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MINDFULNESS
How to Pay Attention
Cultivating mindfulness without meditation
We often use meditation as a shorthand for mindfulness. However, meditation is only one tool for building mindfulness, and it’s not a tool that works for everyone.
The core of mindfulness is not breathwork — it’s noticing what you notice. It’s easy to sail through life in default mode. Our brains are programmed to filter out any information not essential to our survival. However, we often do a poor job of teaching our brains what types of information we want to pay attention to.
In The Summer Day, one of my favorite poems, the poet Mary Oliver asks:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
If you read the full poem, and you really should, you will discover that the narrator of the poem, the one asking the question about your wild and precious life, is not inviting you to live a life of hustling and grinding.
Instead, she is teaching us about what the core of living a creative life, a human life, really is. In the middle of the poem, Oliver hides her most important advice. Oliver tells us:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into grass, how to kneel down in…
