Issue Two: Paying Attention
Attention is complicated these days.
We all have it, and we all use it constantly, albeit, not always as consciously as we might want. Despite being aware of the way we waste our attention we do tend to assume that if something were truly important, we would notice it. If someone were speaking to us, we would hear. Perhaps even if we were tired that we would realise, and that if something wasn’t really functioning it would render itself obvious to us.
If something really needed our attention we believe we would still be able to give it.
I'm sure you can recognise a time when you were physically in one room whilst your mind was somewhere else. We have all pottered alongside someone only half listening to the conversation (sometimes they noticed and called us out, but many times not). Likely you have eaten a meal and couldn’t remember tasting it, or even, completed the walk home without noticing anything but your phone screen.
Probably, we’ve all also completed an asana practice without actually inhabiting our bodies!
Whilst we can consider that might begin to address these things with intentionality, Yoga actually suggests something different. Specifically, yoga is clear that working with the mind effectively actually comes much later in the process, and that our practice begins instead with the body and the breath.
But before any of that is truly effective we have to make the shift from ‘fixing’ something, to removing expectation and simply noticing it.
The practice of paying attention
One of the first things we ask people to do when they begin practising yoga is to pay attention to the breath. It sounds simple. And in some ways it is.
For a few moments, we ask ourselves to notice something that has been happening all day without requiring our conscious involvement;
Is the breath shallow or deep?
Fast or slow?
Easy or restricted?
Where can I feel it?
What happens when I stop trying to change it?
And then, inevitably, the mind wanders. We think about work. We remember something we forgot to do. We notice someone else's practice. We wonder how long we've been here. We start planning dinner. You know the rest…
Importantly though, this isn't a failure of the practice. This is the practice.
We notice that our attention has gone somewhere else. And then, gently, we bring it back.
Again.
And again.
And again.
More and more gently, More and more smoothly. With less and less negative self-narrative accompanying the drifting of our attention. This is the practice.
(We actually have some guided practices that explore exactly this on ‘Kula’ like this breath exploration not got access yet? Learn about Kula here)
However, something far more profound is occurring when we work with the seemingly simple act of paying attention to our breath.
There is an interesting idea emerging from cognitive science that has made me think about this quite differently. One of the ways the brain makes sense of the world is through something called predictive processing. Rather than simply receiving information from the world and then deciding what it means, the brain is constantly making predictions about what it expects to encounter and comparing those predictions with what actually arrives.
In other words, we're not simply looking at the world, we're looking at the world through everything we've already learnt about it. Our previous experiences, assumptions, memories and expectations all form part of the model we're carrying around.
Most of the time, this is incredibly useful. If you've walked into your kitchen hundreds of times, you don't need to consciously process every cupboard, chair and surface. Your brain has already made a pretty good prediction of what is going to be there. But the same system that makes the familiar world wonderfully efficient can also make it surprisingly difficult to see something new, or rather, something you weren’t expecting to see. Because once we have an expectation about something, we become very good at noticing the evidence that confirms it. Even our yoga practice!
As counterintuitive as it might at first seem, we don’t necessarily see what is there. We see an evaluation of what we were expecting to see.
Increasingly the Bayesian brain model is being used to detail this phenomenon, bringing an empirically backed lens that complements what yoga has been saying for centuries. It simply says that the brain is constantly balancing prior beliefs (in this system called cognitive priors) with actual incoming sensory information. The relative weight or precision given to those two sources influences how much the new information changes our existing model. If the prior is given more weight, incoming information has less influence. If the sensory evidence is given more weight, what we're actually experiencing can have more influence on what we believe.
Importantly, more recently, research has begun to show the degree to which we can influence this balance. Researchers have proposed that the attentional qualities cultivated through practices like focusing on the qualities of the breath may allow incoming sensory information to have greater influence, while reducing the dominance of strongly held prior expectations.
It means that paying attention isn't simply about concentrating harder. Rather, that it is about becoming a little less certain about what we are going to find.
About quite literally, structurally, training yourself to be increasingly open to what’s in front of you.
Think about walking into a conversation already knowing what the other person is going to say. Or meeting someone with a story about them already formed in your head. Or waking up convinced that today is going to be difficult.Or even stepping onto your yoga mat assuming that your body will feel a particular way.
Once the expectation is there, it becomes remarkably easy to find evidence for it.
‘See? I knew they'd say that’, ‘I knew today was going to be stressful’, ‘I knew my body wouldn't be able to do that’ etc. etc.
It doesn't mean that our expectations are wrong. Our previous experience is incredibly useful. It helps us navigate the world, recognise danger, make decisions and function without having to consciously process everything around us.
The problem comes when we stop noticing that we're using the lens.
When what we expect becomes so familiar that we mistake it for what is actually happening.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons yoga asks us to practise returning our attention again and again to something immediate. To something internal. To something mundane.
Not because we are trying to create a perfectly blank canvas.
Not because distraction means we've failed.
But because every time we notice that we've wandered into our own assumptions, we have an opportunity to look again and ask:
What is actually happening here?
Not what did I expect to happen?
Not what usually happens?
Not what happened last time?
Not even, what was I hoping might happen?
But what is actually happening now?
This feels particularly relevant to the idea of discernment that we touched on in the first Note. Discernment isn't simply about knowing what is right or wrong; rather it is about becoming sufficiently attentive to distinguish what is actually happening from the story we have already formed about it.
This is one of the reasons attention matters so much.
Without attention, we can spend a surprising amount of our lives experiencing our predictions rather than experiencing what is actually happening.
Yoga gives us a place to practise something different.
To notice.
To return.
To become curious again.
To allow the next moment to tell us something rather than immediately deciding what it will say.
And perhaps that is a much more useful definition of mindfulness than simply being present. It certainly isn't about achieving some permanently peaceful state in which nothing distracts us. It is the repeated practice of noticing what is actually here. Of training ourselves, and further, actually rewiring ourselves to be truly capable of noticing what is actually here.
There is another reason I've become increasingly interested in attention, and it's probably the part of the conversation about social media that concerns me most.
We talk a lot about how social media fragments our attention; the endless scrolling and intrusive notifications. The increasingly short and visually stimulating pieces of content. The reality that if something hasn't captured our attention within a few seconds, we've already moved on. It seems fairly obvious that spending a lot of time training ourselves to expect constant novelty isn't necessarily a great preparation for sitting quietly with something that takes time to understand.
It's not just that social media is eroding the stamina of our attention. It's that it can increasingly decide what our attention is exposed to. Every time we watch something, pause on something, like something, follow someone or scroll past something, we give the system another little piece of information about what holds our attention. The algorithm learns, and then it gives us more of what it thinks we want.
At first, that feels remarkably useful. The things we like become easier to find, the subjects we're interested in appear more often, and the people we agree with become more visible. But there is a consequence to this.
The more accurately the system predicts what we will engage with, the less often we may encounter something that surprises or challenges us; which takes us right back to the idea of the predictive brain.
If our minds are already constantly making predictions about the world, and then we spend significant amounts of our time inside an environment that is continually presenting us with information that fits those predictions without any real attentive effort required, we can end up in a rather complicated feedback loop.
We expect something → The algorithm notices → It gives us more of it → We see more evidence that our expectation was right → Our expectation becomes stronger.
And then the next time we encounter the real world, we are even more ready to notice the things that confirm our expectations and ever less capable of fixing our attention on the things that might keep our view broad.
It can happen with almost anything;
What we think people are like.
What we think relationships should look like.
What we think success looks like.
What we think our bodies should look like.
Even what we think we should be worried about.
The danger isn't necessarily that everything we're being shown is false, quite the opposite! Much of it may be completely true, but it will only ever be a small part of the truth.
If I believe that people are selfish, I can find an almost limitless supply of evidence that people are selfish. If I believe that everyone else is more successful than me, I can find thousands of carefully edited examples to prove it. If I believe that the world is frightening, there is no shortage of frightening things to show me. And if I believe that I'm right, the internet can become remarkably good at helping me feel right.
And so the simple act of practising paying attention becomes even more important. Yes it helps us pay attention for longer, but even more than that it keeps a better balance of looking at whats in front of us, rather than looking for confirmation of what we thought was there.
Yoga encourages us to notice the thing we weren't expecting,
The feel the feeling that doesn't fit the story we've been telling ourselves.
The recognise the day that turns out differently from the one we predicted.
To really experience the experience that doesn't fit neatly into the model we already have.
That is where the lessons of the practice start to settle in.
Of course, paying attention isn't always possible, and it certainly isn’t always pleasant.
Sometimes we avoid noticing things for very good reasons; there are things we'd rather not think about, or not yet resourced enough to think about. Conversations we aren’t ready for, and habits we'd rather not examine. And I think this is where some of the more superficial versions of mindfulness can become unhelpful becuase present isn't always a straight line to feeling peaceful.
Being present means noticing that sometimes we're angry, or exhausted, or disappointed.
The purpose of attention isn't to make everything comfortable. It is to make things gradually clearer.
And, ultimately that clarity will gives us greater agency.
We may still choose not to act. We may still decide to wait, and we may decide that something ultimately isn't ours to change. But at least we're responding to what is actually happening rather than what we'd prefer to be happening.
Returning
What I think is most important to remember about practising attention is that it doesn't require perfection.
We will get distracted. We will lose patience. We will reach for the phone. And, we will spend twenty minutes thinking about something that doesn't matter.
We will forget to breathe.
We will forget all of this.
And then, occasionally, we'll notice. That's the moment that matters. We can return.
Return to the breath.
Return to the person in front of us.
Return to the task we're actually doing.
Return to the food we're eating.
Return to the walk we're taking.
Return to the life that is actually happening rather than the one playing inside our heads.
And the most beautiful thing about this?
The universe is always willing!
Every single breath is an opportunity to return.
The universe never throws a strop and tells you that you’ve missed your chance, and now it doesn’t matter how hard you focus on your breath the opportunity is gone.
No.
Every single breath is an opportunity to return.
Every single breath is an opportunity to immerse in the texture of what is really happening.
Every single breath is an invitation to become delightfully surprised!
And, as Matt Licata says, “true healing is always a surprise.”
A Small Practice
At some point this week, choose one ordinary thing that you normally do while thinking about something else.
Making breakfast.
Walking somewhere familiar.
Having a shower.
Drinking your morning coffee.
Rolling out your yoga mat.
For a few moments, try doing only that thing.
No need to make it profound.
No need to meditate.
No need to become particularly peaceful.
Just notice what is actually happening.
And when your attention wanders - because it will - notice that too.
Then come back.
Notice.
Return.
Begin again.