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.
