eyes seem to want a pause on their own.

What looks like zoning out to others may not always be a lapse in attention.

When you do it on purpose, you learn to savor visual rest without waiting for the world to make it easier.

Exercise

This attention exercise explores visual rest by softening your gaze, noticing the boundaries of your visual field, and investigating the shape of darkness or light with your eyes open or closed.

When to use this attention exercise:

• After extended reading or screen time, when your eyes feel strained

• While riding as a passenger or taking public transportation

• During a transition between activities, before turning your attention to whatever comes next

Read more

This is the first installment of Find Rest in the Unrest, a ten-part series exploring how to notice and savor restful sensations amid ordinary life. Explore the series.

We put off enjoying silence until the conditions are perfect, but waiting for everything to quiet down just delays developing the skills to detect and savor rest in its many imperfect forms.

Today we begin Find Rest in the Unrest, a ten-exercise series that explores the restful aspects of ordinary experience that we habitually miss while waiting for ideal circumstances to do the work for us. We’ll explore restful auditory, visual, and bodily sensations; the gaps in mental activity; and the elusive peaceful feelings we fail to recognize because we’re waiting for the dramatic versions we’ve come to imagine. Then we’ll combine these options and explore ways to use them in everyday life. None of these attention exercises require perfectly relaxing situations.

We’ll start by listening to silence.

That might sound like an invitation to listen to nothing. But consider how noticeable it can be when an appliance switches off, a conversation pauses, or the last note of a song fades. The absence of sound can become something we recognize.

A 2023 study on auditory illusions suggests we can actually hear silence, rather than mentally inferring that a sound is missing. Researchers inserted brief silences into recordings of busy restaurants, markets, and playgrounds for participants to compare. Their results suggest that we perceive silences in ways similar to how we perceive sounds, rather than merely inferring that a sound is missing.

In the laboratory of my own life, paying closer attention to silence has sharpened my ability to distinguish raw perceptions from their meaning—to untangle “sensing” from “making sense.” I’ve explored that same shift with internal speech, too—practicing hearing thoughts more as sounds and less automatically for what they mean.

I’ve noticed how restful it can feel to hear conversations in a language I don’t understand. On a bus in a big city or another country—or while watching a foreign film with the subtitles turned off—I can practice letting the voices wash over me. It’s like teaching myself that there are other ways to listen than the ones I practice daily by default. And even when I do understand what’s being said, I can give more of my limited attention to the sound of voices, including their rhythm, pitch, volume, and the silent pauses between words and sentences. It’s like listening to the music of ordinary moments without needing to decipher every lyric.

Listening for silence invites this shift. A sound becomes something to explore, including the contrast it offers when it ends. Other sounds might continue. We don’t need the entire world to fall silent to recognize that one particular sound is gone.

Sometimes, giving a few seconds of attention to quiet feels comforting in a tangible bodily sense, and that comfort may make another restful sensation easier to notice. Maybe tension in my face melts a little or I’m pulled to a place in my body that isn’t asking anything of me. In this way, taking in one instance of relief a bit more fully can evoke another one to notice.

We’ll explore this possibility throughout the series. Something uncomfortable may keep pulling at our attention while something restful remains available alongside it. Becoming familiar with both gives us more options.

For today, we’ll keep the experiment simple: listen to a sound, notice when it stops, and stay curious about what follows.

You don’t have to stop your thoughts to hear the absence of a sound. And you don’t have to find the experience soothing to begin getting acquainted with it. As with physical exercise, the benefits of attentional exercise can show up unexpectedly in daily life as you become more familiar with the practice.

I encourage you to try each exercise in this series two or three times, becoming familiar enough to explore it without guidance. As this year fades and the next begins, you’ll have a growing repertoire of ways to discover a little internal ease in ordinary moments.

Exercise

This attention exercise explores how to hear silence by noticing when sounds end and listening to the relative quiet around you.

When to use this attention exercise:

• Shopping in a grocery store or waiting in line

• Listening to live or recorded music

• Noticing pauses in a conversation

Read more

I trust my body to do all kinds of things I’m not remotely qualified to supervise.

I remember learning about some of its intricate feedback loops in an advanced biology class as an undergrad considering a medical career. It took a staggering number of lectures, diagrams, and textbook chapters just to begin to appreciate how the body regulates temperature and respiration—and how its complex internal systems keep it alive.

I don’t know enough about these ancient processes to take the wheel on any of them. I’m not in a position to monitor the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in my bloodstream or manage all the chemistry involved in digesting a meal—from smelling the food and salivating to chewing, absorbing its nutrients, and eliminating what the body doesn’t need to hold onto.

I’m happy to let my body handle all of that.

This doesn’t mean leaving the body entirely to its own devices. I do what I can to pay attention to the feedback that’s available to me. If a particular food or spice doesn’t sit well with my digestive system, I can adjust what I eat in the future—or live with the consequences when I decide to override past evidence. If I repeatedly ignore my need for sleep, stop challenging my muscles, or neglect movement to maintain range of motion in my shoulders or hips, the consequences begin to show up in tangible ways I can’t completely ignore.

I can support these processes without micromanaging them. I can influence the conditions without pretending I know how to do the underlying work.

But when it comes to my mind, I find it much harder to stand back and appreciate the wonder of mental processing.

When my brain and body generate thoughts, I’ve historically assumed that my conscious participation will be a welcome contribution. I analyze, evaluate, rehearse, troubleshoot, and try to think my way through whatever uncertainty has appeared.

Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht writes:

“There are things that are true that shouldn’t be. The meat shouldn’t think. We shouldn’t die. But there it is.”1

Somehow, this “meat” manages to think, and I find it hard to leave the process alone once I become aware of it. Memories surface. Words and images appear. Associations form, triggering a series of additional associative leaps. Predictions get made. Problems continue processing outside conscious awareness. Even when I’m asleep, my mind dreams, trying to untangle it all.

Recognizing thought as something the body does doesn’t mean believing that every thought is accurate, useful, or wise. It means we don’t necessarily have to interfere with every thought for mental processing to continue.

My experience with mindfulness practice over the years has shown me how much of my intentional thinking is extraneous—how often it complicates things and keeps complicating them, despite the insights I’ve picked up along the way. Sometimes it’s a response to not knowing what will happen, or an attempt to escape the confusion, instability, and discomfort that make up a human life.

Thinking can be tremendously useful—I love thinking and don’t plan to stop—but more thinking isn’t always what a situation needs. The paradox is that cultivating mindful awareness requires resisting the temptation to make thinking its opponent.

When I practice hanging back and observing—listening, watching, feeling—I give my body and mind room to process what they’re already processing. I become a little less likely to take the bait every time a thought promises that one more round of analysis might finally resolve what’s outside my ability to resolve.

Things often go better when I see more, hear more, and feel more—while interfering less with the faculties I’ve inherited as they process it all. That can be challenging not only when discomfort and confusion are being served, but also during quiet, comfortable moments I don’t fully register because I’m too busy looking for a story problem to chew on.

This week’s attention exercise doesn’t require trying to stop thought (psst: none of them ever do). Instead, it offers a chance to bring different regions of bodily sensation into the foreground, letting other regions recede without disappearing, and then feeling the body as a whole.

We aren’t controlling what the body feels. We’re experimenting with how we relate to whatever sensations are already there.

The body is continually carrying out more processes than we could possibly track. We’re simply stepping back from the imaginary control panel long enough to take in more of what the body is already doing.

Exercise

This attention exercise invites you to bring different regions of bodily sensation into the foreground to sharpen the experience of feeling the body as a whole.

When to use this attention exercise:

• While lying in bed, explore the front and back of the body—the side resting against the mattress and the side facing away.

• While sitting at a desk, sense the lower body in contact with the chair and floor, then the upper body, then both together.

• While standing in sunlight or near a source of warmth, notice the illuminated or warmed area against the less prominent remainder of the body.

Read more

Mindfulness doesn’t require a quiet mind. You may already know this, but it’s understandable to think that shutting down mental chatter is the whole point of meditation. There’s a lucrative market for escaping our thoughts and feelings, but I see mindfulness practice as offering much more than a spiritually acceptable alternative to three margaritas or whatever else you use to try to dial down your internal noise.

Practicing mindfulness can set the stage for the mind to quiet, but expecting or demanding this outcome can turn every thought into evidence that the practice isn’t working. Abandoning the practice when quiet doesn’t come means missing out on what makes mindfulness so enlivening and, at times, liberating.

The paradoxical and nuanced nature of these challenges is what goaded me to become a mindfulness teacher. Letting go of the need for my mind to quiet allowed me to become more intimately familiar with mental talk, images, pauses, and the ways they interact than I ever thought possible. As a result, my thoughts and feelings became less nebulous, tangled, and intimidating.

Observing thoughts in ways that downplay their meaning isn’t foreign to psychotherapy. Noticing a thought as a passing mental event—without automatically obeying, fighting, or believing it—is called cognitive defusion in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) explore related skills through their own frameworks. Some of these techniques draw attention to the sound of words, helping us experience thinking as something beyond meaning alone.

Shinzen Young gave me particularly concrete ways to practice it. Observing mental talk and the visual side of thinking are central to his approach. Over the years, I learned to distinguish mental talk from mental images and to observe each apart from the meanings they carry.

At first, I noticed this mostly in retrospect. After listening closely to a car driving by, the experience was fresh enough that I could still recall the absence of mental chatter during those few seconds. I started to notice something similar after watching a compelling movie, listening to a favorite song, or hearing my daughter describe a challenge she was running into.

That gave me something to explore in formal meditation and everyday life. As I meditated, I gradually began noticing these shifts as they happened. Sometimes a sound drew my attention so completely that my mental talk spontaneously quieted. Sometimes a thought absorbed me so completely that the sounds around me seemed muffled. And sometimes I could hear external sounds and mental talk at the same time.

Eventually, through modest, consistent daily practice and intensive retreat practice each year, I learned to notice a thought as it appeared, track its sound-like qualities as it unspooled in my mind, and hear it fade or end abruptly. The experience reminds me of the muted trombone patter Charlie Brown and his friends hear when adults speak. Don’t get me wrong. The meaning still comes through. It just isn’t the primary focus when I listen this way, and the thoughts can feel less gripping.

Combining this with practice in distinguishing pleasant and unpleasant emotional sensations gave me a subjective sensory laboratory that eventually became portable. At first, I explored these interactions while meditating in stillness under favorable conditions. Gradually, I could investigate them while working, interacting with other people, or waiting for a meeting or medical appointment to begin.

These skills can make our inner experience easier to observe and navigate. With practice, they can help us take unpleasant feelings less personally, hold rigid beliefs less tightly, and respond to difficult moments with more composure.

Try counting silently to five. You know what the numbers mean, but can you also notice what they sound like? Now stop supplying the words and listen for whatever comes next.

That small shift—from making mental talk to listening for it—is where this exercise begins. You don’t need a quiet mind to try it. Even a familiar worry gives you something to listen to.

Exercise

This attention exercise invites you to listen to the sound-like qualities of your mental talk—its rhythm, syllables, and tone—while giving less attention to what it means.

When to use this attention exercise:

• Heating something up in the microwave.

• Waiting for an appointment to begin.

• Taking a walk after a stimulating day of work.

Read more

Discomfort is great at grabbing our attention and holding onto it. A leg cramp or an anxious thought can instantly take over our attention.

Comfortable sensations aren’t insistent. They don’t demand our appreciation or ask us to investigate their causes. We can be surrounded by pleasant sensory details and barely notice them, while imagined scenarios gobble up our limited attentional budget. We default to whatever is on our minds, inadvertently muting ordinary moments until overlooking them becomes a habit.

Last week’s attention exercise asked whether some small part of the body might feel okay even when another part of our experience didn’t. This week’s exercise broadens that exploration, inviting your other senses to join the search party. A pleasing sight, a soothing sound, the relief of resting your eyes, or even a brief lull in mental chatter might be worth savoring for a few seconds.

Something surprising can happen when you linger with one of those pleasant details for a moment. You might hear a sound you like and then notice a comfortable feeling in your chest. As you stay with that feeling, you might notice another enjoyable sensation. Or you might close your eyes, enjoy the relief for a minute, and notice your shoulders begin to unwind. Savoring one small sensory pleasure can make the next easier to notice. Let curiosity guide the experiment, and paying attention to comfortable sensations may gradually become a habit.

I can look forward to a massage for days, only to realize halfway through that I’ve been mentally planning the rest of my afternoon. The warm, steady pressure of the therapist’s hands feels good at first, but soon my mind conjures problems to solve, tasks I forgot to do, or calculations about how much to tip and whether I should have spent the money on something else. Attention can drift away from a massage just as easily as it does from the breath during meditation. When I notice, I can gently return to those sensations—warmth, pressure, relaxation—and let them register for a few seconds before they’re gone.

The opposite challenge comes up in uncomfortable appointments, too, like when a dentist is repairing a crown. When I turn something like that into an attention experiment, I don’t try to make a painful procedure pleasant. It’s more like wondering whether I can find anything comfortable to focus on, and what might happen if I gave it a few seconds of my attention.

It starts with something small. I hear light jazz blending with the hygienist’s laughter down the hallway, and notice that simply listening this way makes my legs relax and even tingle a little. My feet respond to the slightest invitation to join in. If I’m left alone for a few minutes, I might watch the colorful fish “swimming” on the screen, where the illegible X-rays of my teeth will soon stare back at me. Even a video of aquarium life can soften my arms and face. A series of these small, intentional shifts can feel surprisingly satisfying when you know that discomfort could easily take over the experience.

This skill is worth practicing not only in comfortable moments—where you can get the hang of it—but also in challenging ones. It won’t instantly make every situation easy, but it can reveal more texture and nuance in the moment you’re actually living.

Becoming connoisseurs of sensory details helps us notice finer distinctions, giving us more options for how we respond in any situation.

When discomfort grabs our attention, noticing anything else might feel unnatural at first. But giving a pleasant sensation a few seconds to register can reveal something we might otherwise miss: even a difficult moment can have comfortable parts.

Exercise

This attention exercise invites you to savor pleasant or neutral sights, sounds, and body sensations—and simply notice what unfolds.

A single sound might send a shiver of delight through your body. Resting your eyes might bring a subtle sensation to the surface. You can linger with one perception, return to it, or follow another as it appears. There’s no need to force pleasantness to build. The practice is simply to notice when it does.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• While listening to music you enjoy.

• While watching the light or colors change during a sunrise or sunset.

• During a quiet afternoon when you have a few minutes to notice what feels good.

Read more

• What “Ugh” Feels Like

• When Some Small Part of You Feels Okay

Emotional discomfort understandably captures our attention more effectively than pleasant feelings. That imbalance helps fuel an economy packed with promises of relief. Physical pain, emotional distress, and uncertainty make us especially receptive to anything that promises to make them go away.

Much of what I read about navigating difficult emotions focuses on what caused them, what they mean, and what to do about them. When I talk about developing mindful awareness of emotional feelings, I mean something different—something that remains confusing until it moves from conceptual understanding into direct experience: noticing the sensory components that convey our feelings before we analyze or address them.

The day after my granddaughter Quinn was born, I was taking care of her older brother, Frankie, along with four dogs: our dog Baxter and Alex and Derek’s dogs, Ginger, Cookie, and Sophia.

Frankie and I were getting ready to leave for the hospital to meet his new sister. I had backed the car out, strapped him into his car seat, and ran back into the house for something he wanted to bring along.

A minute or two later, I noticed something was wrong.

The house was way too quiet.

A quick scan revealed that I had left the sliding door open. The gate across the driveway was open so we could back out, creating a perfect opportunity for four-legged family members, overshadowed by the new baby, to go on an adventure.

I grabbed the leashes, got Frankie out of his car seat, and we started looking. Baxter and Ginger came running back almost immediately. Cookie hadn’t gone far, but little Sophia was nowhere to be found.

So instead of heading to the hospital, Frankie and I started walking around the neighborhood, peeking into backyards, calling Sophia’s name.

This is exactly the kind of situation my mind knows how to make worse. I had caused the problem. I desperately wanted to rewind the past few minutes and close the door. I imagined having to tell Alex and Derek that I had lost their dog while they were at the hospital with their newborn daughter. I could practically hear the family story being told for years: Remember the day after Quinn was born, when Grampy let the dogs out and we never saw Sophia again?

And there was another, subtler pressure. If I wasn’t visibly distressed enough, would people interpret that mean I wasn’t taking the situation seriously enough?

The uncertainty plus the high emotional stakes threatened to convince me that suffering in advance was the most sensible use of my energy and attention. Not freaking out would be irresponsible, right? But part of me knew that making myself miserable wouldn’t help us find her.

So I tried something else.

I paid attention to what was actually happening.

It was a pleasant May day. I was walking around the neighborhood with my grandson. Sometimes I carried him on my shoulders. We had a mission. We called Sophia’s name, poked our noses into places we normally wouldn’t, talked with neighbors, and explored familiar streets from an unfamiliar perspective.

I wasn’t trying to convince myself that the situation was okay. I was trying to notice whether some small part of me felt okay within it.

That distinction changed everything.

The fear didn’t disappear. Neither did my concern for Sophia or my responsibility for finding her. But when I stopped feeding the imagined ending and focused on what was actually happening, my distress dropped dramatically. The situation was urgent, but it no longer felt like a crisis. I was looking for a lost dog.

Eventually I called Derek at the hospital and asked him to come help. We kept searching.

After about 90 minutes, another bodily sensation finally became impossible to ignore: I really had to pee.

So Frankie and I headed back to the house. And for the first time, it occurred to me to check the car.

I opened the door.

There was Sophia, staring back at me.

Apparently, in those frantic first seconds after realizing the dogs were loose, I had closed the car doors without noticing that Sophia had climbed inside. She had been safe all along.

I treasure this memory partly because of that ridiculous ending. But I also remember it as an unusually clear demonstration of something I’d been practicing for years.

Feeling okay in some part of your body doesn’t mean indifference to the situation.

It doesn’t mean the unpleasant feeling has disappeared. It doesn’t mean you’ve decided the problem isn’t important. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee that the story will have a happy ending.

It means that unwanted possibilities don’t necessarily occupy every square inch of your awareness.

This can feel surprisingly counterintuitive. We tend to treat distress as evidence that we understand the seriousness of a situation. Sometimes there’s even social pressure to perform it. If I’m laughing, enjoying the sunshine, or noticing the pleasant sensation of a child riding on my shoulders while something important remains unresolved, perhaps I’m not worried enough.

But worry and caring aren’t the same thing.

The attentional move I’m describing doesn’t require replacing unpleasant feelings with pleasant ones. It asks whether, while the unpleasant feelings are present, something else is present too.

A relaxed forehead. Warmth in your hands. The beginnings of a smile. Interest. Affection. A little spark of amusement. Or perhaps nothing recognizably pleasant at all, just some small region of the body that, for this particular moment, doesn’t hurt and isn’t afraid.

That’s enough.

The point isn’t to manufacture a better experience. It’s to become more accurate about the experience you’re already having.

Today’s attention exercise invites you to temporarily set aside the story you could tell about how you’re feeling and investigate the component sensations beneath it.

Here are some fun ways to investigate the subtly pleasant feelings we easily overlook:

• Notice the glee mixed with fear when watching a scary show. The recent hit Widow’s Bay gives you the opportunity to play with a wide variety of pleasant feelings in the diabolical stew of fear, frustration, and cringe.

• Try to feel the quiet shiver of delight when someone voices an opinion that lines up neatly with your own. Before rushing into disdain for people who disagree, see if you can recognize what certainty itself feels like in your body.1 Surprise, it feels good.

• Music makes this challenge a lot easier. I find that the feelings percolate so quickly that trying to pin them down or name them becomes pointless. Instead, let the emotionality wash over you like a warm shower. For extra credit, notice whether an emotional flavor or tone lingers after the song ends.

• The next time you plan to get together with someone who tends to make you laugh a lot, try to mine some of the laughter to help you map the shape, spread, and other characteristics of your body’s sensory response to humor.

• Erotic feelings seem to play a similarly sneaky function as humorous ones. The next time you find yourself lured—willingly or unwillingly—into a thirst trap, scan for affective sensations unique to this kind of human arousal.

There’s a reason to play with this when nothing much is at stake. In a recent Science of Perception Box conversation, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett made a related point: we may have more influence over our experience than we think, but that influence develops like a skill. It works better when we practice before the heat of the moment rather than waiting until we desperately need it.

That’s what exercises like this are for.

Exercise

This body-based attention exercise invites you to notice pleasant and neutral sensations that can be easily overlooked when something feels unpleasant—and to discover that different emotional flavors can coexist.

You don’t need to make an unpleasant feeling go away. The practice is simply to notice whether some small part of you feels okay within it.

When to use this attention exercise:

• When an unpleasant mood starts to feel like the whole experience

• While you're waiting for an outcome you can't control

• During ordinary low-stakes moments, to strengthen the skill before you need it

Read more

• What “Ugh” Feels Like

• When Some Small Part of You Feels Okay

Whether we mean to or not, we often treat emotional regulation as a way to avoid or resolve unpleasant feelings. But learning to regulate our emotions begins with the willingness to feel them while staying connected to what’s happening.

The bad news is that this slippery skill requires a lot of practice, isn’t particularly popular, and no one can do the work for us. The good news is that even a little practice can help us catch more moments to respond before reacting takes over.

While working as an ABC News correspondent, had a panic attack during a live broadcast of Good Morning America while filling in at the news desk. The incident was so distressing that it prompted him to seek professional help. That path eventually included therapy, a regular mindfulness practice, and a second career devoted to talking and writing about mindfulness.

Comedian Joe List recently described a similar confrontation with intense emotional distress on an episode of Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out. Minutes before recording a stand-up set for Conan, his heart started racing. He felt dizzy and began shaking. His mind filled with predictions about being unable to go onstage and humiliating himself in front of Conan and the audience.

He decided to go onstage anyway. Then something interesting happened. He flubbed a line, which gave him a chance to abandon what he’d rehearsed:

“I flubbed a line and then I did an off-the-cuff thing, which puts you in the moment because you’re no longer reciting something.”

The improvised remark got a laugh. By the end of the set, he felt much better. The distress hadn’t disappeared on command. He had continued performing while it was present, and responding to what was actually happening interrupted his absorption in what he feared might happen.

These dramatic examples make the process easier to see. When emotional intensity becomes impossible to ignore, we may be forced to confront sensations we would ordinarily resist, explain, or urgently try to escape.

But crisis is a terrible prerequisite for practice. Don’t wait until the stakes are unusually high. Start practicing with everyday challenges. At lower intensities, we have more room to recognize the early signals: a tightening in the chest, heat rising in the face, a sinking feeling in the stomach, or a buzz of agitation that hasn’t yet taken over. These quieter moments give us opportunities to become familiar with unpleasant sensations in preparation for when the stakes are inevitably raised.

The same process happens when the kids aren’t getting ready for school, a coworker gets under your skin, or someone says something that leaves you feeling embarrassed or defensive. Attention training may not prevent discomfort from intensifying, but it can help us recognize—and sometimes reduce—the additional suffering created by resisting, catastrophizing, and urgently trying to escape what is already happening.

Mindfulness isn’t an exemption from difficulty. It’s a way to build skills for participating more fully in real life—including its pleasant moments, its unpleasant ones, and the complicated moments that fall somewhere in between.

After several years of exploring emotional bodily sensations in my mindfulness practice, I discovered an almost endless number of opportunities to sneak this kind of investigation into daily life without anyone noticing.

One vivid example occurred while I was working as an instructional librarian at a business school. A prickly coworker struck up a conversation with me, which I naively interpreted as an attempt to connect over a shared interest. I quickly discovered that she was actually mocking something I was personally invested in. I could feel defensiveness, anger, and embarrassment erupting inside me.

Rather than escalating the interaction, I decided to draw on as much social composure as I could while observing the emotional reactions unfolding inside me. The energy I didn’t invest in defending myself became available for a highly educational, visceral lesson in emotional regulation. I smiled politely and nodded without feeding the interaction while secretly observing an internal fireworks show playing out in my face, chest, and stomach.

To be clear, defending myself was one valid response to her sneak attack. My mindfulness practice allowed me to recognize that it wasn’t the only one.

Even this retelling contains both parts of emotional experience. Descriptions like “prickly coworker” and “sneak attack” belong to the story I tell about what happened. The fireworks in my face, chest, and stomach describe what I could feel happening in my body. The story and the sensations were related and could influence each other, but they were distinguishable.

The point isn’t to strip an emotional experience of its meaning, talk ourselves out of a justified reaction, or avoid taking necessary action. It’s to recognize that the story about what we feel and the sensations we can detect are different components of the same experience. Noticing that distinction can give us more room to choose what happens next.

In today’s exercise, we’ll begin practicing at whatever intensity is already available. We’ll take a reading of our current energy and mood, notice any commentary playing out in the mind, and explore how the emotional part of the experience registers in the body. There’s no need to generate an unpleasant feeling. We’ll work with whatever is already there.

Next week, we’ll use these same skills to investigate a surprisingly different challenge: noticing subtle neutral and pleasant sensations before our attention rushes past them.

Exercise

This body-based attention exercise invites you to notice how mood registers physically—and to distinguish those sensations from the mental commentary surrounding them.

You don’t need to wait for an intense emotional reaction. Lower-level discomfort can provide especially useful conditions for learning.

When to use this attention exercise:

• When an unpleasant feeling is mild or just beginning to register

• When you feel anxious, irritated, embarrassed, or agitated

• When you’re under real or imagined pressure

• When you feel bored, ambivalent, or unmotivated

• When nothing dramatic is happening, and you want to become more familiar with your subtler emotional signals

Read more

A few days ago, while I was running, I listened to a 2021 episode of This American Life featuring two producers who described remarkably different internal experiences of moving through the world.1 I can’t remember what steered me to it, but it turned out to be a vivid illustration of the framework behind my approach to mindfulness.

I’m fascinated by what close attention can reveal about how our minds work—and by leaving room for the possibility that other people’s subjective experience may be very different from my own. So much of what we say about the mind focuses on the content of our thoughts. This conversation stayed closer to the underlying processes that make that content possible.

The mindfulness framework I learned from Shinzen Young gives me a way to decode this puzzle that feels simultaneously practical, consequential, and mind-blowing.2

At the grocery store, Lilly Sullivan’s attention leaps from a red shopping basket to questions about having a family, memories of her mother’s Volvo, something she did as a child, and guesses about what nearby strangers might be thinking and feeling. One perception triggers another thought, memory, question, or emotional reaction. She’s describing my default subjective state.

Her colleague Diane Wu describes something very different. She notices the red baskets. She examines the spinach mix. She takes in what is physically in front of her without automatically following it into an extended chain of associations. I’m married to someone who navigates the world more like this.

Lilly compares her mental activity to a washing machine, with thoughts tumbling around together. Diane compares her experience to a video camera pointing toward things in the world. Images register, but most of them don’t linger or become tangled up in interpretation.

Their conversation offers a vivid illustration of the difference between making sense and sensing directly.

We can loosely organize our moment-to-moment experience into three sensory categories:

• visual

• auditory

• body sensations

Making sense draws on memory, imagination, language, prediction, and emotion. Sensing directly puts us in closer contact with the immediate flow of sights, sounds, and sensations.

Neither mode is inherently better. We need mental processing to plan, solve problems, understand other people, and learn from experience. But mental processing can become so dominant that what our minds make of the world crowds out what is arriving through our senses.

Near the end of the story, Lilly reaches for an analogy I often use in describing multisensory mindfulness practice. Discovering how Diane’s mind works, she says, was like learning that some people live in the ocean while she lives on land.

I think of mindfulness practice as attentional cross-training that helps us become more amphibious—able to live on land, immersed in the content of our thoughts and feelings, and in the water, immersed in the immediate flow of sensory experience. We aren’t trying to relocate permanently. We’re developing the ability to move between the two more readily. Practicing before life becomes especially difficult can make confusion and uncertainty feel a little less impossible to inhabit when the resolution we crave remains out of reach.

Diane’s example focuses primarily on seeing. In the exercise below, we’ll work on getting our sea legs by listening instead. When the washing machine of mental activity is churning, you don’t have to force it to stop. See whether you can let nearby and distant sounds occupy more of the attentional field.

The point isn’t to escape thought. It’s to remember that thought is only one place your attention can live, and to leave enough room for more of the world to come in.

Exercise

This spatial listening exercise invites you to notice not what sounds mean or what caused them, but where they seem to occur—left or right, nearby or far away, all around, or close in. Try it while walking, waiting, completing a familiar task, or whenever mental processing has become the dominant feature of your experience.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Choose a place where sounds are likely to arrive from several directions.

• Sit somewhere where you can safely soften your gaze for several minutes.

• Listen without noise-canceling headphones so the soundscape remains available.

Read more

A participant in one of my practice groups recently described an unexpected shift during a breath-awareness exercise.

She told us she’d been working with breath lately, though sometimes it felt a bit repetitive, stale, and uninspiring. Then she noticed the lingering scent of lime on her fingers and hands.

The fresh, citrusy smell seemed to permeate the air around her. As she inhaled, the added sensory detail made the breath feel more energizing and alive.

The exercise itself was exactly the same. She was still breathing in and breathing out. But this one small, invisible detail had changed the experience. Her attention had become more available to what was actually happening.

I was struck by the smallness of that moment—and by its significance. The lime scent didn’t resolve whatever had made her day stressful. It didn’t supply an answer, change the circumstances, or make difficult feelings disappear.

But it may have helped create a little more room around them.

Emotional discomfort sets the mind in motion: analyzing, fixing, predicting, or wishing the feeling would stop. Sometimes that helps. But not every discomfort can be solved right away. Waiting for medical test results may spark anxiety. Offering a perspective others may not share can leave us feeling vulnerable. A long meeting can leave us drained. Sadness can stay with us, even when there’s nothing we can do to fix what caused it. The mind keeps circling a personal conundrum, searching for a way out.

In those moments, a simple sensory detail can give your attention somewhere else to land, even for a few seconds.

It could be the scent of lime, the feeling of your feet on the floor, a breeze on your arm, a phrase of music, or the warmth of a mug in your hands.

This isn’t about distracting yourself from what matters, or pretending you’re fine. It’s an opportunity to notice that difficulty isn’t the only thing happening.

We often imagine resistance as something we have to work through directly: understand it, soften it, release it, or persuade ourselves to feel differently. But sometimes resistance weakens in a less direct way. When you give one ordinary sensation your full attention, you’re not trying to solve the discomfort or talk yourself out of it. You’re letting something else become vivid too. As your attention widens, your relationship to the rest of the experience may gently shift.

Fully hearing a sound may make discomfort feel less overwhelming. Sensing a breeze may let your body soften. Becoming interested in something ordinary can remind you that you’re larger than the problem your mind is working on.

Equanimity refers to an ability to notice a sensory experience without trying to change it. Not pushing away what’s unpleasant, or clinging to what’s pleasant. We let each sensation be as it is, long enough to get curious about it.

Equanimity with one perception can have a downstream effect: when the scent of lime—or any ordinary sensation—is allowed to be exactly as it is, resistance elsewhere may soften too. You haven’t talked yourself into accepting your circumstances; you’ve given the whole system a little less to push against.

The discomfort may still be present and valid, but it doesn’t have to take up all your attention.

Today’s exercise offers a simple way to practice this. Instead of sorting body sensations as pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad, we’ll explore a different contrast:

What feels relatively steady? What feels noticeably changing?

Maybe the pressure of your feet on the floor or the touch of clothing on your body is steady, while the movement of your breath, a pulse, or spreading warmth feels dynamic.

Neither is better. The point isn’t to find the “right” sensation or to make changing sensations hold still. It’s to become more curious about the qualities of what you feel, rather than passing judgment on it.

That curiosity can sharpen perception. Even a few seconds of clearer noticing can break the habit of struggling with what’s happening.

Over time, the familiar comfort of “this too shall pass” can become something more immediate: this sensation is passing. The situation itself may not have changed, but the sensations associated with it are not fixed. Tightness, heat, pressure, ache, or flutter may already be changing—intensifying, softening, spreading, fading, or shifting in texture. You don’t have to wait for the difficulty to be over to notice movement. You can feel it passing, in real time, at its own pace.

Even when things remain difficult, that awareness can make them more livable.

Exercise

This guided exercise explores the contrast between body sensations that feel steady and those that noticeably change. By shifting your attention between them, you’ll practice getting curious about what you feel, beyond whether you like it or want it to be different.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• When you’re caught up in thinking and want to reconnect with your body.

• When you notice yourself evaluating situations or sensations as good or bad.

• When your mindfulness routine feels a little stale, and you’d like a fresh way to explore what’s already here.

Read more

A friend reached out to me yesterday to share a moment when her mindfulness practice showed up just when she needed it.

She was trying to finish some errands and get home in time to meet a repair person. Standing in the grocery store, she began imagining everything that could go wrong. What if she didn’t get home in time? What if the appointment had to be rescheduled? Had she tried to fit too much into the day?

Her mind was quickly spinning uncertainty into catastrophe.

Then she interrupted herself: Wait. What have I been practicing?

She felt her feet on the floor and her hands on the shopping cart. She took in the sights and sounds around her. Instead of continuing to devote all of her attention to what might happen later, she reallocated some of it to what was actually happening now.

Nothing about the external situation had changed. She still had errands to finish. The repair person was still coming. She didn’t know exactly how the timing would work out.

But worry was no longer her entire world.

At any given moment, we have a limited amount of attention to give. We can’t notice everything equally at once.

Something will occupy the foreground while other parts of experience recede into the background. Often this happens so automatically that we don’t recognize any choice was involved. Thinking, planning, remembering, rehearsing, and worrying consume attention, and we simply call it being alive.

Mindfulness practice reveals that we have far more options than we often realize.

This doesn’t mean that thinking is bad or that we should spend our lives trying to escape from it. Thinking helps us understand the past, anticipate problems, and make plans. But we can become so absorbed in making sense of life that we lose contact with the direct experience of living it.

Sometimes we can take a brief break from making sense and return to sensing. We can feel our feet against the floor, notice our hands on a shopping cart, or sense the air’s temperature on our skin and the subtle movement of our body as we walk.

A story in the mind can persist without becoming the only thing you notice.

This capacity can be pleasantly grounding on an ordinary day, but its deeper value often becomes apparent when life gets difficult. When people ask how they’ll know whether mindfulness is working, I sometimes have to give them an unfortunate answer: You may not fully appreciate the investment until you really need it.

I’ve relied on this kind of attention during dental work. But I understood its value more deeply while sitting on the floor of a veterinarian’s office, saying goodbye to Baxter for the last time.

Practice didn’t make the physical or emotional pain disappear. It helped me encounter it differently.

In those moments, I discovered something I hadn’t been able to appreciate during more ordinary practice. Although my attention remained finite, the experience available to be felt seemed larger than I had realized.

A painful sensation could stand out without erasing the rest of my body. A broken heart could fill my chest without becoming the whole of me. The pain didn’t necessarily get smaller, but there seemed to be more space around and within it.

That space made the experience more livable. At times, it even made an intensely difficult moment feel more alive.

This is one reason we practice when the stakes are low. Much like physical exercise, attention practice develops capacities that may not seem especially consequential while we’re developing them. Feeling the sensations in your hands or gradually spreading your attention through the whole body can seem almost trivial.

Then life gives you a moment when you have no choice but to feel what’s here. You may discover you’re not entirely at the mercy of the loudest sensation, the most frightening thought, or the story gathering momentum in your mind. You may be able to remain present with something painful while staying connected to more of yourself.

Today’s exercise explores that possibility. We’ll begin by feeling one region of the body at a time. Then we’ll gradually bring those regions together, taking in the body as a whole. Finally, we’ll allow a particular sensation to move into the foreground while seeing whether the rest of the body can remain part of the picture.

Hopefully, you won’t need to put this capacity to a severe test anytime soon.

But difficult moments are inevitable. A few minutes of practice now can prepare us to meet them with greater flexibility, curiosity, and courage.

And perhaps, when you most need it, you’ll be surprised by how much more of yourself is there, and how much more livable the experience becomes.

Exercise

This attention exercise explores what happens when you widen your awareness of bodily sensation. You’ll begin by feeling one region at a time, gradually include the whole body, and then practice letting one sensation become prominent without allowing it to become your entire world.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• During a haircut, massage, or dental cleaning.

• After getting into a warm bath or shower.

• When you wake during the night and notice your mind becoming active.

Read more

I was 36 when I realized I might be holding out for a different past. Until then, I was trying to figure out what my future was supposed to be like.

I was on my first silent meditation retreat. Until then, I don’t think I had ever sat still with my own mind and emotions long enough to recognize how much of what made life difficult was coming from inside me rather than the environment around me.

I experienced moments of relaxation during those four interminable days, but boredom and physical discomfort were always close at hand. A sit that began comfortably enough could slowly intensify until physical or emotional discomfort became almost unbearable. From where I sat, everyone else in the meditation hall was having an easier time.

During one sit, I was horrified by the realization—or the vivid impression—that I had stood up in the middle of a meditation session, stuck out my tongue, and shaken my head as if I’d completely lost control, filling the contemplative silence with loud nonsense before sitting back down.

Had I actually lost control, or did I imagine it? I wondered if meditating too much could make me lose my mind—or reveal that I’d already lost it and was only pretending otherwise.

Then, during one of the evening talks, the teacher said something about the delusion of holding out for a different past. I had never thought about this. Surely it didn’t apply to me. And yet, when I started to reflect on the basic chapters of my life, something snapped into focus that I suddenly couldn’t unsee.

I wished I hadn’t been a little boy raised in Kansas who made friends with girls much more easily than with boys. I wished my parents had liked me, understood me, or had been better equipped to support my interests and needs.

The list kept growing.

What if I hadn’t gone to a fundamentalist Baptist church three times a week throughout my childhood? What if I had developed crushes on girls instead of boys? What if I had asked better questions when my college piano teacher told me my technique was holding me back—that I couldn’t keep developing musically unless I started over and relearned habits that had already become muscle memory?

What if my grandfather hadn’t been so cruel to his children? What if I hadn’t gotten divorced? What if I’d gone to a better college or lived in a bigger city or been good at earning money? What would my life have been like if I hadn’t turned out to be gay? What if, in the church, being gay hadn’t eclipsed every other part of who I was, or if, in the wider world, it wasn’t treated as the one thing that made everything else irrelevant?

There it was.

I was holding out for a different past.

It was like reading a diary I had been secretly writing my entire life ,but hiding from myself.

For over three decades, some fundamental part of me had watched my life from the inside, digging in its heels and silently screaming: NO! NO! NO! Not this. Not that. There’s been a mistake. This can’t be my life! NOOOO!

I was holding out for a past where I could have been someone entirely different—a straight boy from a big city, with parents who understood him and guided him toward quallified teachers and mentors. Maybe then I’d have become a respected musician, writer, or artist, capable of making my way in the world whether it welcomed me or not.

Recognizing this was stunning—and strangely relieving. I could finally see the invisible prison I had helped build around myself. But seeing it didn’t automatically unlock the door.

The way through

I’m 60 now, and that retreat insight has been quietly evolving within me for 24 years.

It hasn’t been about forcing myself to accept my history or deny my longing for things to have unfolded differently. Logic can’t dissolve disappointment, grief, or the lingering effects of circumstances beyond our control. What has helped has been quiet and gradual and doesn’t sound like it would be helpful at all.

I’ve learned to practice acceptance at the level of sensation and perception, not just in terms of life events or situations. When I stop obsessing over the story of my life, I can narrow my focus to the raw sensory details of being alive.1

Seeing what I’m seeing.

Hearing what I’m hearing.

Feeling what I’m feeling.

Over time, this shift has changed my relationship to my past, my present, and whatever future remains unknown.

I wouldn’t trade my past for some idealized version a child might dream up. I’m grateful for the parenting I was able to cobble together from my young, well-meaning parents, as well as from teachers, friends, writers, poets, artists, and myself. I love the magical moments, the heartbreak, and the unlikely, inevitable, unrepeatable messiness of this amazing life. I can wish some things had been different, or wonder how they might have unfolded, without wishing away the life that emerged from them.

This feels like more than tolerance or acceptance. It feels more like love.

It doesn’t mean condoning what’s wrong with the world or pretending my pain doesn’t exist. It’s an open invitation to step out of the perpetual cycle of analysis and judgment, to pause—if only briefly—the habit of interpreting and controlling every moment.

It means letting myself inhabit the lived texture of my life as it actually unfolds. Sometimes I manage this for only a few seconds, sometimes for minutes, and—on rare days—for longer stretches.

The past tugs at my attention, always ready to be rearranged. The future, too, beckons—posing as a puzzle with a single, elusive solution.

But sensory experience plays by different rules. It happens only in the present, unfolding moment by moment as a shifting blend of sensations and perceptions.

What’s happening right now?

I love exploring the distinction between “making sense” and “sensing directly” in my relationship with my grandchildren.2

Frankie, who will be five soon, struggles to put his face in the water during swim lessons. My mind wants to leap ahead, picturing him as an adult who’s still afraid to go underwater, as if this single moment threatens to dictate the rest of his life.

His two-year-old sister Quinn, meanwhile, is learning words—and also how to whine. I can project years ahead, imagining her forever incapable of asking a question without whining.

When I let those imagined futures take over, they feel urgent, like problems I have to solve immediately.

But when I come back to my senses—to what’s actually playing out in front of me—I hear splashing, laughing, crying. I hear the instructor’s encouraging tone. I see signs of concern and relief on the faces of other parents watching new swimmers. Coming out of my head and into the sensory world also allows me to see Frankie pop up from the water, his face bright with glee, relief, and pride. Back at their house after swimming lessons, I see the instant Quinn recognizes me. She runs over carrying a toy, a crayon, or a book she’s eager to show me.

Freed from rewriting the past or perfecting the future, I find I don’t always need to know what comes next. Sometimes the right response simply appears.

This isn’t indifference. If anything, it’s the opposite.

It draws me more deeply into the unpredictable joys and sorrows of a life I only get to live once, one moment at a time.

What noticing endings makes possible

Most approaches to mindfulness practice emphasize what to do after your attention wanders: simply notice that it has happened, then gently steer it back.

But there’s another way I learned from Shinzen Young: get curious about when a sensory experience ends.3 Instead of waiting for distraction, pick a sight, sound, or body sensation and follow it to its natural conclusion.

Stay with a sound until it fades. Track an exhalation to its endpoint. Watch something move until it leaves your field of view.

The end of a sensory experience doesn’t leave attention with nowhere to go. It positions you to notice what comes next.

That next perception might be a new sound, a shift in light, a bodily sensation, or even a quiet pause where nothing in particular stands out.

You don’t have to go searching for it.

You can practice letting it come to you.

Practicing in this way can make sensory experience more vivid and immediate. Instead of being swept away by interpretation and abstraction, you become fascinated by the continuous play of endings and beginnings happening right now.

Rather than internally shouting NO! at entire chapters of my life, I have more moments of a different kind of recognition: Oh my God, I’m alive. This is what it feels like to be alive. Even the most ordinary moments can feel infused with the miraculous.

You may not be able to rewrite the life behind you or guarantee the one ahead.

But you can become more available to the one that’s unfolding now.

Exercise

This exercise invites you to follow sights, sounds, and sensations to their endings, then notice what arises next.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• When you feel caught in repetitive thinking

• While listening to music or spending time outdoors

• During an ordinary transition, such as finishing a meal, leaving a room, or ending the workday

Read more

I’ve been meditating daily for more than two decades. That probably sounds more impressive than it feels, because it implies that the challenge of establishing the habit persisted longer than it actually did. The truth is that after a couple of months, it began to feel as routine as taking a shower or going to the bathroom.

It can be more difficult to maintain the habit when I travel, but the novelty of being in a new place often adds a layer of curiosity and enthusiasm. I feel lucky for the opportunities I’ve had over the years to meditate in some sensorially spectacular places.

A couple of years ago, Matt and I spent Easter weekend hiking in West Texas. Each morning, before sunrise, I carried a chair outside our little concrete casita and sat gazing out at the vast Chihuahuan Desert landscape.

I practiced one of my favorite approaches to mindfulness: noticing the experience of seeing, hearing, and feeling—both the sights, sounds, and sensations in my body, and the mental images, internal talk, and emotions I can feel in my body.

If you had seen me sitting there as the sun came up, you might have assumed I was trying very hard to savor the experience. Maybe you thought I was deeply relaxed, that my mind was quiet, or that I was trying to somehow take some of the desert home with me by capturing it in my mind.

In reality, my subjective experience was considerably messier.

I wasn’t taking in an idealized desert sky. I was seeing the desert sky through my 58-year-old eyes. The bright colored flowers were blurry without my glasses. As the sky brightened, I could see the familiar floaters that had drifted through my vision since I was 23. They were particularly prominent against the brightening expanse of pale blue sky and fluffy white clouds. In addition to the personal window I can’t wipe clean, there are the intermittent images my mind conjures from the past or about the future.

The desert was extraordinarily quiet. Which also meant I could clearly hear the white-noise hiss of my tinnitus. It’s been with me for more than a decade, and I’ve come to recognize it almost as the sound silence makes now. There were also the sounds of my mental chatter coming and going within all the quiet.

And then there was my body. Some sensations were comfortable and settled; others weren’t. There were little aches, stiffness, itches, and a signal from my bladder emerging. Unpleasant feelings were along for the ride amid the pleasant ones: subtle restlessness, the residue of a disagreement from the day before, and the gradual evidence of caffeine circulating.

None of this ruined the sunrise.

In fact, this is largely what I’ve been practicing all these years.

I’m not trying to make myself believe that my life is enough. I’m not telling myself that I should accept difficult circumstances or be grateful for what I have.

I’m aiming for something much smaller and more immediate: Can I experience what I’m seeing, hearing, or feeling right now as enough, just as it is?

Sometimes I can. Sometimes the desire for something to be different is much stronger. Enoughness isn’t an attitude or “mindset” that I can impose on every experience to beat it into blissful submission.

It is, however, something I’ve gotten better at detecting.

A sound can be enough as it is.

The temperature of one hand can be comfortable enough for now.

Not every exhale needs to live up to something I have in mind.

The view in front of me doesn’t need elements added to it or removed.

Maybe enoughness is less a conclusion we reach than a sensation we can learn to recognize: a momentary weakening of the impulse to improve, enhance, prolong, remove, or otherwise interfere with what’s already happening.

My Grandma Donna used to say, usually after spending a little extra money or giving some away, “You can’t take it with you.”

She was right.

But perhaps there’s a version of taking that has less to do with holding on to an experience than with learning how to take it in.

I couldn’t bring that West Texas sunrise home with me. A photograph can’t preserve the experience. My memory can’t either.

But I can use experiences like that—and much more ordinary ones—to strengthen my capacity to recognize moments when nothing needs to be added or taken away. Even moments that carry uncertainty, ugliness, unpleasant sounds, or discomfort.

I don’t need to pay this kind of attention every waking minute.

I try to do it more often than never.

Today’s attention exercise is an experiment in recognizing that quieter signal: nothing about this particular sight, sound, or sensation needs to change right now.

Exercise

This attention exercise invites you to notice enoughness at the perceptual level. By exploring sights, sounds, body sensations, and breathing without trying to improve them, we practice recognizing moments when nothing needs to be added, removed, or changed.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• When something pleasant makes you want more. Before reaching for the next bite, song, episode, photograph, purchase, or experience, take a few seconds to notice what “enough” feels like.

• When you catch yourself subtly fighting an ordinary moment. Waiting in line, sitting in traffic, hearing an irritating sound, or feeling restless can become opportunities to find one sensory detail that doesn’t need to change.

• When an experience feels especially worth savoring. Instead of trying to hold onto a sunset, a conversation, a meal, or a quiet morning, experiment with letting one moment be complete before the next one arrives.

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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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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 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.

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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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.

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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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