One secret to amplify your focus

A Chinese farmer gets a horse, which soon runs away. A neighbor says, "That's bad news." The farmer replies, "Good news, bad news, who can say?" The horse comes back and brings another horse with him. Good news, you might say. The farmer gives the second horse to his son, who rides it, then is thrown and badly breaks his leg. "So sorry for your bad news," says the concerned neighbor. "Good news, bad news, who can say?" the farmer replies. In a week or so, the emperor's men come and take every able-bodied young man to fight in a war. The farmer's son is spared.

This is a wonderful little story about perspective. The perspective you can have in different types of scenarios in your life. But how does this tie in with meditation?

One of the fruits that comes with practicing meditation is how your perspective changes in various situations.

Meditation allows you to slow down your emotions and reactions.

What is meditation?

This is a question based on personal preference. People meditate for a stronger spiritual connection, some to enhance their focus, others to become more aware and zoom out and to be.

These are a couple of reasons, but the answer is definitely not binary. There is a lot of grey area surrounding ‘what is meditation’.

Globally it involves three elements: attention, focus, and awareness.

From focus, we can say that it is bringing your attention to a specific point or object. → So it is converging your attention.

With awareness, the emphasis is on zooming out and observing whatever in or around your body. → So it is diverging your attention.

If you look at what attention is, the lines are already blurring a little. There are many takes on what attention is.

So I will not give a definition or my definition of what attention is. Instead, I would like to ask you:

What is your definition of attention?

Take 1 minute where you write down your current definition. In a year or so reflect on it and see if it still is the same.

Pros and cons

A study about how daily meditation enhances attention, memory, mood, and emotional regulation1 showed a significant difference in non-experienced people after meditating for 8 weeks. They concluded many significant results in the study.

Pros

1. Learn how to (re)focus 

Often meditating is holding your focus as long as possible. While this is a part of the practice, it is much more geared toward returning to point of focus.

Hence refocusing.

In my post about the handstand, I mention that balancing on your hands is more geared towards making corrections and therefore re-balancing.

There is a similar process going on with meditation. Once you drift away in thought and emotions you want to return to the initial point of focus. In a gentle manner.

2. Increase the strength of your attention

By bringing your attention to either being more focused or aware you’ll strengthen the neurons when paying attention. This process is also called ‘long-term potentiation’.

Long-term potentiation means strengthening connections between neurons by the process of recent activity. This means you do more of a specific the better you’ll become at it.

3. Better memory

In the study, there is a significant enhancement in the working- and recognition memory. This means you can hold and maintain information longer.

My experience is that this is true. I could recollect information I read from the morning to the evening quite. And that’s quite something as I always considered myself not someone with a strong memory.

An extra positive outcome of a better memory is that your critical thinking increases. You be able to analyze more pieces of information, and thus have a better understanding of the content you’ve taken on.

4. Regulate emotions better

This one is quite known, but that doesn’t makes it not true. Since this point this in with the next one they have some overlap.

But the key word here is regulating. Your emotions are there, but over time you’ll start noticing that you don’t have to act on your emotions when they rise.

So by practicing meditation you’ll create a longer interval between a response and the actual output. By this, I mean instant reacting or reacting with a little pause, which is often very subtle.

So instead of becoming angry in a situation, you’ll feel emotions of frustration, but let it slide away.

5. Influencing the affective state

A couple of weeks ago I noticed something very interesting about my mood or affective state. I was riding my bike and there were tourists walking on the cycling road. Like many people in big cities, I got frustrated and yelled at them that they should walk on a normal road.

10 seconds after this happened, I noticed this awareness where I asked myself ‘why did I get so upset?’, and ‘why did I yell at them?’.

I realized that the response I gave isn’t how I wanted to react. By meditation, for a longer period of time, this reaction felt a bit distant from my mood.

In the following weeks, I noticed more and more that I’m calmer in situations where emotions could get the better of me.

I’m more positive.

Cons

These cons are not listed in the study but are my observations based on previous experience within my practice.

1. Choosing the right starting point

Meditation is now globally adopted as a concept. With this development, a lot of information has already been shared.

With the increasing popularity of meditation, it is sometimes hard to determine how to start a meditation practice.

I’ll share some tips to start later on.

2. Physical discomfort

If you’re someone like me who was as stiff as a board it can be challenging to sit in a position where you can be in for a certain time.

This physical discomfort can limit the outcome of your meditation. Or even worse makes you shy away from it.

My suggestion is to always choose a position where you feel comfortable in. Where you can put your attention on your practice.

3. Over-stimulation

8 years ago I read a book from Davidji called The Secrets of Mediation. Every time I tried to meditate with tips of the book, I got overstimulated by thoughts and underlying emotions. After a month I noticed that meditation wasn’t it for me.

It is easy to name all the benefits of meditating, but being honest if it is the right time for you is often a neglected topic.

Especially if you have levels of anxiety or depressive thoughts meditation may not be the right approach for you right now.

Personal take on meditation

I’ve been meditating for some time now and as mentioned before I can feel the effects of a meditation practice.

One of the most interesting observations is that it is much more vivid how to turn on your focus. So being aware of the opportunity to focus and applying the focus is a rich experience.

But…

I believe that I scratched the surface of what meditation could bring me, but I can say that it is a worthwhile pursuit.

And according to Sam Harris on the podcast of Andre Huberman the ultimate form of meditating is where there is no internal dialog. There is only ‘experience.’

That’s quite something.

3 tips to start

1. Start with the littlest amount of friction possible.

If 5 minutes is too much do 4 minutes. If 4 minutes is too much do 3 minutes. If… you get the idea.

Why do you want to do this? Because you want to start building a routine with consistency. Later you can turn up the consistency.

2. Pick something known.

By now, we all know that focusing on your breathing is a way to meditate. Or to scan the body from the toes all the way up to the crown.

It can be anything but start with something that is known. It is easier to start with and again starting and doing is for now the foundation.

3. BE GENTLE with yourself.

How often I got frustrated with myself because I wandered off is countless. Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way. But that’s great so now you don’t have to!

If you wander off return to the thing you’re focusing on. If you using an app they will guide you through this as well.

But being gentle helps you in the process itself. The benefits of it will wrinkle through the rest of your life.