Tension has seeped into my musculature and made itself at home. It’s a hidden force that sits along the ridge of my shoulders and neck, like an army occupying the high ground awaiting an attack. The grip is silent and unnoticed until I place my attention there. Once seen, it’s advantage shrinks, and the tightness starts to dissipate like slow air from a balloon. I continue watching, take a long breath, adjust my posture, and exhale. Simply noticing my body causes things to ease.
I can be gripped by the nonphysical too, thought loops rolling across the musculature of my mind. Ruminations manufacture whole scenarios, embellished stories about the past, or fantasy futures I am wishing for or against. Placing my attention on these mental fabrications can deflate them, too. In some ways, thoughts are stickier because they’re not concrete and can slip by unquestioned. Thinking carries a false authority until we see that not all thoughts are true. Some, maybe most, are working drafts to occupy a mind prone to worry.
The first step is to notice. A world of benefits follow, but it’s hard to get there if I don’t cultivate the foundational skill of noticing. This requires a stepping out and a looking at; pushing pause on the movie of my life and peeking behind the camera. Often, I’m so caught in activity mode that the images rushing by create a convincing reality, when in truth, my perception has narrowed to a slim range. When I push pause and look deeper, reality becomes much, much bigger: I recognize my muscles are tense, holding a pain I did not realize was grief; I sense my thoughts are racing, but they lose their speed and urgency when I give them my attention; even the sprouting tulips are more red, more fragile, once I truly see them.
The step of noticing is small and big. It starts with the tiniest dot of a pause and opens into volumes. Without the step of noticing, I’m at the blind mercy of automatic forces that sap my strength. With it, I can start to exercise some choice about how I want to be.
Anything gets better the more we do it. I cultivate awareness by regularly practicing the skill of noticing. The foundation practice for me is meditation, which I use as a chance to step out of my habituated patterns of thinking and feeling and just … notice. What is my body sensing? What thoughts are banging at the door? What are my reactions to both? Anything that reveals itself in my awareness can be noticed as a neutral observation of occurrence. By devoting a small space of time each day to just notice, I find I can push the pause button more easily during the flow of the day.
Sometimes my pause is short. I remain in activity mode, which operates at the surface, like a photograph – accurate, but two-dimensional. Other times, the pause lengthens, and I fall more deeply, entering contemplative mode. Consciousness has layers. It goes a long way down. I’ve yet to find the bottom. Here, the calm is palpable, my insights clearer, my heart more porous, my worries floating at the surface, happy to wait for my return.
Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash