Endurance of Focus

Jenna Zaffino:

Hi everyone. I'm Jenna. Welcome to your endurance of focus session. In this session, I'm gonna offer you some strategies that will help to tackle the number one objection that I receive from my clients and people in the world when they're thinking about starting a mindfulness or meditation practice, and that is, I can't sit still. I won't be able to do it without distraction. There's too many thoughts in my head. I'm too busy. All of those little things add up to a big objection, which is I'm afraid I won't be able to do it, or I'm afraid I will fail at it.

And the good news is it's really, really hard to fail at an attempt at mindfulness or meditation unless you're raising the bar so high that it would be impossible to achieve that goal. So for our purposes in the mindful compass library, I wanna just remind you that your focus is truly, truly engaged best when you just try to hone it in on something or some thought or some sensation. In the mindful compass library, we have a number of practices that are there to help you just experience focusing on, an object or your breath or your hands. There's lots of different ways that we can engage into temporary focus or minimal time periods of focus that still bring us the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. That said, the longer and the more engaged you can work your way up to, the more benefit you will receive. And so I wanna offer a few strategies that can help us transition into a mental space and maybe a physical space to engage with mindfulness and then also some strategies that can help us navigate through those distractions that inevitably will come up. In the time where I'm filming this in the year 2024, it's real hard to think about just, like, stop dropping and meditating. Our new cycle is 24 hour.

We're taking care of our own health. We're taking care of the people around us. It's very challenging to just drop into a very focused space. So it does help to have a transition strategy, and one of my favorites is called the take 5 exercise. So it's a means of tuning in to the 5 senses and noting or naming what you see, feel, hear, smell, and taste. And I will say in this exercise, if any of your senses are impaired, then just navigate the exercise in a way that makes sense for you. So let's try this one. Let's just sit up nice and tall as best you can, and we're going to just simply name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can feel, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and one thing you can taste.

You really can't get this one wrong, so I'll name the first ones with you, and then we'll do it once again on our own. So five things that we can see. What I can see is a plant, another plant, a camera, a desk, and a little, flag. Four things we can feel, I can feel my voice vibrating in my throat. I can feel my seat in my chair. I can feel my hair kinda touching my face and I can feel my breath moving my body. 3 things I can hear. There's always a train where my studio is.

I can hear a train right now. I can actually hear a plane as well, and I can hear the sound of my own voice. 2 things I can smell. I can smell a really horrible air freshener that I actually threw out because it's not good for our breathing that's in our building. I can smell a A little bit of coffee, maybe from earlier in the day. And one thing I can taste is that little bit of coffee from earlier in the day. So good a good reminder to have some water. So let's do that again one more time.

And this time, you think about 5 things you can see. Naming them out loud for yourself. Four things you can feel. 3 things you can hear. 2 things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. Great work. Now, one of the reasons we want to tune into our senses is to bring our focus back in towards our body and perhaps our breathing or the beating of our heart or just our physical presence and away from the frenetic kind of stressful energy that exists outside. So I find this exercise to be really useful in situations that might be a little more heightened, like, you know, wait in a crowd or sometimes in traffic.

Quite honestly, you can do it anywhere you are with your eyes open. So it can be used as a stress management strategy, or it can be used as a means to just kind of transition you into a place where you're going to be a little more focused for a longer period of time. And speaking of that focus, I'm going to offer you 2 more exercises that hopefully will help you really sense how to keep your focus for a prolonged period of time. But in the meantime, I will note that it helps to have a place that is dedicated for your focus, meaning you don't need to put up a whole meditation room with cushions or pillows, but if you have a really comfortable chair in your home or a space in your apartment that just feels peaceful and calm, maybe has a window by it or just something warm and comfy, that can be a really great way to anchor yourself and remind yourself that when I sit down for a few minutes here and just pay attention to my breath, pay attention to the things around me, that I can remember that my life is happening in my body and not all over the place with all of the different things that are going on. It can be really, really helpful to have that anchor of a place. Okay. So let's move into a bit of a feeling focus. The simplest way that we can engage into mindfulness is just putting our focus on something which is the opposite of doing nothing.

And that's how it gets a little more possible for us to actually engage into purposeful mindfulness instead of just feeling like we're sitting there waiting for some enlightenment to happen. So what I like you to do is take your index finger and your thumb and then just slowly rub them together. Do it with such attention that you can feel the ridges of your fingerprints against each other. Just notice anything that you feel, really try to gather information about what your thumb feels like on your finger and your finger on your thumb. Sometimes it's interesting to notice which is the leader of the movement. And if you're able to switch it up to where maybe your thumb moves a bit more, and then maybe your finger moves a bit more, and then maybe they move together. And feel what it's like to put a little more pressure down into them, and then feel what it's like to do a really light touch, still staying focused on the ridges between your finger and your thumb. Like playing the tiniest violin, right? Guess what? You have practiced mindfulness for one complete minute, so let's keep going with that.

From here, we're gonna take our hands and now start to just gently move your hands, palm over palm. Rubbing them together. There's no particular purpose or technique to doing this. It's almost like you're just trying to learn about your hands. So whatever feels interesting to you, just continue to move and pay attention. Maybe you'll notice if one hand feels the same temperature as the other hand or the same texture of skin or even the same musculature of your hands. We all have a dominant hand. Sometimes it's interesting to feel the difference in the strength of one hand versus the other.

Again, you can't really get this one wrong. It's just a matter of paying attention. And now you've practiced mindfulness for 2 minutes. So good work. Let's rest for a moment. So, it's a really simple way beyond just taking a deep breath or watching your breathing is to give yourself a focus, whether it's an object like a couple of our practices in the mindful compass library or it's rubbing the fingers and paying attention to the small details. Those are really effective ways to just hone in your focus away from some of the chaos that's going on around you. Now, if we want to get a little deeper, we are going to give ourselves the permission to lose focus, knowing that we can also retrieve it if it goes away.

So this exercise is a breathing meditation. However, as always do what you can. There's no. Extra pressure to take deeper or longer breaths. You're simply going to notice your breathing as it happens. So for this one, let's reengage our posture, kind of get some energy back into your spine. If you'd like to close your eyes, go for it. If not, you can keep them open with me and we'll just start to tune in.

So we're just beginning to breathe and notice the movements of our breath. Notice the inhalation and the exhalation doing this without judgment as much as possible. We're gonna do the best we can to just be an observer, trying not to draw any conclusions just right now, but instead just focus in. So we'll be here for the next few moments, just focusing in on your breath. In the event, which will probably happen, that your mind drifts to another subject or thought or thing, I'd like you to say that thing out loud and then return to the breath. So for example, we might be breathing, paying attention to the inhale and the exhale. And I might remember if I have to get my son ready for soccer practice later, and then think about what time I have to pick him up and all the things that go into that. And I'm just gonna say, okay.

Soccer practice, and then return to the breath. Whenever a distracting thought comes up, name it, and then bring your focus back into your breathing. Name the thought you're thinking about now, and bring your focus back to your breath. And speak out loud what you're thinking about now, and bring your focus back to your breath. And we'll take one more chance to name any thoughts that you're thinking, any distractions, and bring your focus back to the breath. Great work. Now, you can absolutely insert some motion of your hands or your fingers for that longer exercise if paying attention to your breath is not necessarily anchoring you in a good way. You can also use an object like we've done in other practices where you just put your focus on the object and then as the distracting thoughts come up, you can shift your focus back to the object after you name what they are.

The idea is, from a metaphor that comes from lots of meditation practices, which is, you know, the sun is your main focus, your energy source for mindfulness and focus, and often there will be clouds that pass in front of it. The clouds are just like those distracting thoughts. So as they pass, we let them pass. We say there's a cloud, and then we come back to the sun once it once it has passed. Because your mind is really good at continuing this ticker tape of information of scanning and focusing and getting in front of your worries or your fears. But you have the power of self focus to really come back again and again. And the more you practice, the easier it will be to maintain that focus for a prolonged period of time. But notice how we're not doing nothing, but instead we're doing something with focus that might from the outside look like not much, but from the inside is taking a lot of brain power to stay focused.

So for your weaving well-being tip for this session, I want to encourage you to schedule yourself 2 minutes per day. Now that might feel like a big undertaking, but I promise you that if you put an alarm in your phone or a an event on your calendar and you take 2 minutes each day to either do the finger, the hand, to sit in your comfy spot and just notice what's going on, to do your sensory exercise, or to focus on your breathing and note your distractions. Those things are going to begin to build a little habit in your day to day activities. And when there's a habit, there's often a craving for that habit that's developed the more you do the habit. So I know that this is, a big undertaking, but when you think about 2 minutes out of all of the minutes in your day where you might get to come back to your body, maybe experience a sense of calm and relaxation, that's really simple, I hope you'll feel that that is a lot more motivating than meditating for 10 minutes a day. Sometimes that feels too big for folks. And if you're somebody who already has a meditation practice, I wanna encourage you to expand it to include simple acts. I know a lot of people who do meditation on a regular basis and they have the freedom in their mind, body, and schedule to dive into 10 to 15 minutes of practice, which is a lot for for many of us.

And that might be an ideal for somebody, but we need to remember that mindfulness can be accessed on every single level and you don't need ample amounts of time to reap the benefits of what mindfulness can do for you in those 2 minutes. So I encourage you to play with this practice, maybe develop some focuses of your own. Petting the dog is one of my favorite meditation mindfulness focuses while I let those distraction, distracting thoughts come up. So play with it, make it your own. Remember you are strong, resilient, and the small moments matter. I'll see you soon.