An Ocean of Attention
by Christine Jacobi
Like many of us, my meditation practice is often full of distractions. During a RIM Zoom meditation, we were asked to notice the felt sense of being mindful. I don’t remember the exact words, but these phrases are etched in my mind.
Bring the breath to the front of your mindfulness awareness. Everything else is arising and passing away in the background. Be aware of every sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and thought without clinging to or chasing after any of it.
Recognizing the felt sense of being mindful has been so helpful to me. It is difficult to describe a felt sense, which does not conform to the boundaries of words. For me, the experience of being fully tuned into a meditation is very much akin to sailing the open ocean in the dark.
I lived most of a decade on Windbourne, a 34-foot sailboat. I learned a bit about paying attention to everything at once, which is very much like the attention we cultivate in meditation. It is an attention that is simultaneously focused and diffuse, relaxed and fully attuned.
Like each of us, the ship herself is a mindful arrangement of many pieces of equipment designed to perform reliably in changing conditions. This six-ton sailboat simply floats until the sails are raised and properly trimmed. When everything is attuned, the ship seems to rise a bit and leap forward. In heavy seas with swells taller than her mast, the ship resolutely presses up the side of swells and surfs down the other side with abandon. It is very like the way we mindfully face challenges.
Oceans cover much of the earth’s surface, with a vastness that defies oral description. Above the ship and sea is the sky … an incalculable volume of space. The stars hint at the vastness that dwarfs the ocean. The ship is but a speck. When the ship, the ocean, and the sky converge, there is often a magical moment of perfect attention for the sailor, which is similar to the kind of attention we cultivate in meditation ... focused and diffuse, relaxed and fully attuned.
When sailing in the dark, the helmsman is aware of everything, but attention does not linger on any single element. Fixing the gaze on one object would risk missing new things emerging from the darkness. All six senses are online and attuned to subtle changes. So there is this steady, vigilant watching of everything in the field. Phenomena arise from a pervasive darkness and disappear just as quickly. While the helmsman knows where she is, there is no real sense of what will arise in the next instant and only a vague interest in what has already passed. The felt sense of this attention is familiar to the meditator in me.
When my meditation is full of distraction, I often visualize myself on that sailboat … moving through an ocean, carried by the wind through time and space. When mindfulness is established, there is a felt sense of my heart rising and expanding. I watch, with curiosity, as things arise from an unknowable field of possibility and fade away. This ocean of attention to the present moment connects me to all that exists. There is a felt sense of joy on a grand scale.
→Back to Voices Community Connections