Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
feeling bored
feeling achy
feeling embarrassed
Mindfulness is the art of non-conceptual awareness.
It doesn’t require that we stop thinking but that we learn to notice the difference between sensory perception and mental comprehension.
Making this distinction requires habitually setting aside what things mean to simply notice them.
Poets and artists invite us to play the same game without calling it mindfulness.
The poet Paul Valéry pointed to this capacity when he said, “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.”
We could also say that hearing is forgetting what generated the sound and that feeling is forgetting what a sensation means—and whether we like it or not.
Adults interpret this too literally and convince themselves they’re doing wrong.
It can help to approach the challenge as a child would.
Young children don’t need to be told that listening to ambient sounds lowers their blood pressure. They don’t need to be convinced to stare at a flower, insect, or work of art because it’s good for their brain health. They’re willing to feel the sun on their arm because being alive is fascinating. We have to teach them to value conceptual understanding over direct experience.
It’s not that children turn off their minds while relishing ordinary perceptions. They enjoy identifying a sound’s source and learning the animals’ names. They can describe when something hurts, feels good, or tastes delicious.
They’re still young enough to value direct sensory awareness as they accumulate a conceptual understanding of themselves and the world around them.
Children and adults need both kinds of awareness to navigate their lives effectively. However, adults tend to anchor their attention primarily on concepts by default. As a result, they often struggle to recognize how raw sensory data can be beneficial beyond merely contributing to their understanding, predictions, and opinions.
Practicing mindfulness means deepening an appreciation of visual, auditory, and somatic perceptions for their own sake while valuing the ability to think about what it all means.
One of the best ways to calibrate your mindfulness practice efforts is to bring a childlike curiosity to any exercise. The goal is not to turn your mind off but to reconnect with the visceral delight of being alive—whether the observable details are pleasant or not.
Another way to loosen your grip on concepts is to explore sensations apart from how we usually think about them. You can zoom out to cover broader areas of sensations and zoom in to feel a portion of sensations you have names for.
The exercise below illustrates the variety of options for practicing non-conceptual awareness of body sensations. Instead of trying to eliminate thoughts, cultivate your curiosity toward the subtle sensations waiting to be experienced.
Feeling half of your face for a few seconds might seem insignificant to you as an adult, but developing the ability to feel half of the embarrassment in your face or a small part of the sadness in your chest can be freeing in ways that children are too inexperienced to appreciate fully.
