Spying On Your Perceptions With Mindfulness

Undercover agents develop their ability to see what others overlook. They’re able to get their eyes on the information they need to make strategic decisions. Today you’ll practice trying to see what’s right in front of your eyes. Have you ever arrived somewhere and realized you had no memory of driving to get there? It’s universal to develop this kind of blindness of familiarity. We can drive—and live—on cruise control. This leads to missing a lot of life’s visual richness. Let’s consider how this happens and ways to unlearn it by steering your attention back out toward the world around you.

As you’ve noticed by now, it can be fascinating to see and hear for a few seconds without rushing to make sense of the raw sights and sounds themselves. Today, we’ll investigate a simple way to detect and savor physical sensations in the body. Just as a person can learn to relax using real-time data from a biofeedback device, empowering self-awareness and self-regulation skills can be honed without relying on external technology. With a little bit of consistent practice, you can gradually and secretly develop the sensitivity to experience ordinary life in higher definition.

At least in the movies, globe-trotting spies seem to have spent a lot of time refining their palate for the finer things in life. As we’ve been learning, though, savoring richness doesn’t require expensive wines or gourmet meals. A multi-sensory approach to mindfulness practice leads to becoming a connoisseur of ordinary sensations and perceptions. Just as a person can get better at recognizing the specific ingredients and subtle spices in a bite of food, you can get better at teasing out the sensory components of mundane moments and savoring them with greater satisfaction. Plus, every day is dripping with free opportunities to develop this invaluable skill.

It’s very important for undercover agents to distinguish allies from enemies. Some relationships can be counterintuitive and tricky to manage. There’s a similar challenge in mindfulness practice. This session walks you through a powerful way to practice listening to your thoughts instead of focusing on what they’re about. Instead of trying to get rid of your thoughts, you can practice gently coaxing them to ride along in the back seat once in a while, rather than always letting them take the wheel. When developed, this skill becomes a liberating superpower.

Yesterday we began shifting the way we relate to our thoughts. Today you’ll learn a powerful method to build on what you’ve already learned. It’s easy to get tangled up in thoughts. However, we can practice detecting the various emotional flavors that fuel our most persistent and intoxicating ruminations. It builds on the work we started with body sensations by adding four physical aspects related to our feelings. When practiced consistently, this helps build your emotional palate. It also prepares you to befriend unpleasant feelings and to take your emotional reactions less personally.

Staking out a suspect involves a lot of waiting around for something to happen. Things get more interesting when it’s time to tail them. In today’s session, you’ll explore an important theme of every contemplative tradition: impermanence. When you pay close attention to what’s happening in the present, you can often observe various subtle and not-so-subtle fluctuations. This is true for all of the perceptions we’ve been working with—including thoughts and feelings. Mindfulness can look like something done in stillness, but it becomes dynamic when you learn to spot and surf these natural, observable, and surprisingly plentiful waves of impermanence.

People who develop the skills of spycraft learn not to trust anyone. The stakes are too high and the examples of deception are too abundant to be ignored. In fiction and in reality, people working undercover have a reputation for manipulating, lying, and double-crossing each other. Sometimes they're able to do this by convincing themselves that the ends justify the means. But the means tend to leave a lot of negative personal consequences in their wake. What if instead of cultivating an internal lack of fear and trust, we were to habitually remind ourselves to recognize the humanity we share with everyone we encounter? This session describes a doable, enjoyable way to do just that.

Spies and detectives train for the unexpected. This includes getting good at being outside their comfort zones. In this final session of the Spying on Your Perceptions with Mindfulness course, we’ll look at how to let comfortable sensations train us to relate more effectively to uncomfortable ones. While mindfulness doesn’t solve specific problems, it can change how we relate to our lives—which can paradoxically lead to getting better at resolving what can be resolved. When we become more comfortable being uncomfortable, we’re preparing to respond more skillfully to the inevitable challenges of life and to stop waiting to inhabit our lives until the circumstances become ideal.