Inviting distractions

skullchin

I'm reading _Buddha's Brain by Rick Hanson. One of his suggestions to improved concentration is as follows:

Take a few minutes at the start of meditation to open up to and explore the sounds and other stimuli around you; do the same with you inner world. Paradoxically, inviting distractions in encourages them to move out. Dropping the second dart of resistance to them reduces the amount of attention they get. Additionally, the brain tends to become habituated to the steady stimulus and stops noticing it after a while

I'm wondering how many people do this at the start of their meditation? It makes sense, I think I do it sometimes, but I think I will consciously try it for awhile and see how it goes.

fivebells

"Concentration" is a problematic term for the capacity meditation develops. It's easy to come away with the wrong impression of it, because early training places attention on a single stimulus like a candle or the sensation of the breath. But although single-pointed concentration develops from these methods, that's not really the point. The point is to develop the capacity to attend to experience without projections. So if you experience a "distraction" that is your experience, and attending to it is the work of meditation. Simply holding a mental phenomenon in attention weakens the attachment to it, and eases the return to the specific meditation "task" of attending to a particular stimulus.

So yes, people do this, and not just at the start. It is the central idea in a way, occurring in some way in all the meditation methods I'm familiar with.

skullchin

Thanks @fivebells, that was helpful

Sabre

I think this is a very, very good advice. I do this almost always, but especially when my attention is weak (after a long days work for example). I find it is very hard (if not impossible) to focus on the breath immediately when sitting down. You can do it, but if our minds act in quite the same way (which I assume ), you will find it is not a peaceful focus but a rather restless forced focus.

Usually it takes a while for the mind to settle and come to rest. Just paying a kind attention to your surroundings/body is a very good practice to let this happen, I find the breath to subtle for this. Thoughts will fade out and if you are comfortable with your body and the surroundings, the mind will leave it sooner once you focus on the breath. If there is an agitation left in your body before you focus on the breath, it will always keep coming back in my experience.

I just had a very nice meditation starting with 10/15 minutes of this kind of attention before picking up the breath.

genkaku

Not quite as artfully, perhaps, but I was thinking about distractions in practice just the other day:

http://genkaku-again.blogspot.com/2011/04/try-to-be-distracted.html

Sabre

I wouldn't call it inviting distractions. I would call it accepting the moment. If you accept things, they stop being distractions.

I post this mainly because I had no more time to edit and forgot to say:
skullchin I hope you enjoy your meditation.

With metta,
Sabre