The Tapas of Attention

So, obviously, I’ve been re-invigorated about the blog. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve posted a lot and am just generally excited about it—it moved from the “I should do that” category back to the “I want to do that” category. So I’m going along enjoying what I’m doing, feeling good, and then starts the internal judgment and nagging—“you were going to have personal anecdotes and now you are just writing about ideas,” “your life is boring so you don’t really have anything to write about,” “you’re just writing about the same thing over and over,” etc. This is crazy! In a matter of moments, I go from things being great to everything being a big mess. Except that I am paying attention and recognize all of that as bull-oney.

I noticed a similar process with the book I am working on. My first few months were full of enthusiasm and productivity, then I went through a long lull period of discouragement and relative disinterest. And now I am seeing that I really do want to write it and think it will be a meaningful contribution, but don’t always “feel” like it, so need to make a commitment to spending time on it. And this actually works pretty well. And then I start hearing about how it’s never going to get done and can sense some sort unspoken idea that I should be feeling the way I was feeling in the beginning. Voila! I’m feeling bad about it instead of optimistic as I was just moments ago. Unless I recognize that no one who wanted me to actually work on the book would be telling me that and I DON’T LISTEN TO IT.

In both of these situations, I go from being in my experience to thinking that things should be some other way than the way they are. There are a lot of yoga ideas we could bring in here, but let’s just stick with tapas. It takes a lot of effort and discipline to keep bringing my attention back to the present moment and what’s actually happening right now. My experience, though, is that life is better when I do that—it seems worth the work. A problem, sort of by definition, is when I think that something should be different. So I could even end up thinking that the fact that those thoughts arise that something is a problem is a problem, but it is just something that happens. So my tapas is not trying to make that process not happen, but seeing it, stepping out of it and focusing on something else.