For just about anything, the more we do it, the better we get – a backhand in tennis, scales on the piano, birding by ear. And it’s not just the repetition that helps, it’s the quality of attention we bring that changes everything. When our focus fills the full shape of the thing we’re doing, the distinction between an isolated “me” doing a separate “thing” fades. Our hips, hands, and racquet move as a whole; our fingertips feel the bottom of the keys; our hearing becomes the voice of birdsong. We experience life as a flow, actor and action fused.
The same is true of spiritual practice. Setting aside a regular time provides the repetition, but playing with the quality of my attention is where the magic happens. It’s not a side benefit, it’s the main attraction. I start out doing something and end up being something. I think of it as an immersive kind of listening. More than just hearing with my ears, it’s listening with my body, perceiving the space inside me and around me, sensing energies that ripple underneath, noticing impressions in my imagination. The seemingly solid world becomes fluid. Some sensations shout for attention, some are quiet whispers, others silent like the ocean currents. An aliveness overtakes me. I unfold in layers like a rose.
Listening at this depth drops me into another world. Existence feels bigger, my senses reach out to meet it. Rich textures surround and permeate me. I rarely stay in this expanded state for long. I get distracted, or anxieties flare up, or I remember the tasks I need to accomplish, and the world collapses back. The minutia of living has its own quality of attention, focused on surface details, important in its way.
At first, it seems like the two worlds are separated by a permeable wall that I can pull my way through and sit for a while. Every time I experience the larger field, my senses grow, adjust, tune to the vibrations a little bit more, and it becomes easier to find my way back. Practice in any sphere, done at depth, changes our mode of being. We realize we are not the constricted self we had imagined ourselves to be. As I flex the quality of my attention more and more, telescoping in and out to fit the needs of the moment, the wall thins and the worlds come closer together.
Photo by Pavel Marianov on Unsplash