"After you read a poem just knowing you can hold it, you can be in that space of the poem. And it can hold you in its space."

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

An attention exercise on the theme of rest barely disguised as a poem.

When you begin a walking or running program, there are several details you can track as evidence of improvement. Your step count. The length of your stride. Your pace. The amount of time it takes your heart to return to its recover its baseline resting rate. But how will you know when you’re getting better at noticing perceptions? 

Any perception you can observe directly in real time can be used to train a variety of attention-related skills.

I like to make a game out of turning ordinary activities into opportunities for practice.

There are a number of exercises I use when watching a film — whether it’s one I enjoy, dislike, or have seen before.  

"You don't have to analyze it. You just have to feel it." 

Dan Harris

What keeps us holding out for these perfect, comfortable lives that we imagine? And how can training your attention help address these habits?

Mindfulness involves cultivating familiarity and intimacy with aspects of everyday experience that we often take for granted.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

What makes it so difficult for us to pay attention at any given moment? It seems like it should be easy.

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Louise Glück

First, you must let your heart
be broken open
in a way you have never
felt before,
cannot imagine.

Dorothy Walters

"Although emotional sensations can arise anywhere in the body, they are much more likely to arise in the belly, chest, throat, or face. These are the emotional hotspots in the body, the regions where emotional sensations can get huge. That means that other areas are much less likely to host gigantic emotional sensations, which turns out to be a useful and convenient thing."

Michael Taft

Thinking your way through unpleasant emotions takes time while a single repetition of any mindfulness exercise only takes a few seconds. The skills of attention strengthened by mindfulness practice enhance both the resolving of unpleasant emotions and the acceptance of them.  

One of the things I’ve found so remarkable about the approach to mindfulness I practice and teach, is the way it has gradually, yet significantly changed the way I relate to the physicality of my emotions—including the unpleasant ones.

If your strategy for trying to live in the present more doesn't acknowledge that the present often sucks, you will find yourself frequently convinced that you have failed instead of realizing that your expectations are unrealistic.

A mindfulness teacher needs to sell you on the possible outcomes of consistent practice but also has to steer you back again and again to the slippery path that leads to them.

"The universal war is not limited to the relation between different states, but takes place between villages, between households, and between individuals, and that it takes place even between the different parts of each individual soul."

~ T. K. Seung

yù yī - 玉衣

n. the desire to see with fresh eyes, and feel things just as intensely as you did when you were younger—before expectations, before memory, before words.

"Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been."

~ Mark Strand

It seems like stepping outside for a walk should be enough to clear our minds, but when we head outdoors, our attention tends to stay anchored in our heads. What we need is a practical focus strategy and more realistic expectations about how our minds respond to such a challenge.