Quality of Attention

Such a subtle thing,

The quality of the light

That illuminates the scene.

Cinematographers have many terms

For this, because they understand

The power light has to change what is lit.

Hard light, soft light,

Key light, fill light,

Back top bottom warm cool light.

High-key and low-key lighting,

Chiaroscuro. Natural. Artificial.

The same face can be made menacing or benign,

The same room welcoming or forbidding.

So too can the power of our attention

Change that to which we attend.

At some point in my late 30’s, I’m not sure exactly when, I started saying the phrase “Always more gentle” to myself, often. I wasn’t necessarily referencing anything going on outside my head, although sometimes I was speaking about that also.

Mostly I was talking about my inner monologue and the resulting quality of relative tension or relaxation in my body. It became a practice of trying to intentionally soften the way I regard myself, and I found that this was just as much a somatic practice as it was a cognitive one. Harsh, critical, and negative self-talk, in my experience, leads to subtle but discernible tension and contraction in the body, in ways that inhibit sensitivity and hinder movement quality.

This practice eventually leaked over from my daily life into my training life, and (especially as I began spending more time practicing Qi Gong) I found that playing with the quality of my attention while training very much changed my experience of the training.

In one set I could constrict my attention to sensations of weight, effort, struggle etc. In the other, I could play with expanding my attention to breath, nuances of weight shifting, subtle changes in the hip rotation as I transitioned into and out of the squat… essentially transforming my attention from a bright, narrow spotlight to more, diffuse, soft floodlight. Beyond that, I could keep in mind that the whole reason I’m doing this difficult thing in the first place is because I like myself and this is a form of self-care. 

Softening my attention in this way, for me, changes how I feel at the end of a workout. I’m calmer, more relaxed, more easily able to transition into stretching, cooling down, and getting on with the rest of my day.

I notice this same phenomenon with all transitions in and out of different parts of my day: softening and expanding my attention and slowing down just a bit helps me to smooth out the bumps and rough edges. It interrupts negative thought spirals before they start, and helps me to get ahead of any emotion or mood struggles by keeping my internal environment gentle.

I think this is a big deal for folks in the gym. I used to work out motivated by self-loathing and I see plenty of people who appear, from the outside anyway, to be doing that themselves. I’m not interested in the results of anything motivated by self-loathing and frankly I don’t think you can get to where you want to go that way. I believe a gentle attention is more sustainable, more enjoyable, and more effective, in every metric, in the long run. Perhaps not in the short run, but I’d rather not trade tomorrow's health for today’s gains.

And finally, this gentle quality of attention is the foundation of any good Qi Gong practice. Qi cultivation, the practice of building up the quality and quantity of Qi in your body, requires you to become a good listener to subtle sensations. Eventually, you’ll find that, although you may not consciously know why, you’ll have ‘hunches’ about when it’s time to rest or push forward, eat or avoid certain kinds of food, dress more warmly or more cooly, even connect with certain people. All of these little impulses towards and away from things in life can help maintain health and prevent disease, and they don’t necessarily come from your head. They often come from your gut or your heart, which are part of a larger interconnected system in your body. Softening and broadening your attention as you attend to your inner life, whether that be emotions or sensations or thoughts, is the first step on the path towards getting more in touch with this web of information and learning to respect it’s (and your) limitations, and cherish it’s (and your) strengths.