Give this Your Divided Attention

The Art of Divided Attention

Do you have a moment? If so, would you be able to give this letter your divided attention? I promise you’ll get more out of it if you do.

 No, that’s not a typo. It’s my new theory. 

 It came to me as I was listening to a short talk on the art of listening on the new Deepak Chopra app. In it, the meditation teacher Devi Brown talks about good listening as a quality of undivided attention. 

 That sounds like a lovely goal. But the more I study my own mind through meditation, the more I realize it’s an impossible one. And, I suddenly thought, counterproductive.

Instead, I want to make a bid for listening with artfully divided attention. Done right, I believe it can unlock deeper connection in human communications. And in music. For one thing it can change the way you relate to dissonance.

When I listen to a person speaking, my mind is firing off reactions all the time. Ideas pertaining to the subject at hand. Observations on physical occurrences in my field of vision or background sounds. A realization that my stomach is growling.

Some of those impulses pop up fully verbalized on my inner screen. (“There is a fly on Mike Pence’s head.”) 

But others drift unarticulated into the murk of my subconscious. My emotional resistance to an argument, say. Or the emotional halo of a memory that’s been triggered. Impatience with my state of being hungry.

Over time, left unexamined, these build up like silt clouding my reception.

In meditation, we get to practice noting such distractions in the privacy of our own head. The classic technique is to call an unbidden mental impulse by its name. Just that simple act of labeling – thinking … sensation – helps dissolve the distraction. 

There is a second level to the practice that I found transformational when I first tried it. This is the concept of feeling tones, the possessive charge of – my relationship to --a given thought, sensation or emotion. 

In the Buddhist theory of mind, there are only three feeling tones: pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. In meditation, you bring awareness to these whenever a distraction occurs. I might label an itch as: sensation. unpleasant. Or a daydream as: thinking. pleasant. 

Now, the stated goal of meditation is to devote undivided attention to whatever object is our anchor – most often the breath. Yet the real work happens when we bring awareness to the glitches in our focus. As we become more skillful at spotting and illuminating these glitches, our ability to pay attention deepens.

All of which applies beautifully to music. In Beginner’s Ear sessions, I encourage musicians to design a program that builds a real journey for the listener, including some sounds that might register as more acerbic, even spiky. 

One of the revelatory aspects of these programs has been the reaction of audience members, who say that from inside a mindful state of listening they were able to identify a reflexive aversion to certain harmonies and then bring a more open curiosity to that discomfort. “It helped me let go of the ‘I like this. I don’t like this,’” one listener said. “To just notice it and be with it.” (You can revisit that Beginner’s Ear session on this video.)

If you want to play around with feeling tones, settle down somewhere delicious with this 15-minute playlist and see what happens if you divide your attention artfully between the sounds coming at you, and the pings of pleasure, aversion, and clinging that bubble up in you. See if noting helps them dissipate, leaving you more clear and receptive.