Transformation Through Directing Your Attention
As a global community that values compassion, fairness, and care for all, we work together with complex and diverse modalities to create new systems and new ways of being together, of relating and communicating. Transformation work spans the continuum from global action to individual change. Ideally, efforts at all levels along the continuum reinforce one another and synergize to create the change we envision. For example, actions you take to serve your community support others just as they support you in your own internal transformation.
As someone who is dedicated to personal transformation, along with contributing meaningfully, you are likely aware that the way you use your attention shapes your life and affects the lives of those around you. You understand that your attention is one of your most valuable internal resources. Strategies that enable you to direct your attention in simple, authentic ways help you transform little by little.
Consciously learning to direct your attention is not a practice of positive thinking or always looking at the bright side. Truly helpful strategies for directing your attention respond to what is in front of you; but instead of that response being informed by habits that don't serve your life, it can be informed by your aspiration to grow into the embodiment of wisdom, love, and compassion. Simple daily, in-the-moment decisions help you align with such aspirations.
Let's look at four strategies for directing your attention and responding authentically in the moment.
Sensing
Gratitude
Compassion
Loving-kindness wishes or prayers
Sensing
Simply putting attention in one or more of the five senses offers a way to land in equanimity, clarity, and a restful open state of body, heart, and mind. Shifting your attention to the senses is typically most useful when you notice that you are in a chaotic, anxious, or distracted state. In these states, your mind and attention are jumping from thought to thought and feeling to feeling. You are likely rehearsing, either consciously or unconsciously, doubts, judgements, and limiting stories and beliefs about who you are and how life should or shouldn't be. Resting attention in the senses interrupts these harmful habits and brings relief.
When shifting your attention to the senses, choose the sense that you are most drawn to in the moment. This will be dependent upon your environment and your own preferences or strengths.
For example, if you happen to be outside, it may be easiest to focus on how many colors or shapes or you can see or to focus on the play of shadow and light. If you are inside near an open window, it may be easiest to focus on the sound of birds, cars going by, construction in the distance, etc. If you are at home and someone is cooking, you might focus your attention on scent, noticing how many different scents you can detect. If you are physically active, it might be most simple to focus on movement: to feel the contraction and release of muscles, the rolling of joints, or the texture and pressure on hands and feet.
If you can maintain your attention on sensing for even a full minute, you will experience relief as well as groundedness. This will enable you to return to the task at hand and respond in a way that’s truly useful.
Gratitude
Feeling and expressing gratitude is a way of honoring the efforts of the many living beings that have enabled a given moment to occur. Gratitude conditions your body, heart, and mind in the directions of humbly receiving, celebrating, and honoring interdependence. Learning to direct your attention to gratitude interrupts habits of directing attention to what's missing, what's wrong, or what could go wrong. Gratitude practice helps your attention become more even so that when you consciously choose to focus on a problem or challenge you will be able to perceive it in more subtle and complex ways and act with greater wisdom.
Turning attention toward gratitude is most simple and authentic when you are obviously receiving or benefitting in a given moment. Common opportunities for attending to gratitude include eating, lying down in the comfort of your bed, receiving affection from another, walking through a park, snuggling with a pet, or kissing your children goodnight. Identify the most obvious moments of receiving and benefitting for you. Make a list of these daily events, and set your intention to turn towards the feelings, thoughts, and words of gratitude every time they occur.
Compassion
The most obvious time to turn your attention to compassion is when you notice your own suffering or the suffering of others. Compassion is marked by an upwelling of care, concern, and a wish for relief from suffering. Compassion interrupts habits like blame, shame, or anger, which direct your attention away from the discomfort and pain of experiencing or witnessing suffering in the moment. Being able to meet suffering with wisdom requires the ability to compassionately stay with it. As you are able to stay with the experience of suffering or witnessing suffering, you can begin to understand what's happening and offer help that is truly responsive.
To sustain your compassionate attention on suffering, it's helpful to have gestures or phrases. Gestures might include putting your hand on your heart, placing one hand in the other, bowing, gently nodding your head, or rocking your body back and forth. Here are some examples of phrases that are commonly used to stay with and access compassion:
Dear one, I care about your suffering
It's okay, I can be with this experience
I am willing to let my heart break in care for this person
May they be free from suffering
May they know relief
May they be safe
I can offer companionship in this experience
Loving-kindness wishes or prayers
Directing your attention to loving-kindness and prayers for the well-being of yourself and others is, perhaps, most authentic when you are experiencing ease or engaged in routine physical tasks like washing the dishes. Loving-kindness wishes or prayers are a helpful way to interrupt mental chatter. You've likely noticed that, even when you are not distressed, your mind constantly chatters. It rehearses previous conversations, prepares for future events, reviews the to-do list, etc.
Particular gestures or phrases can also be helpful with directing and sustaining your attention in this way. Notice what you already do when you are loving someone or wishing for their well-being or celebrating their successes. How do your hands move? How do you hold your body? What do you do with your gaze? What do you say? What thoughts do you have? Answer these questions and choose two or three things to help you direct and sustain loving-kindness wishes and prayers for well-being and joy.
Practice
Choose one of these four strategies to integrate into your day today. Set your intention and identify specific moments, relationships, or events in which you will direct your attention in this way.
*You can find a more traditional Buddhist perspective on directing your attention in my recent Dharma talk.