Mind Whispering

Author:Tara Bennett-Goleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

One-Pointedness

Focusing on just one thing calms the mind. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see yourself with greater clarity, to perceive what’s genuinely there. It’s like letting muddy water settle; once the mud sinks to the bottom, the water clears. One-pointedness of attention is a kind of settling of the mind, protecting the mind from distraction.

Collecting attention on one point of focus has powerful benefits for mode work. It both calms our disturbing emotions and creates more breathing space around our habitual reactions. We’re less likely to head for the exit when we face the unsettling feelings that can arise when we challenge mode habits.

If you anchor your boat, it can still experience the currents of the sea, but it doesn’t get carried away by them—it stays put. One-pointedness acts like an anchor for the mind.

Find a quiet time and place, and sit quietly, bringing your focus to your breathing. Don’t try to control it in any way; just be fully aware of the sensations of your breath. When you concentrate on your breath, it becomes the anchor where you continually return. If you steadily stay with the breath for a while, your attention will begin to feel more stable. The more stable your concentration, the more this mental skill will transfer to being more present to sounds, images, feelings—to all of life’s experiences.

You can play with this practice—try to notice when your mind wanders—then redirect your attention to what is occurring in the present. You can always use the one-pointedness on your breath as an anchor.

Try this: when you first wake up in the morning, for a few minutes direct your mind to your breath rather than just drifting with your thoughts. As thoughts come up in your mind, let them go and return your focus to your breath. See if it makes a difference in how you pay attention to other activities through the rest of your day.

One-pointed attention is the foundation for all other meditative practices. Steadiness of mind lessens the tendency to immediately jump into some other thought, so forgetting what we were in the middle of.3

The Sanskrit word for concentrative meditation, samadhi, means to put together or collect (as in collecting wood to build a fire). To see things clearly, we first need to collect our minds by becoming more focused and composed.

The insecure modes are opposites of concentration: the avoidant cannot sustain focus on what’s so upsetting; the anxious gets too agitated. Then there’s the mind on automatic: a distracted, dull attention that gets swept away by whatever is interesting in that moment. Our thoughts adrift, we are driven by random impulse; our minds do not stay put at all.

But in order to carry through on anything in life, we need sustained attention, the remedy for a scattered mind. Concentration helps us work with our modes in several ways. For one, being able to sustain the continuity of a focused mind builds a stable base for sustaining mindfulness.

Being

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