Daniel Goleman – Part 1 from WhatMeditationReallyIs on Vimeo.

I just finished watching this video-presentation by Daniel Goleman and what strikes me most is the simplicity of the phrase that he uses, “attentional retraining.” In these two words, we are reminded of what is is that we’re working with during meditation – our attention – and what we’re doing – retraining it.

Sometimes, when we’re working with our mind and practicing meditation, something as simple as remembering the phrase, “attentional retraining” is all that it takes to bring us back to our practice. Suppose that I sit down to meditate, and within 5 minutes find that my attention has wandered to something else, food, the bills, a bike ride…whatever. By remembering that I’m trying to retrain my attention, I can allow myself the space to work with my mind; try, fail, try, succeed, etc.

If we imagine having to retrain a dog who has been reinforced, over its entire life, that running away from us is okay, we can see that we’d have a good deal of work to do in order to get it to obey us. We can look at our mind as being similar to that untrained dog; for our whole life, we’ve allowed our mind to run away with thoughts, sensations and emotions. Now, our job is to retrain our mind and doggedly bring it back home.

What Goleman poignantly reminds us of in this video is that our society, the culture that we live in, actually trains us in distraction. He states that our attention is “normally lame…normally out of control.” Hearing this, we may at first think, “that’s not so.” Believing our mind (dog) to be well behaved, we may resist the notion that it isn’t well-behaved. However, when we decide to spend some time with our mind through practicing meditation (like taking the dog for a walk in an open field) we find out that it’s off and running and that it’s wandered off. Bad dog! Well, not exactly bad….

The habit of becoming distracted is not so much about being bad or good as it is about training. Just as a dog who is trained to wander is not at fault, so too, our mind is not at fault. We’re simply habituated to let our attention wander. Meditation is about retraining our attention so that it doesn’t wander, so that it doesn’t find distraction as easily.

For more information on how to meditate, and how to retrain your attention, please see the Related Posts below. Also, don’t forget to download the free ebook, Can Meditation Change the Way that You View Your World?, for help with getting started in you meditation practice. Also, you can now download the new ebook, How to Work with the Four Distractions to Meditation to learn how to deal with some of the obstacles to meditation.

NEW – this site has a new page, Media, where you can find articles, MP3 tracks for downloading, and videos on the subject of meditation.

As always, please feel free to share your comments. Let me and others know what situations you find yourself in when you’re able to be compassionate with yourself when finding yourself distracted during a compassionate moment. And, as always, please feel free to contact me if you’d like to see additional content or other discussions on this site.