Practicing mindfulness involves being open to changing perspective, not just switching interpretations but also shifting between different modes of attention.
Our default mode is narrative. We live life like a character in a movie. There are villains to overcome and conflicts to settle. The story gets more intense, but we're kept going by the hope of relief at the end.
Mindful awareness mode feels more poetic and sensory. There's nothing to fix. You have ten thousand things to observe, and you try to choose one to focus on for a few seconds.
I see this challenge as temporarily reclassifying the details of what occurs at any moment. It never replaces the narrative mode, but it ultimately improves it.
Narrative categories relate to storytelling, while poetic categories connect to our senses. Besides the traditional sensations (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and physical feelings), there are perceptions with similar qualities (mental images, internal chatter, and emotional perceptions).
When we work with sensory categories, we create some distance between observation and interpretation. We can focus on their explicit qualities instead of what they suggest. For example, a sound might be perceived as soft and high-pitched, rather than as beautiful or irritating.
One effective way to explore the power of recategorizing experience is to examine the contrast between active and restful perceptions.
In some exercises, we monitor mental activity. In this one, we enjoy the peaceful side of observable perceptions. They don't usually require our attention, but they can be quite delicious to experience intentionally.
Exercise
This exercise develops your ability to detect and savor restful perceptions.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Relatively comfortable — unrushed morning coffee, getting ready for bed
Pleasant or neutral sounds — sitting on a park bench, listening to music
Low-level restlessness or mild physical discomfort
Settle in. Decide whether you'd like to close your eyes or keep them open. There's no right choice, and you can change your mind anytime.
Detect physical rest. Find and gently observe restful sensations in the body while letting the active ones play out in the background.
Detect auditory rest. Find and listen to silence. Notice when a pleasant sound directs attention away from thinking, creating mental quiet.
Detect visual rest. Notice the darkness behind your closed eyelids or when the mental screen is blank.
Freely float between visual, auditory, and physical rest. While doing your best to allow the many active perceptions to persist in the periphery of your awareness, float from one restful perception to another, savoring it for a handful of seconds before moving on to the next.
