28. Meditation 14

Use your attention as a flashlight to focus on different parts of your body.

Okay. Just find your seat.
Feel your body resting in space.
Let gravity settle you.
Feel the sensations of heaviness and warmth or coldness, vibration, whatever you can notice that reveals that you have a body.
As you feel the sensations of the breath coming and going, see if you can feel all this closely enough so as to relax the concept of the body, your sense of its shape.
If you feel your hands on your thighs or knees or on the armrests of a chair, feel these sensations closely enough so that you no longer feel the shape of your hands or your arms or legs.
Notice that all that is really there is a cloud of sensation, changing moment by moment.
You don’t actually feel the shape of anything.
As you pay attention to the breath and to sounds and sensations, I want you to observe a difference between attention and consciousness.
They’re not quite the same.
Attention is like a spotlight in the field of consciousness.
For instance, pay attention at this moment to the feeling of your tongue in your mouth resting against your teeth.
Feel those sensations as closely as possible.
But notice that there are other things that you do notice.
You’re paying attention to your tongue, but you can also hear my voice and other sounds and other sensations in your body appear to you in the field of consciousness.
You’re aiming your mind at your tongue in this case, but other things are appearing.
It’s this sense of aiming that is attention.
It’s also this sense of aiming that can feel like a self.
It can feel like there’s a meditator in the center of consciousness.
This is an illusion that we will spend more and more time considering as we practice here.
But for the moment, notice how attention feels.
Pay attention now to the sensations in your hands.
Really focus there. Try not to miss anything.
But notice too that you’re also hearing the sound of my voice.
That is just impinging on consciousness all on its own, but you’re trying to notice everything in your hands.
It’s that difference that I want you to observe. Attention is the attempt to narrow the field of consciousness, and attention can seem to be directed by an act of will. There’s a connection between attention and volition.
See if you can feel that directly.
Pay attention to the sensations in your back.
Really try to place your mind there to the exclusion of all else.
Attention can also be directed into the mind itself, into memories and images.
Picture the Statue of Liberty and pay attention to that image, whatever appears, however vague.
Picture the statue as closely as you can, and now pay attention to part of it.
If you have an image of the face and the crown or the upraised arm and the torch, or you can do this with some image that you might even be more familiar with. Picture the whole thing in a flash, but pay more attention to part of it.
Even while doing this, you’re hearing my voice and feeling sensations elsewhere in your body.

For the last minute of this session, just give up all efforts. Don’t pay attention to anything strategically, just notice what appears in the open space of consciousness . . .

Well, once again, thank you for the efforts you’re making here. I hope you’re finding this to be a good use of your time. Again, the goal, if we can use that concept here, is to erase the boundary between formal practice and the rest of life. So more and more, I’ll be encouraging you to think about what we’re doing here as indistinguishable from other moments in life. And perhaps you can build that into the rest of your day in some formal way. If you can pause before starting work at your desk, or before making a phone call, or answering an email, just check in with your state of mind, again, if only for 10 seconds, punctuating your day with moments of mindfulness really is immensely powerful. So I’ll be reminding you to do that from time to time.