The quality of my attention guides the trajectory of my spiritual growth. It’s the beating heart at the center of any practice – watching the breath in meditation, feeling the body stretch and find new shape in yoga, searching inward during prayer. My ability to direct and sustain my attention is what opens all possibilities. Without it, I’m adrift, bouncing between events, controlled by old patterns that no longer serve me.
As I experience it, the major obstacle to shifting the seat of my consciousness are my patterns of past conditioning. I spent my early years learning the wonders and terrors of being a physical being in a material world. My ego learned how to navigate life at the level of survival and acquisition, avoiding what hurt and pursuing what I desired. These ego skills were useful, necessary steps in my development, and I am grateful for them. But they created internal structures of belief that spring into action automatically. I have to encounter and redirect these patterns in order to grow. And I can’t do that if I don’t see them.
My attention is like a tender plant with deep roots. It needs my care. With water, it blooms. Neglected, it withers. All it takes is for me to use it with awareness, to place attention on whatever I am experiencing and let it instruct me. When I do, new worlds step out from the ordinary. A flat curtain opens and the scene gains depth. Colors become colors because I notice. Details share their fullness. Immediate. Intimate. But when I am caught in the old patterns, I lose touch with my attention. My senses retreat, details flatten. Life skims along the surface in a dull, repetitive motion. The sacred evaporates.
In a world of constant distraction, my attention is always at risk. My screens are never far away, calling to me, promising rich experience. But they are engineered by those who know well the patterns of my past conditioning and how to tickle my addictive vulnerabilities. The screens are happy to have me stay, devouring my attention for as long as they can. Luckily, the roots are resilient. It doesn’t take much to strengthen them. Radical abstinence is not needed, there is great value in small steps. Moving the rudder, even slightly, changes where the ship ends up.
I have been trying small steps lately to reduce my screen time. I avoid going to my devices first thing in the morning. I spend the first hour of the day enjoying the analog world. Everything I need will be there later, but the first light of morning will be gone. I’ve gone back to wearing a wristwatch so I don’t reach for the phone to see the time. When I feel an impulse to open my laptop, I spend a moment paying attention to the urge itself. Sometimes I find the need was not so important, that it was more out of habit.
I have not mastered these steps, it’s a work in progress. I try to remember that everything is practice. My response to every occasion leaves an impression, a thumbprint history of my experience. I hold on to as many of the good ones as I can, and let the stale ones fall away.
Photo by A.C. for Unsplash