Life is a beautiful thing.
Just take it all in and breathe,
breathe, breathe.
~ Creola Johnson
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“Linguists say that language comes after music
and we sang nonsense syllables
before we invented a rational speech
to order our days.”
~ Jim Harrison
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“Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible?
Can we go outside and listen?"
~ Naomi Shihab Nye
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"Linguistic repetition, you learn from an early age, can give form or take it away, because it forces a confrontation with the malleability of language and the world we build with it, build upon it."
~ Ben Lerner
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I've shared strategies for using movies to strengthen attention. Just as in ordinary life, what makes tending to the sensory components of a film so challenging is the pull of the narrative. But what would it be like to focus on the changing sights and sounds without having to resist the gravitational pull of story elements?
Starting today, you can find out.
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"In some of my research on cochlear implants, I learned that when they are turned on for the first time, patients often say the sound is kind of 'digital' or 'mechanical' sounding, which is entirely normal. I guess the ears and brain eventually normalize the signal and things begin to sound more natural. I thought that was entirely fascinating, so I made it a part of my song."
~ Ryan O'Neal, from "HearingI & How It Was Made"
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"The idea that reality is not real or what you sense and feel is not authentic is something I’m very skeptical of."
~ Bill Nye
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Any perception you can observe directly in real time can be used to train a variety of attention-related skills.
I like to make a game out of turning ordinary activities into opportunities for practice.
There are a number of exercises I use when watching a film — whether it’s one I enjoy, dislike, or have seen before.
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"It felt like my senses were being used in a way that I ignore them a lot."
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The human voice can sing a vowel to break your heart.
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Forget everything you've ever done.
Make no comparisons. Simply listen.
"Bird sounds captured using a digital audio recorder and fed into a computer to activate particle effects."
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"Although emotional sensations can arise anywhere in the body, they are much more likely to arise in the belly, chest, throat, or face. These are the emotional hotspots in the body, the regions where emotional sensations can get huge. That means that other areas are much less likely to host gigantic emotional sensations, which turns out to be a useful and convenient thing."
~ Michael Taft
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"This is something you do find in Quaker meetings, actually, and in Buddhist meetings as well. The whole herd, and that may be 50 animals, will suddenly be still, completely still. And it's not just a stillness of voice, it's a stillness of body."
~ Katy Payne
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But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.
~ Dogen Zenji
When I first started practicing mindfulness, I saw internal words — aka verbal thoughts — as my opponents. Like most people, I thought the point was to not think. When verbal thoughts were present, I was obviously not. Start over. Try harder.
There's just one problem with this approach. It is normal for the mind to think in words.
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yù yī - 玉衣
n. the desire to see with fresh eyes, and feel things just as intensely as you did when you were younger—before expectations, before memory, before words.
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