The Tension Of Attention
It often takes a while to get used to relaxing the stretching of our consciousness (*attention) in the form of our busy mind. It is fundamentally one big mental habit that fundamentally believes it is about to die at any moment and is constantly, frantically, trying to run our life to save itself. However, all along, though it does not remember it in its frantic business, its source is always that which we may call the tension-less, resistance-less, open and allowing place of infinite awareness, consciousness, presence, reality, or in religious language God's being.
We are often so busy rowing the little boat (stretching our consciousness) that we forget we are in the middle of a beautiful ocean of calmness that extends beyond the senses in all directions. We can see from this perspective that disciplining the egoic mind that is the rower of our little boat when it continues to create tension in our mind and body is only going to compound the tension.
The only choice we have is to greet this mental stretching activity with the same patient warm, loving kindness that a mother may welcome her child who is upset over a broken toy. Always from a place of accepting loving kindness. Never from a place of stern discipline. Even if sometimes we may have to be firm with the child of our mind, this firmness is always rooted in a deep love for the child that is our busy mind.
Initially, we often find that all we know is the tension of our child mind. We even are convinced it is reality, and should someone point out it is not; we will defend its activity. However, eventually, we inevitably tire of busily rowing our boat towards this or that destination that we firmly believe will give us that warm, loving whole feeling that we seek, and undergo a metanoia** when, usually over a while, we allow ourselves to remember, we are not the little vulnerable separate person rowing the boat frantically in one direction or another to quell her fear, and sense of inadequacy arising out of her misperceived separateness from all other things. All along, we were the infinite, eternal ocean in which it is being rowed.
The resulting dissolution of tension releases all that pent up emotional and psychological energy back into the present. Instead of using our energy and creating tension to maintain our little boat to seek wholeness and happiness, we can start sharing the resulting happiness we awaken to that we always were. Giving our attention to sharing is a far more tensionless activity than giving our attention to seeking.
Here, our attention is characteristically calm, consistent, sincere, just, honest, generous, innocent, loving, caring, courageous, wise, inspiring, creative, condition-less, free, beautiful, strong, skilful, authentic, reliable, dignified, intelligent.
*attention (n.)late 14c., "a giving heed, active direction of the mind upon some object or topic," from Old French attencion and directly from Latin attentionem (nominative attentio) "attention, attentiveness," noun of action from past-participle stem of attendere "give heed to," literally "to stretch toward," from ad "to, toward" (see ad-) + tendere "stretch," from PIE root *ten- "to stretch."
**[Metanoia, a transliteration of the Greek μετάνοια, means after-thought or beyond-thought, with meta meaning "after" or "beyond" and nous meaning "mind". It's commonly understood as "a transformative change of heart; especially: a spiritual conversion." The term suggests repudiation, change of mind, repentance, and atonement, but "conversion" and "reformation" may best approximate its connotation. In The King James Version of the Bible, its verbal cognate metanoeo/μετανοέω is translated as repenting]
