The Power of Attention: Change your World.

In Mindfulness meditation we're always talking about attention. The definition of Mindfulness is 'paying attention in a particular way'. So we're always either paying attention, or taking the attention or bringing attention to something. But if I had to ask you what attention is, exactly, what would you say? Would you know? :)

In Mindfulness, attention is deemed to be not just another function alongside other cognitive functions. In meditation we believe that attention is a process which happens before cognitive function and before things arise.

One opinion maintains that the kind of attention we place on a thing changes the very nature of the thing we have placed our attention on. I really like that idea and have been playing around with the fluidity of our attention a little bit this past week, bringing a slightly playful quality to it. After all, Mindfulness doesn't have to become Grimfulness.

Bringing a Mindful quality to things, paying attention to things in a particular way, changes the nature of the way in which those things exist to us. Even the world in which those things exist changes by the quality of attention we bring to it. You could say that the quality of our attention changes the way we experience our world. That's quite powerful, then.

The kind of attention I'm talking about is not the kind of attention we experience when an ambulance roars past, making a loud noise, grabbing our attention. I would label that as stimuli. I'm talking about placing our attention on something, like taking our Mindfulness there. It's a more conscious action.

If the idea of the quality of our attention affecting our reality is starting to feel like a mental Gordian knot, allow me to use a simplistic but interesting example about how our attention is fluid, elastic and playful.

We bring a different quality of attention to different things. Imagine you are my friend. The quality of the attention you bring to bear on me will be different from the way in which you would attend to me if I were your partner, or boss, patient, brother, a guest, sister, mother or a cashier / shop assistant.

If you take a moment to imagine the way you would pay attention to a variety of the people above, you will feel the kind of attention you pay to each and every person is subtly different. I don't really like to use the word 'energy' so much, but the quality of attention we place on our partner definitely has a different energy to the quality of attention we place on a cashier or work colleagues.

You will also have a quite different experience of me than I do, but I also have a different experience of you than you do of yourself. You would have a different experience of my mother, who might be your friend, and I would have a different experience of your sister if she is my friend. And yet nothing objectively has changed in any of these people.

Furthermore, you would feel changed if I changed the type of my attention towards you from friend-attention to shop-assistant attention. Therefore the quality of attention I bring to bear on others will also change their world. Think about it: the biggest gift you can give anyone is to pay attention to them completely, to be totally mindful of the person you are with at that moment. Not to be distracted in any way. What could be more special than that?

This difference in the quality of our attention doesn't just happen within our human world. It happens with everything we come into contact with. Taking a mountain as an example: it can be a landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to a prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or to another the dwelling place of the gods. The mountain is changed by the attention given to it, but there is no “real” mountain or right or wrong mountain here. There is no right way of thinking or one way of thinking that reveals the true mountain. It is just one particular way of many ways of looking at a mountain.

Attention also changes who we are, we who are paying attention. By paying attention to someone doing something, we become closer to that person by becoming measurably more like them and connecting with them, recognising how they feel.

So through the direction and nature of our attention we create our world.

Such attention or Mindfulness is not a function, not a thing, it's a process.

So I invite you again to think about how you pay attention. Someone remarked this morning that it all starts with love. If we love someone, we pay attention. I invite you to imagine how it would change your experience - how it would feel to you - as well as to the person receiving your attention - if you were to pay the same kind of loving-kindness / metta / compassionate attention to each person you are interacting with as you would with the person you feel the most love for.

And then, lastly, how do you pay attention to yourself ?

Interesting, isn't it?

Paying attention to ourself with the same loving-kindness and compassion we felt for the person on the list above we connected with the most - sometimes that's the biggest challenge of all.