Learn your instrument
Stay With Yourself
Your attention is probably leaving you hundreds of times a day.
Someone walks into the room and your attention goes to them. A message arrives and you are gone. You remember something you still need to do. You start thinking about a conversation from yesterday. Someone is unhappy and immediately you are trying to understand why. Your phone lights up. The plant needs water. There is always something.
Most of the time, you probably don’t even notice that it happened.
Your body does.
Because while your attention is everywhere else, you are missing part of the information that is available inside you. You don’t notice the tension building in your shoulders. The little contraction in your stomach. The warmth in your hands. The moment you become tired. The tiny hesitation before you say yes to something you don’t actually want.
You have left the instrument while it is still playing.
This tool is about learning to stay.
Not by shutting out the world. You still get to have conversations, work, raise children, walk through a crowded supermarket, answer messages and remember that the bloody plant needs water.
You are going to learn to do all of that without completely leaving yourself to do it.
And that takes practice.
Why practice something so simple?
Because knowing “I should stay connected with myself” is not particularly useful when the ability disappears the moment something grabs your attention.
You want the movement to become familiar.
Feel your hands.
Stay.
Attention wanders.
Notice.
Come back.
Again.
Again.
Again.
You practice it when nothing important is happening.
While brushing your teeth. Waiting for the kettle. Sitting in bed. Walking through the house.
Then you practice while doing something.
Then while talking to somebody.
Then somewhere busy.
And eventually, when something happens that really pulls at you — anger, fear, grief, conflict, attraction, an old pattern lighting up — you are not trying to learn this skill for the first time.
Your body already knows the route.
The hardest part
The hardest part isn’t feeling your hands.
The hardest part is not following everything that tries to take you away from them.
Your mind will be extremely helpful.
Oh! I need to send that email.
Wait, wasn’t I going to order something?
I should really clean this desk.
Is this exercise even working?
And there you go.
This is where the training happens.
You don’t need to fight the thought. You don’t need an empty mind. You only need to recognize what happened and choose again:
No. Not that right now. This.
Back to the sensation.
That tiny choice is what you are going to practice hundreds and eventually thousands of times.
Not because staying with your hands for three minutes is some extraordinary achievement.
Because every time you return, you are practicing something much larger:
When something pulls my attention away from me, I know how to come back.
Module 1 — Learning to Place Your Awareness
We start ridiculously small.
For this first practice, you don’t need to process anything, understand yourself, change your thoughts or solve a problem.
You are simply going to learn how to place your awareness somewhere in your body and keep it there deliberately.
Start with your hands.
Sit or lie somewhere reasonably comfortable. You don’t need silence. You don’t need candles. Tuesday morning at the kitchen table will do perfectly well.
Set a timer for three minutes.
Now bring your awareness inside your hands.
Don’t look at them. Don’t imagine them. Don’t think I have hands.
Feel them from the inside.
Maybe you notice warmth. Tingling. A faint electrical feeling. Pulsing. Pressure. Perhaps one finger is much easier to feel than another.
You don’t need to find a particular sensation.
Just find whatever tells you:
My hands are here.
And stay.
And then your mind will leave
Probably.
You may suddenly discover that you’re thinking about dinner.
Or work.
Or something somebody said yesterday.
Or whether the plant needs water.
Or perhaps you’ll start evaluating the exercise:
Am I doing this right? I don’t feel much. Maybe I should try my feet instead. Actually, where did I put my phone?
There you go. 😂
The moment you notice that your awareness has left your hands, don’t make the distraction a problem.
You just caught it.
That’s the practice.
Make the choice again:
No. Not that right now. This.
And return to your hands.
Feel.
Stay.
Leave.
Notice.
Return.
You might do that once in three minutes.
You might do it thirty times.
Thirty returns are not worse than one.
Every return is one repetition of the ability you’re here to learn.
Practice this for a week
Do the three-minute practice at least once a day.
And then start sneaking tiny repetitions into ordinary life.
Feel your hands while brushing your teeth.
Feel them while waiting for the kettle.
Feel them before getting out of the car.
Feel them for thirty seconds when you get into bed.
You are not trying to spend your entire life monitoring your hands.
You are teaching yourself:
I can choose where my awareness goes. And when it leaves, I can bring it back.
Keep a tiny record
After each three-minute practice, write down:
What could I feel?
What pulled my attention away?
Did I notice that I had left and return?
That’s enough.
Don’t grade yourself.
You’re gathering information.
After a few days, you may start recognizing the things that recruit your attention most easily. That is useful information too.
And if three minutes turns out to be surprisingly difficult?
Good.
Now you know why we’re practicing this before asking you to stay connected with yourself when life gets complicated.
Module 1 — Learning to Place Your Awareness
We start ridiculously small.
For this first practice, you don’t need to process anything, understand yourself, change your thoughts or solve a problem.
You are simply going to learn how to place your awareness somewhere in your body and keep it there deliberately.
Start with your hands.
Sit or lie somewhere reasonably comfortable. You don’t need silence. You don’t need candles. Tuesday morning at the kitchen table will do perfectly well.
Set a timer for three minutes.
Now bring your awareness inside your hands.
Don’t look at them. Don’t imagine them. Don’t think I have hands.
Feel them from the inside.
Maybe you notice warmth. Tingling. A faint electrical feeling. Pulsing. Pressure. Perhaps one finger is much easier to feel than another.
You don’t need to find a particular sensation.
Just find whatever tells you:
My hands are here.
And stay.
And then your mind will leave
Probably.
You may suddenly discover that you’re thinking about dinner.
Or work.
Or something somebody said yesterday.
Or whether the plant needs water.
Or perhaps you’ll start evaluating the exercise:
Am I doing this right? I don’t feel much. Maybe I should try my feet instead. Actually, where did I put my phone?
There you go. 😂
The moment you notice that your awareness has left your hands, don’t make the distraction a problem.
You just caught it.
That’s the practice.
Make the choice again:
No. Not that right now. This.
And return to your hands.
Feel.
Stay.
Leave.
Notice.
Return.
You might do that once in three minutes.
You might do it thirty times.
Thirty returns are not worse than one.
Every return is one repetition of the ability you’re here to learn.
Practice this for a week
Do the three-minute practice at least once a day.
And then start sneaking tiny repetitions into ordinary life.
Feel your hands while brushing your teeth.
Feel them while waiting for the kettle.
Feel them before getting out of the car.
Feel them for thirty seconds when you get into bed.
You are not trying to spend your entire life monitoring your hands.
You are teaching yourself:
I can choose where my awareness goes. And when it leaves, I can bring it back.
Keep a tiny record
After each three-minute practice, write down:
What could I feel?
What pulled my attention away?
Did I notice that I had left and return?
That’s enough.
Don’t grade yourself.
You’re gathering information.
After a few days, you may start recognizing the things that recruit your attention most easily. That is useful information too.
And if three minutes turns out to be surprisingly difficult?
Good.
Now you know why we’re practicing this before asking you to stay connected with yourself when life gets complicated.
You may believe you can’t do this.
I did.
In the beginning, staying with myself could feel almost impossible. But that belief began to change when I gave myself evidence. One return became evidence. Then another. Then a moment in a difficult environment where I managed to stay for slightly longer.
Don’t wait until you’re good at this before deciding you’re learning. Collect the evidence while you learn.
You are not trying to convince yourself with positive thinking. You are giving yourself experiences that contradict the old conclusion: I can’t do this.
That is why we count the returns
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How do I know when I’m connected?
If you have spent years with most of your attention directed toward thoughts, tasks, problems, other people or the world around you, “stay with yourself” can be a surprisingly confusing instruction.
Stay where?
Feel what?
I remember a time when I barely knew what people meant by feeling the inside of the body. Now it is immediately recognizable to me, but it wasn’t always that way.
So don’t look for some extraordinary state.
Start with your feet.
Close your eyes if that makes it easier and place your awareness inside them. You may need to concentrate at first.
Wait.
There may be a faint tingling or something resembling a tiny electrical current. You might notice warmth or cold. Pulsing. Pressure. A subtle vibration. Perhaps you can’t quite name what you’re feeling at all, except that suddenly your feet don’t feel like two objects attached to the bottom of your legs.
They feel alive from the inside.
That’s enough.
Try your hands too.
Don’t think about your hands. Feel inside them.
Can you detect their temperature? Tingling? Pulsing? That almost-electric aliveness?
You may notice something else happening at the same time.
The rest of your sensory world can become more vivid.
Perhaps you suddenly hear the music more clearly.
You notice the temperature of the air against your bare arms.
Your hair touching your face.
The weight of your body against the chair.
A taste lingering at the back of your mouth that you hadn’t noticed thirty seconds earlier.
It’s as though somebody quietly turned up the volume on sensory experience.
Try the switch
Now experiment.
Feel the inside of your feet.
Really stay there.
Then deliberately start thinking about a problem you need to solve.
What happens?
And return to your feet.
What happens now?
Don’t use my answer.
Find out.
Can you notice a difference between being absorbed in thought and directly sensing what is happening inside your body?
Can you notice the moment you move from one into the other?
Can you return deliberately?
For me, this became a remarkably clear switch. When awareness settles deeply into sensory experience, deliberate thinking falls away. I can still speak, but the experience of speaking is different too: the words seem to arise rather than being constructed in my head.
Your experience may not be identical.
That’s fine.
The purpose of this exercise is to learn your own signal.
Because eventually you want to be able to recognize:
There I am.
And also:
Ah. I’ve left.
Before you finish Module 1
Don’t move on simply because you’ve completed the exercises.
Stay with this module until you can answer yes to these questions:
Can I deliberately find sensation inside my hands or feet?
Can I recognize the difference between thinking about my body and sensing it from inside?
Can I notice when my attention has wandered away?
Can I deliberately return?
Do I recognize, in my own experience, what “staying with myself” means?
You don’t have to hold it perfectly.
You don’t have to stay there for hours.
You just need to know the doorway.
I feel where ‘me’ is. I know what is feels like when i’m there. I can tall when i’ve left. Sitting in a chair, i know how to return.