Digging Deeper: Attention

One warm, sunny day I asked my son to walk down to grab the mail. The distance between our house and the mailbox is about a five-minute walk down a shared driveway. On his way back, he noticed something among the hedges lining the hillside and yelled to me from outside, “Mom! Come outside! You have to see this!” He said it with such intensity that I thought maybe something big or bad happened.

When I ran down to meet him and followed his pointed finger toward the hedges, I realized what he wanted to show me. “Look mom! Isn’t it so pretty?” The “it” he was pointing to was a lone, bright red hibiscus blooming amid a sea of green leaves.

Like a lot of children, my son is a “noticer.” He notices tiny, wonderful things. He attends to the world and in return, he gets and shares moments of awe. When I think about attention, I think about noticing. Pausing to attend can be challenging, as Ryan mentioned. Yet the practice of attention can begin by simply noticing. What do you notice about your breath? What do you notice about how your body feels at this moment? What do you notice about the environment around you? How can you connect what you notice with your sense of gratitude or joy or compassion?

Here are some resources to help you explore the value of attention.

• Tara Brach’s guided meditation on Cultivating a Kind Attention

• Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness practice 

• On Being Interview with the late Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winning poet who often wrote about attention

With grateful attention,
Lisa