One thing I’ve learned to do recently that has aided me greatly in exercising control of the focus of my attention is adding a small block to my daily meditation.
I still do Warrior Meditation®, but at the end, in the metacognition phase, I’ll eventually open my eyes.
I know I can only focus on one thing at time, I can either be focused on my internal thoughts, or I can be focused the stimulations coming into my mind through one of my five senses.
I cannot focus on two things at one time.
The human mind can divide attention very rapidly, but I can only focus on one thing at a time.
The amount of incoming data that I can actually pay attention to at any given moment is shockingly low.
I recently went through a program called Neuro Linguistics Programming (great program), and in that training, they spoke of two million bits of data coming into my brain through my various senses per second.
That’s combining all the date coming into my brain from my sense of vision, touch, hearing, taste, and smell.
All of those combined, operating at full capacity are pounding my present life experience with two million bits of data per second.
Of that two million bits of data, I can actually focus on 126 bits of data at any given time.
Most of my life experience is being experienced and recorded by my unconscious mind, and my human brain filters out things that it feels are trivial and not oriented towards the goal of my “focus.”
That’s how the brain works.
The only thing I can control is what exactly I am focusing on “right now.”
I can allow myself to dwell upon my internal thoughts, or I can shift the focus onto one of my five senses and the experience coming into one of my five senses.
I typically do this technique towards the end of my metacognition phase, where I have already been practicing focusing on my breath for a while.
I’ll open my eyes on a nice, slow, incoming breath but not focus on my breath.
I focus on what I see around me. I just pick a spot with my vision, and notice it as I inhale.
Then I pause, holding the breath for a moment, shifting my focus from vision to the air in my lungs and start to slowly exhale through my mouth.
I focus on the air escaping my lungs as I exhale (notice that last little drop of air leaving).
I myself have noticed that my eyeballs actually shift downward a bit as I now focus on my escaping breath.
On the next inhale breath, leaving my eyes open, I shift my focus to my auditory senses.
“What am I hearing?”
Hold. Slowly exhale and again shift my focus to the air escaping my lungs/mouth.
Next inhale, I focus on my sense of touch, my kinesthetics. Am I comfortable? Am I relaxed? Is there any tension anywhere in my body?
Hold. Exhale, and again focus on the air escaping.
Next inhale, I will focus on my sense of smell on the inhale.
This one is a little tricky because I’ve trained myself to focus on my inhaling breath for so long that my natural inclination is to start doing that again automatically. I have to catch myself, “Nope! What do I smell? Anything?”
Hold. Exhale, focus on breath.
On the next inhale, I focus on my sense of taste.
“Is my breath fresh, or do I feel like I need to brush my teeth? Do I have coffee breath?”
Hold. Exhale and focus on the breath as it leaves.
I’ll repeat this a few times until I am done meditating.
What I have found is by doing this meditation exercise, the ability to catch myself dwelling on thoughts and shifting my focus off of them comes to me a lot easier throughout the day.
When I can shift my focus on/off my thoughts, the ability to remain in a peaceful mental state is a lot easier.
