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motivation, goals, expectations, diligence, distractions, and posture.
It doesn’t matter that your mind wandered. What’s important is that you realized it.
You want to continuously cultivate your ability to intentionally direct attention to any object you choose, regardless of its intrinsic interest. You do this by redirecting attention, over and over again, back to the meditation object whenever it wanders.
allow sounds, sensations, thoughts, and feelings to continue in the background. Be careful of the tendency to become so closely focused on the breath that peripheral awareness collapses.
Learn to accept these distractions, recognizing that they will go away by themselves, only to be replaced by others.
You let the mind keep moving, but only within the boundaries that you’ve intentionally set. Instead of trying to hold the monkey still, you give it a larger cage to move in.
Trying to stay focused on the breath can feel like herding cats.
the less harmony among the different parts of the mind, the more dissatisfaction and impatience you’ll feel.
But when one part of the mind tries to force itself on other parts, this only creates a struggle that feels like an exercise of willpower—and willpower can never succeed in overcoming this kind of internal resistance.
The best way to avoid or resolve impatience is to enjoy your practice. While this isn’t always easy, a good start is to consistently focus on the positive rather than the negative aspects of your meditation.
relax and look for the joy; observe; let it come, let it be, and let it go.
Whether attention is stable or scattered, if restlessness arises or dullness sets in, if the mind is clear and calm, or if some distracting thought keeps surfacing: just observe what is, and don’t judge.
No matter what thoughts or feelings arise, don’t suppress or struggle against them or let them take you away from the practice. They’ll disappear on their own in time.
Our very concept of Self is none other than this narrative “I,”
Awareness keeps a watchful lookout for potential distractions.
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 mental objects.
attention always involves the discriminating mind,
We’re not ordinarily conscious of non-symbolic conceptual thought, but it starts to leak through when conscious experience is no longer dominated by symbolic thought.
one of the basic functions of peripheral awareness is to perceive the relationships of objects to each other and to the whole.
Further investigation showed that, while consciousness plays no part in the instigation of intentional acts, conscious volition is exercised in the form of a veto power. This veto is exercised in the 200 ms gap between when the intention becomes conscious and the actual movement occurs.
what appears in consciousness is a story about what happened, and it doesn’t appear until after the event is over with.
