If this is your first time seeing one of these, you’re welcome to hop in and give it a go, or you can start with the first one.
This is the twelfth episode in a series designed for absolute newbies to meditation or for those who really want to focus on the basics. This track includes ten minutes of meditation practice; if that feels like a lot to you, maybe start at the beginning! From here on out, we’ll keep going with sits that last approximately ten minutes.
Turn on the TV, get comfy, and play this track after you’ve watched: Evicted! (Season One, Episode Twelve).
If you want to know more about the work of Sharon Salzberg (mentioned in this episode) you can check out her website or her Wikipedia article.
P.S. If you’re curious, here you can find out why I started this project.
Recording Transcript (Meditation Begins at 6:13)
Hey there, friend. Welcome back to another adventure together.
Today we will be continuing, our concentration practice. Last time, we experimented with a couple options as an object of focus, and today we’ll be choosing one of those and gently keeping our attention fixed on that point, bringing it back when our minds wander.
One of the benefits of building concentration in this way is that we increase the feeling of connection between our minds and our bodies. They already are connected, naturally, but we can become more aware, more conscious of this connection, and therefore, more trusting of it. After all, we often fear things that we don’t understand. Another benefit of building this skill of concentration is to be able to feel more at home in our own experience. When you have the ability to concentrate, it means your attention has a quality of greater care. When you care about something, or want to direct your attention to a specific focus, you are able to offer that thing more than just your intention. You can pair your intention with the skillful ability to remain concentrated on the things you value, even and perhaps especially, while being bombarded with countless other competing thoughts and stimuli. And I’m sure there are other benefits to concentration that you can think of that I haven’t named, and some of those will likely surface for you as well if you stick with this practice.
But the pursuit of these goals will probably look a bit different than other goals you have tried to pursue. When we want to demonstrate that we really care about a thing, we tend to amp up our motivation as high as it will go, we prove to ourselves that we are really committed and we don’t let up until we get it. We will conquer any obstacles that stand in our way until we get what we want.
But this is actually a pretty unhelpful impulse when trying to cultivate concentration, at least sustainable concentration. We tend to think about concentration as silencing all competing voices, holding our focus with laser precision on the object we are concentrating on. This may work for a couple of minutes, but it will not work for long. And it will leave us feeling pretty exhausted, which can make it harder to concentrate on anything at all.
When we are practicing concentration, what we are really practicing is a balance of self-acceptance on one hand, welcoming whatever comes up, rather than resisting distractions as they arise (and they will arise), and a continual process of letting go on the other hand, as gently as possible, recognizing that our mind has drifted and bringing it back to the object of focus, coming back home, and, as one of my early meditation instructors Sharon Salzburg reminded me, “with as much kindness to ourselves as possible.”
Getting distracted doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It will happen again, and again, and again. The practice is not to avoid getting distracted, it is to recognize when we have become distracted and then, rather than getting caught in our usual cycles of self-judgment or negative self-talk or insecurity, we being as much kindness and gentleness to ourselves, we flex our letting go muscle, and we begin again. That’s the practice. It doesn’t matter if we have to begin again thousands of times, or if our attention stays focused for five minutes or five seconds, we simply let go and begin again.
I say simply not because this is simple to do, I expect that you will encounter a good bit, maybe a huge bit of friction. But the task is simple. We are not clamping down; we are just letting go. And this is where it helps to have that foundation that there is no getting it wrong. Even though you may find yourself more or less able to concentrate on different sits, that is okay. There are a million different factors which contribute to this fluidity in our skillfulness. You don’t have to understand why you are feeling distracted in order to accept your distraction as a welcome part of you, as a possible teacher. We have to give ourselves to get it “wrong” as many times as we need to before we get it right.
And indeed, Sharon calls these moments of “getting it wrong” magic moments, because these are the moments we have the chance to be different. When we realize our mind has drifted, we tend to want to beat ourselves up or stop trying and walk away. But the moment you realize you’ve become distracted is also the moment you can try again, as gently as possible. You will likely be feeling all kinds of fear and insecurity and judgment, you don’t have to ignore or eliminate those, you just have to come back to paying as much attention as you can on your breath, or the sounds around you, or your touch points, or whatever your object of focus is. And remember that often times, our fears are much worse than our reality. You may feel as if you can’t do this, as if you will never be able to focus your mind, but see if you can’t remember that you’re just sitting, comfortably and in a place where you are safe, for a few minutes. No matter how chaotic your mind becomes, your body is successfully resting, and we are listening to our bodies in these practices.
Okay. Enough explanation. You can’t learn to concentrate just by listening to someone concentrate, so let’s do the damn thing. No getting it wrong. “Calm down, weenies.” You’re gonna do great.
