In the past couple of posts, I’ve suggested that you try paying attention to complaining, and also that you play with attention.

For some people, these might not seem like “real” mindfulness practices, but in fact, they are. When you practice these, you strengthen the pathways in the brain that are responsible for the control of attention.

Controlling the attention is a skill that must be learned, like acquiring language or learning to walk. Babies have little or no control over their attention. As children, one of the most important skills we learn is to pay attention to what our teachers are saying (usually under threat of punishment!)

As adults, most of us gain a fairly high degree of control over our attention, but sadly, we fall far short of mastering it. We are typically pretty good at focusing on activities and sensations that we enjoy, like watching a good movie. But that’s setting the bar pretty low.

To really gain mastery over one’s attention means to be able to place the attention on something quite boring or even unpleasant, and leave it there for an extended period of time. Which is essentially what meditation is doing.

One of my favorite meditations is to focus on sounds. When you start trying to listen to all the sounds that just appear around you, you notice just how MANY different sounds keep showing up. You hear the wind. You hear distant vehicles. You hear voices in other houses or apartments. You hear your own breathing; your stomach gurgling, and maybe even your own blood pulsing past your eardrums with every beat of your heart.

And as cool as it is to notice all these different sounds, it’s even cooler to notice that sounds just show up, unannounced, and they go – they don’t stick around for very long. And when they’re gone, you’re left with a kind of echo of them – you can replay the sounds in your mind, but they’re not quite like the original.

Another thing you’ll often notice is that as soon as you start thinking, you stop hearing. You might hear a loud sound like a siren or a train, but the subtle sounds are gone; the richness is lost. Thought automatically gets such a big chunk of your attention that you’re not really HEARING any more.

This is the practice that I’m suggesting in this week’s post: REALLY listen. For 2 or 5 or 25 minutes, try to really listen, to hear all the sounds that come up around you, near and far, and even inside you. See if you can increase the duration with practice. And I invite you to notice the difference between the quality of your listening when thoughts subside (which I call “really listening”) and the quality of your listening when thoughts are active and engaging you (which I call “kind of listening”).

Heck, why nor try it right now? Pause for 30 seconds right now, and notice how many different sounds you can hear. I’ve found that almost anyone can REALLY listen for 30 seconds. But it isn’t long before thoughts elbow their way into your awareness, and you go from “really listening” to “kind of listening”. Try to extend your bouts of really listening as long as you can. I hope you’ll enjoy this practice as much as I do.