It is true that you can find dozens of ways to quiet your mind. Knitting, reading, and prayer all work. Progressive relaxation where you focus on your toes and feet, your lower legs and right up to the top of your head works and is interesting. Putting your attention on each part of your body is good for your body and your mind, too. However, those activities can all be done in a way that is good for all of you but does not train your awareness of your attention.
Training for awareness of your attention is a sort of meta-training, since your attention is itself the focus of your thinking. Where you put your attention matters. Dr. Michael Merzenich showed that doing something attentively and not attentively differ and that attention matters. You have an extra tool, an overview of yourself if you can learn to note what you are attending to. We have both conscious attention, as when we ponder the next move in a chess game and attention from an external stimulus, as when we look up to see who just came in the cafe.
Our mind itself is always re-focusing on something new. Think about your ankle. You may not want to. See? You jumped from whatever your first reaction to "think about your ankle" was to thinking you didn't want to think about your ankle. Maybe you remembered injuring your ankle or being aware of the beauty of your ankles. Our minds are association machines and we can associate one thing with others all day. But with training, we can become more aware of our focus. We become more able to see the tricks, omissions and commissions we commit with our minds.
The first step is concentration. We concentrate on a spot or on our breath. Why? So we have a chance to catch our minds with they go off in a story about how cute the neighbor's dog is or whatever. Concentrating on a spot or on our breath can be a challenge. We quickly decide it is soooooooo boring. We try to concentrate for 5 minutes and it feels like 5 hours. But over time, the quiet, the relaxation and the comfort of our own honest, full company with ourselves becomes a pleasant place to be. We try to do 5-10 minutes every day for 6 months. We do enough that we begin to notice our minds when we are not practicing.
At some point, we may get to where we drop the focus of a spot to look at or our breath and just sit letting the mind display its wants and themes. We might get to the point where we watch our mind play its programs as a tv plays. We might get so that we see how multiple, how nutty, how colorful, how primitive, how fleeting, how colorful our thoughts are.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
