The Attention Game - Finding Awareness

The Attention Game

If we want to change our life we must change how we think. If we want to change how we think then we must learn to find our thoughts by moving our attention. If want to gain control of our attention we must learn to find it. The Attention Game is a compact little exercise that helps you do just that.

This is the first stage of the attention game. What you're going to do is notice things, as many things as possible, in the next five minutes. You're not going to try and notice the specifics of things, and this very important, you are only going to note what sense your attention is using at any given moment. Again, it is very important not to try and notice the specifics, just realize and note moment after moment what sensory mode your attention is actually using.

Your attention is constantly shifting. It moves from object to object non stop all day long. It also moves from using one sensory method to another. One moment your attention is on what you are seeing, the next on what you are hearing. At any given moment there is only one thing that attention is focused on. The game is try and keep up with the constant shifting and to identify which sense you are using as your primary means of attention in each moment.

These are the names of the sensory modes you will be noticing:

Feeling – Hearing – Seeing – Smelling - Thinking

Feeling
Sometimes you will notice that your attention is on the body somehow. You may just be having an itch, maybe your stomach is growling, you may notice your breathing, your heartbeat, or you may be having an emotion. An emotion by the way is a thought expressed in the body which we then “feel”. Therefore call all of these things feeling. When you notice that your attention is on yourself in one of these categories simply note to yourself "feeling".

Hearing
Then you will hear things, your attention will be on a noise or sound of some sort. Simply call this "hearing".

Seeing
Then you will find that your attention is on something that you see. Simply call this "seeing".

Smelling
Occasionally you will notice that your attention is on an aroma of some kind. Simply call this "smelling".

As you do the labeling do not try to identify the thing itself. When you notice you are hearing dot dwell on the type of noise. When you notice that your attention is on seeing do not begin to think about what it is. Just simply name the sense that your attention is working through one at a time. And try to keep up as your attention bounces from one thing to the next.

Thinking
And now for the hard one. Every time you notice that you are thinking simply note "thinking".

Okay, now you're ready to begin. For the next five minutes try to note absolutely everything, one thing after another that your attention is on. Please go ahead and do this now.

What was your experience? If you were to rank the frequency of the number of times you noted each sensory mode which one was first? Second?

If you said thinking was the most frequently noticed then you get a gold star. The truth is that we spend most of our day thinking but we expend very little of our attention on thinking. If you did not name thinking as number one then keep playing the game. Your thinking is there, you are just so used to its presence that it is like an unnoticed background noise.

We think at 1000-3000 words per minute. Therefore a lot of our thinking goes unnoticed by us, so who is in charge of our thinking?

I encourage you to keep trying this exercise frequently. It truly will develop your sense of awareness and help you connect with the world around you. And most importantly help you familiarize yourself with your own thinking. As you become more adept at this process you will realize that there had been many times that you were thinking and even though you were playing the attention game you did not catch it. We are so used to these thinking patterns that we don't even notice them even when we're looking for them.

There are other stages to the attention game that we won't get into in this article. They have to do with developing our sense of the texture of the object of our attention. Instead of just saying “seeing” I would go the next step and say “seeing red, angular, bright, hard”. Notice I'm still not naming the item but trying to note the attributes of the item. This exercises our ability to recognize how we form concepts about the objects we sense and how they are in effect converted into judgements that are passed along to other parts of our mind. There are other levels to the game as well related to the intentional directing of attention which I hope to publish in a future article.