The Most Precious Five Minutes of Your Life

Why is it essential to give yourself the gift of at least five minutes a day where you choose a focus in the immediacy of life, like the rising and falling of your breath, a particular sensation in your body, or the sounds of life as they arise and pass away all around you, and then, when your attention drifts off again into thinking about life, you simply and gently return your attention to your focus?

Because the muscle of your attention is weak, it just follows thoughts wherever they go. If your thoughts say you’re sad, you think you’re sad. If your thoughts say you’re mad, you think you’re mad. It is possible to strengthen the muscle of your attention enough that you can see what your thoughts are doing and you can choose not to follow them wherever they go.

The first time I was able to say, “Fear is here,” rather than, “I am afraid,” was a pivotal moment in my life. Slowly and surely, I learned to do this with all the different beliefs in my head that caused such heartache in my life.

It does take time to strengthen the muscle of your attention by simply returning it to your focus every time you notice your thoughts have captured your attention again. Every time you bring it back, you strengthen your attention muscle a little bit more. And then slowly, it becomes possible to unhook from even the wildest and scariest stories in your head.

Rather than following jealousy down the rabbit hole of struggle, you can see it’s just the story of jealousy. Rather than getting caught in reactive frustration when somebody does something you don’t like, you can come back to grounding in your breath and allow those thoughts just to pass right on through you like the clouds passed through the sky.

Doing this kind of work is like putting together a 10,000-piece picture puzzle. Every time you relate to a thought or the feelings it generates rather than from it, you place another piece in the picture puzzle. At first, it may not make much sense. There can be a heck of a lot of different colors of blue in the sky or greens in the trees of a puzzle. Whether you can see it or not, every single simple acknowledgment that you’re caught in thought and then you bring your attention right back here is a moment of healing.

Slowly and surely, the picture puzzle gets filled in and you realize that thought is a wonderful tool for maneuvering through reality but it’s not who you are. If thoughts are clouds, you are the vast sky that they are all moving through.

Discovering how to do this is also very helpful to know that you are not weird, defective, or stupid because of the amount of struggle you have in your mind. All the parts that make up the stories in your mind are the same parts that make up everybody else’s stories. The best way to describe this is to imagine a huge warehouse that contains a thousand piles of Legos, separated by color and shape. Each of these piles represents a part of the stories that pass through our heads all day long. Maybe one pile is the anger pile. Maybe another pile is the happy pile. Maybe another pile is the lonely pile or the shame pile.

When you’re young you are required to go into this warehouse and choose at least one piece from every single pile to make the spaceship of your mind. You may have more rectangular red Legos than I do. And I may have more round yellow Legos than you do. But as we all put these pieces together, it creates the storyteller in our head, which I am calling a spaceship. As we grow up, we crawl into that spaceship and it drives us all throughout our lives as we think, think, and think our way through our existence.

Then you come to the kind of perspective I am inviting you into – being curious about what the spaceship of your mind is doing rather than staying endlessly in fix-it mode. And the more you work with yourself in this way, the more you begin to take spacewalks outside of the spaceship. You can look back and see how it’s constructed and realize that rather than being driven around by the spaceship you can be the driver.

So give yourself the gift of at least five minutes a day where you stabilize your attention on a focus like your breath, and even if for four minutes and 58 seconds your attention was caught in thought, and your attention was present for just two seconds, it is time well spent! And as you discover, over and over again, the magic of bringing your attention back to life, the time you spend meditating will expand naturally. It won’t be something you have to do. It will be something you want to do.

Amazing things happen when you strengthen the muscle of your attention enough that you finally recognize you are the awareness that can see your thoughts and the feelings and sensations they generate, rather than being enmeshed with them.