Many teachers have used the metaphor of focus to refer to mindfulness:
Where are you focusing your attention?
How are you focusing your attention?
Here are some thoughts about applying this metaphor of focus to our lives.
Stress
In writing about stress, Jon Kabat-Zinn emphasized that “It is not the potential stressor itself but how you perceive it and then how you handle it that will determine whether or not it will lead to stress” (p. 237, Full Catastrophe Living).
We need to examine how we respond to change and pressure. “How you see things and how you handle them makes all the difference in terms of how much stress you will experience” ( p. 238).
“By changing the way we see ourselves in relationship to the stressors, we can actually change our experience of the relationship” and thus modify the extent to which it taxes our resources ( p. 240).
Pain
I recall watching a video of Bill Moyers going through one of Jon’s 8-week Mindfulness Based Stress-Reduction courses. He followed a man who suffered from chronic lower back pain. He had had several accidents and operations, and there was nothing more than could be done for him surgically. He couldn’t even lift his young child and was unable to work.
Over the course of eight-weeks, you could see a transformation occurring. As the participants spoke during the last meeting about what had changed over the eight weeks, his comment was something like: What hasn’t changed much is the pain. What has changed is my relationship to the pain. I feel I can get on with my life.
Before, almost all of his focus was on hating the pain and that had him caught in a loop of pain-hating pain-pain-hating pain... Now his focus was primarily on his response to the pain and he had tools to help him respond differently to the pain.
Meditation: Softening and widening our attention
One of my favorite teachers, Ajahn Sucitto, has a phrase that has stayed with me both during meditations when I am feeling stuck or having trouble concentrating or in the world when I am ruminating over something that happened. He speaks of softening and widening our attention. This except is from Meditation: A Way of Awakening (pp. 193-198), which is available online.
If you are feeling overwhelmed by thoughts, “take some long slow breaths and breathe through the thoughts. Either way, respond to the energy of any mental process by softening or relaxing your awareness of it. As you feel more balanced, that confidence will support the intention to be open to the next moment, a moment at a time. The theme here is: widen your awareness, soften the energy.” To illustrate this shift in awareness, he used the metaphor of an artist’s awareness: you “first look at one detail of a painting, or a design, or the layout of a room, and then you widen the focus to include the whole painting, design or layout.”
Marriage
I was in the Peace Corps in Nepal from 1978 – 1981. I remember talking one day with my closest Nepali friend. We had both decided we were ready to get married and settle down. He told me that he would ask his parents to find him a wife—arranged marriages were still traditional in Nepal then. I was surprised and gently scolded him.
His response has stayed with me for 40 years. After he reminded me that the Nepali divorce rate was much lower than in America, he gave one of the reasons. “Let’s say you have a ‘good’ marriage, let’s say, 90% great and 10% not so great—personality traits and habits of your spouse that you just don’t like.” He said that a Nepali is likely to feel so lucky that it’s 90% great and an American is more likely to grumble about the 10%, wishing it were 5%.”
I’ve remembered that so many times over the years: where do we focus our attention and energy?
Play with it
We can be playful with this metaphor. When you are “looking” at your life, think of you looking as a camera:
Is the lens dirty, foggy?
Is the lens focused—am I seeing clearly?
What about the shutter speed? If it is too fast, I just see one thing; the background is fuzzy
Think of zoom vs. wide angle lens. It’s not that one is not better, but rather when is zoom more appropriate and when is wide angle appropriate? Sometimes that wide angle can be a more gentle focus.