A Quick Concentration Tip
Today's Practical Mindfulness Hack
First, this week’s meditation practice is five minutes of Good Enough Mindfulness
Last week I taught a one-hour mindfulness class to a large room of lawyers. Although lawyers and judges were my primary audience in my earlier years of teaching mindfulness, it had been a while since I taught one of these groups. I focused on what I’ve seen lawyers care about as I prepared for the program, and even more as I lived into it and discussed it with participants afterwards. The way I teach mindfulness to lawyers differs from how I teach mindfulness elsewhere in one way, it is relentlessly focused on the practical. When I reflected on this afterwards, I was of two minds. First, the kinds of evidence and expertise that lawyers find compelling can be overly narrow and I wonder whether if I catered less to my sense of what they like it could broaden what they consider (a possible topic for another day). Second, some of the things I teach to lawyers deserve attention in other places, too.
Today, I want to share a quick nugget that came up last week. Because modern life tends to hollow out most people’s attention, the concentration-building benefits of mindfulness can be quite compelling. Practicing mindfulness is a great way to builds concentration in much the same way that practicing a second language builds the ability to speak that language over time. The developing concentration accrues slowly over time in mindfulness practices, and can then be applied anywhere it’s needed. There is, however, another another concentration booster that folks may find more immediately available.
As I have been distracted by an upwelling in uncertainty this spring, like so many others, keeping myself on task to accomplish what my work and my life demand has taken more effort. A new go-to strategy has emerged for managing my attention. I have been harnessing the very practices I use to foster mindfulness to create the container for longer pockets of focus. I have been setting my meditation timer for thirty minutes, and allowed myself my usual deep breaths as I settle in to the sound of the bell. Then I try to choose a chunk of work that is possible in a thirty-minute period and I focus on it until the timer sounds again. This isn’t perfect, and it works as my take on the Pomodoro Technique of managing their time and attention. The difference is that the cue, the sound of the meditation chime and the practice of taking a few breaths, is deeply habituated as a pathway into deeper concentration. It feels like I’m drafting on my own best efforts, and I wanted to pass this along in case it’s helpful to anyone else.
p.s. If you don’t have a meditation timer, the free Insight Timer App is a great place to find some good options!
May whatever goodness we stir up together in this space be of benefit that ripples out, not only into our daily lives, but also into our communities, and the world.
Last Week to Register for Radical Body Compassion
Registration closes on Monday for the Radical Body Compassion workshop I’m offering with my co-facilitator, the brilliant and kind Natasha Langan, a clinical psychologist and psychosexual therapist who lives near the sea in Ireland. She and I have talked over the years about the intersections in our work and the way that body liberation and psychosexual therapy both benefit from mindfulness, compassion, and a better understanding of both trauma and social context. This inspired us to offer a Radical Body Compassion class together this past fall. It was a wonderful experiment, and this spring we are expanding that course to be a full six weeks that is supported by original workbook pages between sessions.
I hope you’ll join us if you can, and please pass this along to someone else who might be interested! We are offering this spring’s workshop on a pay-what-you-can scale to ensure that it’s accessible to people who want to practice with us.
