Brand New Chapter

Appreciation and Compassion

How Appreciation Helps Us Sustain Our Attention

One thing that is going to make it easier for you to remain grounded is to appreciate what you are focused on. If our relationship to something like breathing in meditation is that it is boring, it is going to be difficult to maintain our attention on it. When things are brand new, it is usually easier for us to keep our attention on them, but as we get used to things, our attention can easily drift in other directions. Appreciation means deliberately being interested in something so that we can keep our attention on it and see the value of it.

One of the saddest aspects of life is that we often only really appreciate things when they are gone or at risk of being taking away. Learning to purposefully appreciate the world around us means we don’t have to look back on our life full of regrets over what we failed to value before it was too late.

Craving as a Barrier to Appreciation

Craving is what prevents us from appreciating what is here. The Buddha identified three types of craving:

Craving for sensual pleasure ( “I wanna feel good”)
Craving for things that are here not to be here (aversion)
Craving for things that are not here to be here

If we pay close attention to our life, we may notice that there is a hell of a lot of craving going on. This becomes even more obvious when we meditate regularly (e.g. boredom is just the mind craving for something that isn’t here to be here). We can spend the rest of our life trying to satisfy these cravings, but it is a bit like whack-a-mole, you satisfy one, and another one just pops up. This means that we are constantly playing catch-up and rarely able to truly appreciate anything. One of the keys to getting out of this horrible cycle is to develop compassion.

The Importance of Compassion

The word ‘compassion’ comes from the old Latin word ‘compati’ which can be translated as ‘to be with suffering’. It is because of suffering (even if it is hardly noticeable and we wouldn’t normally call it ‘suffering’) that we are controlled by craving, so developing compassion is the key to being able to always appreciate what is here.

Compassion is a skill that we develop by doing it. It is something that we develop towards ourselves (we call this self-compassion) and for others. Every time we turn into our discomfort instead of running away, we are developing our compassion muscle. Of course, we need to be careful, if we haven’t been able to show much compassion towards ourselves, we won’t be ready to face our bigger demons. In fact, if we tried to do this, especially with a big trauma, there is a risk we could re-traumatize ourselves. This would be the same as going into a gym for the first time and going straight for the heaviest weights. We develop compassion by learning to sit with the difficult things but not the overwhelming things.

A good way to begin developing compassion is to learn to sit with the five obstacles as they arise. When we experience restlessness, we don’t blame ourselves or decide that our mind is treating us unfairly. Instead, we realize that the mind is restless for a reason, and the real reason we suffer is because we want things to be different (craving). If ill-will arises, maybe some negative thoughts about ourselves or other people, we don’t react by criticizing ourselves for being a ‘bad person’ because that is just more ill-will. The compassionate thing to do is to see that the mind is having a reaction to something, but we don’t need to identify with it. Important point – we will never develop compassion by being hard on ourselves for displaying a lack of compassion.

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Appreciation and Compassion

By Paul Garrigan /

How Appreciation Helps Us Sustain Our Attention One thing that is going to make it easier for you to remain...
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Getting Grounded – First Step To Freedom

By Paul Garrigan /

Moving Attention Away From Thinking Getting grounded involves moving our attention from our inner story about life to the information...
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The Link Between Mindfulness And Perception

By Paul Garrigan /

What Is Perception? Perception is how we make sense of the world. It is like a filter that helps translate...
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Getting Grounded – First Step To Freedom

by Paul Garrigan

Moving Attention Away From Thinking

Getting grounded involves moving our attention from our inner story about life to the information coming from our five senses. It is this that makes it possible to unhook from negative thinking and negative mental states. This is important: the goal is to not stop thinking, but to move our attention elsewhere. If we try to stop thinking, it often just agitates the mind, and we end up thinking about not thinking.

Look at the image below and imagine that at any given moment your attention can either be on your inner story (your inner dialogue about what is happening) or the information coming from your five senses. Here, the arrow represents your attention, and mindfulness is the ability to know where this arrow is pointing at any given moment. Now, to make this work, we need to add in another skill called concentration – this is your ability to move the arrow to where you want it to go and keep it there for a period of time. When that arrow is pointing at input from the five senses, this is what we mean by being grounded.

When I was younger, people would tell me that ‘you think too much’. I used to be confused by what they meant by this. I now see that this was an observation that my attention was usually focused on my inner story, and this was obvious in my behavior (e.g. I could be clumsy and insensitive).

When we are practicing getting grounded in meditation, we will often choose just one of the five senses (touch, sound, sight, smell, or taste) to focus on. The most common method is to concentrate on the sensations created by breathing which is a form of touch.

One of the interesting things about getting grounded is that this is something many of us automatically do when we get stressed enough. If you have ever paced up and down due to worry, you no doubt did this because it gave you some relief by grounding you.

Just spending a few minutes every day being grounded can greatly improve our mental health and increase our sense of well-being. It is such simple thing to do and there is a huge payoff, yet many of us struggle to get grounded for even a few seconds. Let us now move our attention to why this might be the case.

The Imortance Of Concentration

If we have poor concentration, it can be difficult to deliberately maintain our attention on anything for long. The good news is that concentration is like a muscle, and the more you do it, the better you get at it. If you commit to a daily meditation (even ten minutes per day), you will notice an improvement in your ability to concentrate within a couple of weeks.

For most of us though, our inability to remain grounded has more complex causes. In fact, it is gaining insight into these causes that will make it possible for us to change our relationship with perception and develop a growing sense of well-being.

The Five Obstacles (AKA The Five Great Teachers)

One of my teachers was a student of the great Thai meditation master Luang Por Teean who created a method where yogis were encouraged to be mindful at all times through focusing on physical movement. He didn’t expect people coming to his temple to be able to do this right away, but he knew that they could gain insight by failing to maintain mindfulness and understanding why that happened.

When we encounter the five obstacles in meditation, there is a tendency to seem them as the enemy, but they really aren’t. If we can learn to relate to these obstacles in a skillful way, they can teach us everything we need to know in order to find peace.

The five obstacles are:

Restlessness and worry
Mental dullness
Doubt
Desire
Ill-Will

Insight

Being mindful when the 5 obstacles arise leads to insight into your relationship to perception. My favorite definition of insight comes from the Buddhist teacher Rob Burbea who describes it as ‘seeing that frees’. It means more than just knowing something – it is seeing things in such a way that it changes how we navigate life. Insights are the fruit of the practice. The goal of mindfulness is not to practice being mindful every moment for the rest of our life, but to use it as a way to gain insight so that ultimately, we no longer need to practice anything in order to be okay.

An example of an insight you might experience early on is to do with your relationship with thinking. If you are able to be mindful when restlessness comes up in the meditation (or while going about your daily activities), you will begin to see how you are not directly controlling your thoughts (i.e. they come whether you want them to or not). This is one of the most important insights that arise in meditation, and when the true significance of it hits us, it changes things forever.

The Link Between Mindfulness And Perception

by Paul Garrigan

What Is Perception?

Perception is how we make sense of the world. It is like a filter that helps translate something that is incredibly complex into something we can understand. If we were to become aware of all of the sensory input coming into our brain from the outside world, and all of the evaluations our brain is doing to make sense of these inputs, we would feel completely overwhelmed. Instead, our clever brain creates a neat perception that makes it easier for us to navigate life.

This ability of our mind to create perception is necessary for our survival, but there is a downside to it. If we don’t realize that our perception is just an interpretation of what is going on, and that this interpretation is always flawed because of our biases and limited information, we can easily end up in a hell of our own making. For example, if there was an event that left us feeling betrayed in the past, we can start to see signs of potential betrayal everywhere – not because this is what is going on, but because it has become a habit. This is what is meant by the phrase; we see the world as we are not as the world is.

“Perception, figuring out what’s there, has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations and beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world”

Anil Seth (Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience) from his TED Talk ‘You Brain Hallucinates You Conscious Reality

Once we do realize that our perception is only an interpretation of reality, we are then in a position to influence this interpretation in a positive way. This is something the Buddha realized 2,600 years ago when he taught his followers to practice skillful ways of perceiving such as loving-kindness. My goal is to help you gain insight into how perception creates the sense of who you are, who other people are to you, and what life is about. Furthermore, you will see how changing your relationship to perception may be the key to solving pretty much all of your struggles in life – this is what mystics have claimed for centuries, and it is something you can start to see for yourself. In order to do any of this, we will need the assistance of a special way of perceiving called mindfulness.

What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is way of perceiving that comes naturally to humans. We do it all of the time without even realizing it. Here are a few examples of how this might happen:

You are feeling tired and you notice that your thoughts are more negative than usual.
You are driving and somebody cuts you off and an angry thought of ‘getting your revenge’ briefly enters your mind before you dismiss it (you become mindful of this thought because you see it as out of character).
A strange thought pops into your mind and you wonder, ‘where did that come from?’

Mindfulness simply means knowing what your mind is doing. In Western psychology it is referred to as metacognition. It is the ability to step back and look at what your mind is doing in a more objective way.

“To see our own mind clearly, without being caught up in its movement, to watch thought without trying to do anything with it or about it, simply seeing it and letting it go, this is the way to freedom…”

Luang Por Teean (Thai Meditation Master)

How Mindfulness Can Help You Change Your Relationship With Perception

You have likely already noticed how your body state changes your perception of reality. So, for example, if you are feeling tired, you may notice that your thoughts become more judgmental. When you are mindful of what is going on with your perception, you realize that the behavior of the people around you hasn’t suddenly deteriorated, you are just a bit grumpy due to tiredness. This realization can make the difference between saying things you later regret or being more cautious in responses until you get some rest.

If you deliberately cultivate mindfulness in your daily life (which is what we are doing here), it will lead to insights that will permanently alter the way you relate to perceptions. This is something we will be talking more about later on.

I’m going to be teaching you the following four perception skills in future posts:

Getting grounded
Appreciation and compassion
Encountering stillness
Imaginal practices

You may wonder why mindfulness isn’t to be found in the above list. This is because mindfulness is a component of each of them (at least in the beginning). It is important to practice these skills in meditation and in daily life – in fact, I would suggest it is even more important to practice mindfulness as we go about our daily routine.

Even though I don’t play the game, I like to use the analogy of golf when talking about developing mindfulness. Going to the driving range for practice is the equivalent of a daily meditation practice, and it gives us the chances to develop our skills. Practicing mindfulness in daily life is the same as actually playing a game of golf.