Divided Attention, Divided Hearts

Divided Attention, Divided Hearts

What is Mindfulness Really About?

Distractions are subconscious gossip. - Tibetan Meditation Teacher Trungpa Rinppche

 

Thoroughly understanding the mind-monkey, the machinations in the heart … one becomes a peer of heaven. - Taoist Master Zhang Boduan

When our attention is divided, there is a much more acute, and dire, situation happening than diminished productivity or short term distraction.

Our hearts are divided too.

In the words of the Taoist Master, our distractibility is a symptom of “heart machinations”. Our attention flies around because our emotions are not in flow, not honored or fully felt. Our minds become party to plots and schemes, our agendas and character strategies.

Like Iago whispering half-truths about Desdemona, our distracted minds can mask a self that contrives for its desires, its comforts and advantage. They spread gossip — sometimes meaningless, sometimes malicious — throughout our heart-minds.

People do not want to be more focused because it increases their income or the corporate bottom line. They don’t want to be more mindful in order to “get more done” or to be better at their jobs.

We want to be more focused because concentration feels profoundly better than distraction. We want to be mindful because only in presence do we experience wholeness and recognize what is most meaningful to us.

Mental agitation is intrinsically distressful. Continuity of attention is intrinsically pleasurable as it allows us to experience reality. And a warm-hearted mindfulness connects us to purpose because in it we recognize our cares and affinities.

Focused attention is itself a manifestation of love. Paying attention to anything, allowing it to arise in our conscious awareness without overlaying concepts or judgments, is all by itself an expression of love. And love is the most profound creative and connecting force in the universe, as it arises directly from our fundamental unity.

Every time we truly pay attention to something, a creative connection is established. This applies to a product, a spreadsheet, a tire iron, or an apple as much as to an animal or human being.

Bring your attention to anything, an object or being, friend or foe, pleasurable or unpleasurable, and hold it in awareness without being distracted by your commentaries, judgements or general thought stream. While holding this object or being in non-judgmental awareness, continue to appreciate it quietly in all its uniqueness and intimacy.

This unknowing witnessing is affection’s first touch. It can be as intimate and profound as a kiss. It is a doorway to living fully from the wellsprings of the heart.

Mindfulness is attractive because our intrinsic human desire to do meaningful work, to love and be loved, is continually challenged by forces that work to atomize us socially, fragment us psychologically, and distract us mentally.

A distracted attention is only the surface manifestation of deeper divisions in our hearts, our identities, and our connection with the universe. We can’t help but experience these divisions, often subconsciously, as wounds. And, along with all beings, we cannot help but seek healing for our wounds. Other names for the healing we seek are wholeness or centeredness. Healing is whole-ing.

In addressing the surface level of a divided attention by engaging with mindfulness practices, new meditators are, perhaps unwittingly, opening a window on their internal and collective divisions, and glimpsing the prospect of profound wholeness and healing.

Those who engage this process with the highest consciousness and integrity will inevitably be led to heal deeper divisions within themselves and the collective. 

The high-performing employees  who are the main adoptees of the mindfulness movement bring initiative, ambition, and discipline to the task at hand. More importantly, they bring degrees of social consciousness and psychological understanding that make it harder to live in denial of the individual and collective wounds being perpetrated and maintained across all divisions of class, race and nationality.

We hope you can spend at least a few moments each day with your inner spaciousness and stillness, and move boldly from there into the unknown of our collective future.

The Tend Team