this practice helps develop exclusive attention because it takes advantage of the way bodily sensations compete with mental objects for attention. When we expand our scope of attention to include the entire body, that’s a huge amount of somatosensory information to take in.4 With all those bodily sensations filling consciousness, there’s simply no attention left over for distracting mental objects. In other words, you create exclusive, “single-pointed” attention not by “shrinking” your attention down to a small point, but by expanding it so there’s no room for distracting thoughts and other
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