Distraction

Have you sat down and done your meditation today? If so, you will at some point almost certainly been distracted from your concentration on the mediation object (such as your breath). Perhaps this was by a noise, or a sensation in the body, or by a thought, or by a shadow or sunlight falling across your face.

The Buddhists talk of the six “sense gates”: sound, touch, smell, taste, sight and thought. We might accurately say, then, that your distraction arrived via one of these six gates.

But you must also have noticed that you were distracted - because you are right now reading this email, you must have stopped being distracted at some point! Either you noticed and returned to your meditation, or your time was up and you noticed that instead.

So either way, you were successful - because noticing is actually the most important part of meditation. Concentration is good, because it allows you to focus very accurately, and you can then note what you’re focused on. In concentration meditations, we direct our focus to our meditation object (the breath, or the body, for example). But you can also direct the focus on the object that arrives through one of the sense gates - your so-called “distraction”.

Importantly, this means you shouldn’t scold yourself for loosing attention.& Instead, recognize that your attention just shifted to the visitor through one of the gates. You can greet your visitor in a friendly way with noting: “oh, a sound”, or “hey, a thought”, or “ah, the beautiful smell of my coffee!”. In open meditations, that’s all we do - note whatever comes to our attention. In concentration meditations, we then simply direct our attention back to the meditation object.

It really is that simple: we forget, then we remember again.

And don’t forget to remember to meditate today, if you haven’t already!