Welcome to day four.
Today we will be talking about attention and this attention that we are working to stay committed to this practice,
To sitting every day for the duration of this moon cycle.
And attention is an interesting word and I invite you to feel into what the word attention means to you.
Take a few moments and feel into that.
Attention.
Where is your attention right now?
Another way to say it is where is your focus right now?
Right now I invite you to put your attention on your breathing,
To put your attention on the room or the space around you,
The colors that you can see,
The noises in the background,
And just let your attention bounce from place to place.
There is a way to direct our attention,
In fact there are many ways to direct our attention,
But the common thread is repetition,
Continued practice.
My attention wanders thinking about the future.
I notice my attentions wandered and I work to bring my attention back to right here rubbing my fingertips against my thumb.
I just feel that my attention was out there and now it's in here.
Something that happens to me commonly in my meditation practice is I go into what I call Captain Planet where I'm actually planning everything that I have to do and I notice my Captain Planet,
That part of me that really likes to come online,
And I say all right,
Slow down,
Come on back,
But it's there.
It's a part of me and the repetition,
This continued practice to notice my Captain Planet,
Oh come on back.
The Buddha often talks about meditation and this practice of meditation like tuning an instrument.
He would say not too loose,
Not too tight,
And then the music of this spirit just flows right through us.
So we're not efforting so much,
We're not striving and trying so so so hard to have the clearest mind of all.
Our minds will wander,
That's fine,
It's normal.
And no matter what,
Creating a consistent practice,
Focusing our attention,
Training our attention muscle,
That is what we're doing in meditation.
Robert Thurman says the Buddhists always talk about practice.
It's practice,
Practice,
Practice.
What I want to know is when is the performance?
Okay,
So there's no performance and when I'm describing this type of practice,
Whatever we're choosing to practice grows stronger.
So if we're practicing judgment,
Judgment gets stronger.
If we're practicing remembering to care about ourselves and to care about others,
That starts to get stronger.
And we get to practice manifesting more fully the natural awareness and love because that's who we really are.
And there's a science to practice.
To find mastery,
Science says we need to practice more than 10,
000 hours.
We need to do many,
Many,
Many,
Many rounds.
But there are some real guidelines to follow.
So when it comes to our meditation practice,
Qualitatively into a process of practicing over and over,
It frees us from the busy mind.
It frees us from being completely separate between our intention and our sense of what matters and how we actually choose to pay attention in our lives.
And then when we pay attention and get out of this cycle of being asleep,
Of not being aware,
We can deepen our contact with our intuition,
With our intention.
So I ask you,
What is your intention in sitting with mindfulness with the moon?
What is your intention here?
When we connect our intention with our attention,
They have a virtuous kind of cycle.
You know,
There's something in nature that loves rhythm.
I mean,
Nature functions through rhythm.
That's the way that she is.
Just the way that the planets circle around the sun and the moon and the earth,
Everything spinning in a rhythmic way,
Our bodies,
Minds,
And hearts love the rhythm as well.
This rhythm of sitting,
This practice over and over just to be quiet with ourselves.
As Rumi says,
Do you make regular visits to yourself?
It's that homecoming that becomes more and more of a habit until we just very naturally go,
Yeah,
Right now.
Let's practice.
Find yourself in a comfortable seat.
You'll hear three bells to begin and three bells to end.
And I will offer some light guided meditation throughout the sit.
As we sit today,
I invite you to let your attention go wherever it wants to.
And the key today of our practice is just to start to notice that attention and notice where it goes.
What are your wandering thoughts?
Let's invite in some curiosity as we practice today.
Let's take some deep breaths.
As your breaths lengthen,
Notice what happens as you go inside,
As you turn your attention towards yourself.
As you sit with yourself,
Where is your attention?
Notice as gently and kindly as you can.
Keep bringing yourself back to your anchor,
To your root,
To your connection to the moment,
To your connection to what is happening around you and inside.
Where is your attention?
Noticing where your attention is,
Bringing yourself kindly,
Gently to an anchor,
Your anchor that you chose in this moment to bring yourself back.
Maybe it's the smells around you.
Maybe it's the sounds.
We will never have this moment ever again.
So be here for it.
Notice the wind on your skin.
Notice the breath spiraling into your nostrils.
Notice the saliva in your mouth and what it means to taste yourself,
To come home to yourself.
How open can you be to receiving the world by paying attention to the animals,
To the trees,
To the moon,
This new moon who's here.
She's with us all the time and somehow staying with what's happening around us.
We also can stay with what's within.
We can hold the complexity when we allow for our awareness to be present right now.
This breath,
What is the rhythm of your breath?
See if you can follow the inhales and the exhales to their entirety and maybe you want to make the exhale just a little bit longer.
When we can bring length to the exhales,
It sends a message to our bodies,
To our nervous system that it's okay,
That we can breathe.
We can offer kindness to ourselves no matter what's coming up.
Maybe placing a hand on the heart or a hand on the belly or maybe even want to hold your own hands in your lap.
It's okay,
Sweet one.
It's okay.
This too is welcome here.
Thank you for showing up to your practice.
So the moon should be visible tonight and maybe you'd like to use that opportunity to introduce yourself,
To tell a little bit about what you're doing and about what you're up to and share your intention with your attention.
La luna.
Hasta luego.
See you tomorrow.
