One of the essential skills of paying attention is meta-awareness: the ability to notice where your attention tends to go. It can be quite surprising to see where your attention goes when you stop trying to control it in any way. I like to use the metaphor of letting a puppy off the leash and just watching it to see where it goes. This helps you to identify your attentional habits. It can be quite useful to become familiar with your default patterns.

Another way to increase your awareness of your awareness is through what might be called “negative inquiry”. In other words, asking yourself, “where does my attention NOT go? What do I regularly NOT notice?”

When you let the so-called puppy off the leash, you get to follow it around, and that will reveal certain tendencies. But it won’t highlight for you where the puppy DOESN’T go. For that, you need to see a somewhat larger landscape, so that you can notice if there are certain areas that the puppy of attention tends to avoid.

Perhaps certain areas are avoided out of fear. Perhaps certain areas are avoided because you aren’t even aware that they exist. Perhaps you tend to stay on the same path all the time, for example, getting on a very similar train of thought, one that follows a predictable route and always arrives at pretty much the same place, whenever your attention is allowed to wander.

That’s this week’s suggested practice: let the puppy off the leash, (that is, let your attention go wherever it wants to go,) and observe it to get to know it’s patterns. Then follow that up with negative inquiry. Ask yourself, “where does my attention NOT go when I just let it wander?” Notice what you’re not noticing. It can lead to insights about certain blind spots you have about yourself or the people in your life or the world around you.

One pattern that I noticed when I asked myself what I tend not to notice is my posture. I tend to focus outwardly, to notice sounds and sights, but rarely do I notice what my body is up to. This was an insight that then led to a curiosity: what am I avoiding noticing? That led me to notice that I have a head-forward posture, and I started doing exercises to correct that.

What will you discover when you let the puppy off the leash? What will you learn about where your attention tends to go, and perhaps even more importantly, about where your attention tends NOT to go. Notice what you’re not noticing. You may well learn something important about yourself.

Until next week, keep paying attention to attention!