Intention, Attention, Retention

Intention, Attention, Retention

Reflections from a recent DiabetesSangha retreat
By Sam Tullman

Our retreat was centered around three themes: intention, attention, and retention. I want to focus first on intention. I think this is the most important part of our practice—and perhaps the part that feels least clear, or easiest to lose track of.

During our walking meditation, I was struck by the river we passed. The river simply is. And amazingly, it is also always changing. It was different the night before. It will be different tomorrow. It will be completely different next season.

And yet, it’s just fine with itself as it is.

When we came to the place we stopped at for a while, before we turned around, there were two striking features. One was a large boulder in the middle of the river, with water hitting it and struggling to pass. You could imagine that being a dangerous or sketchy place to be if you were caught in the river. But then turning upstream, the light was so bright on the river it was blinding—beautiful, but impossible to look at directly.

That river is just like our experience. Our moment-to-moment experience is perfect as it is. Not consistent. Always changing. Fine as it is—and yet always different.

Our experience has its sketchy places, places that feel hazardous or difficult for both ourselves and the people in our lives. And it also includes these areas of blinding, glorious light—places of depth, love, and wisdom that we can’t always see ourselves, but that the ones we love can see in us. It’s good to have Good Friends around to mirror that in us.

Intention

As we practice, it’s very easy to sit in a loving-kindness or heart-oriented meditation and think, Ugh, anger. Better get that out of here. And maybe that desire to move it comes from a wholesome place. But that’s actually contrary to orienting ourselves to the river as it is, which is the foundation of a real lovingkindness practice, and a truly heart-centered life. 

We’re not practicing to change the landscape of the river today. That will change over time. It changes a tiny bit day by day, sometimes a lot all at once, but mostly it changes over seasons. We can really frustrate ourselves by trying to push boulders out of the way, or by staring into blinding light to try to will it to increase. Neither approach is advisable.

Instead, we can sit and appreciate the river. Maybe dip a hand in. Feel how cool it is. Feel how it relates to the body, and to the rest of our experience. What we’re learning here— not just with our minds, but with our bodies – is that nothing needs to be changed, and that everything will take care of itself.

That doesn’t mean we don’t engage. It doesn’t mean we don’t take steps to improve things. At a fundamental level, things can be okay as they are—and we can still work to make them better. Both are true.

In a sweet serendipity, I had originally planned to take time today to go into another teaching about a river – this one much older. It’s a Buddhist discourse called The Discourse of the Sloping East of the Ganges River – the Gangapeyyalavagga Sutta. In it, the Buddha talks about what are called the four right efforts—a simple way of understanding how to apply ourselves in meditation practice. Applying ourselves this way, we learn to navigate the flow of this river, and can rest assured we will arc towards greater peace, wisdom, and clarity – even though along the way there are twists and turns that feel contrary to that arc. These four efforts are: 

When something wholesome arises—even a small sense of ease, warmth, or clarity—we encourage it. We create space for it to flourish. We stoke the flame.

When something unwholesome arises—which, of course, there’s never a shortage of—we don’t try to push it out of the river. We try to mitigate the damage it causes, to prevent it from taking over our experience. We ask: How can I navigate these waters skillfully, knowing this boulder is here?

For wholesome, skillful states of mind that haven’t yet arisen, we encourage them to arise! Simple. This is what we often think of meditation as being — a process to help the river of our lives slope in a direction that leads to more good for ourselves and others.

And for unwholesome states of mind that haven’t yet arisen, we of course take reasonable steps to prevent them from taking hold. We can often skillfully anticipate such experiences as we come to know our own mind its tendencies to get stuck on certain things – “Ahh, here’s that bend in the river that I always wipe out at.” 

The Two Wolves

When you look closely, these four efforts are really just two: feeding what’s wholesome, and not feeding what isn’t.

This harkens to  a Cherokee story about two wolves locked in an endless battle inside each of us. In the story, an elder is telling a child about these two wolves: one represents kindness, justice, clarity, and peace; the other represents bitterness, reactivity, revenge, and resentment.

The child asks which wolf will win.

The elder’s answer is our instruction for practice and life: “The one that you feed.”

This looks a little different for everyone. No two people have the same meditation practice. No two people in all of time have ever had the same meditation practice. Even if we all did the exact same thing externally, entirely different things would be happening internally. Our experience is infinitely deep, and it’s uniquely ours. Only we can learn how to work with these two wolves in us. 

This is slow work. It’s better measured in seasons than in days. But with the right intention, the river slopes in a clear direction. Eventually, it cannot help but meet the ocean.

Attention

Attention also develops over time, but how we work with it matters. The mind naturally inclines toward pleasure. This has been known and written about for thousands of years, since before the time of the Buddha! Somehow, most of us today have missed this in meditation practice.

When attention is connected to something that feels good—safe, pleasant, easeful—it stays more easily. We don’t have to fight the mind so much. Practice becomes something the mind wants to return to.

And it’s important we develop it. Yesterday, I went to yoga, and was feeling a little lazy, mentally foggy, and just wanted to go to do a few sun salutations and then go lay down. Maybe on a different day, had I been exhausted, this would have been skillful. But really I was being avoidant, and didn’t want to exert the patience necessary to let my mind settle into the practice. At just the moment I was ready to give up on practice for the day, I thought of you all, and I thought of my partner, who I had a date night with later on in that same day. And I thought to myself “If I can’t even rest my mind for long enough to do a few yoga asanas, how can I hope to show up and be fully present with this person I love? How can I hope to show up well for my community?” This was a wise thought. I recommitted to settling my mind and was glad I did. 

In this way attention itself can be understood as a form of love, or a form of loving-kindness. It’s a gift you give yourself, and the people and things you care about.

Being able to skillfully place our attention is increasingly difficult. Technology makes it harder, and it was always hard, even thousands of years ago. But this skill—learning where and how to place attention—is a real expression of care for ourselves and others.

Retention

Retention is subtler.

We’re not really in control of when the mind wanders. And we’re not really in control of when it comes back. That might be the teaching Retention has for us. 

When the mind returns, we so often meet it with frustration, which is silly. This is the very moment of grace! This is the grace of the unconscious mind, or the beyond-conscious mind, that somehow brings us back to what matters. It’s like when we say “I forgot what I was going to say, but I’m sure it’ll come back to me if it’s important.” And more often than not it does! Our mind, which is so much larger than what we’re aware of, has the kindness embedded in it to come back to this thing that is good for us. I encourage all of us to meet this moment of return, or of homecoming with warm intention.

The mind going away isn’t your fault, and just the same way, the mind coming back isn’t your accomplishment. There’s no need to beat yourself up, and there’s no need to take credit. Just do your best to appreciate the ride, and learn to trust in your honest intention. This is the teaching of intention – it’s a teaching of Faith in Mind. It’s a teaching of what Buddhists would call “Not-Self.” 

A Closing Reading

To close, I’ll share an excerpt (paraphrased in places) from an ancient meditation instruction from a collection called “Cultivating the Empty Field.” It’s a collection of works by Zen Master Honzhi,and this one is titled The Backward Step and the Upright Cauldron:

“With the depths clear, utterly silent,
Thoroughly illuminate the source, empty and spirited, vast and bright.

Even though you have lucidly scrutinized your image,
And no shadow or echo meets it,
You see that you still have distinguished
Between the value of a hundred different things.

At that moment, you must take the backward step
And directly reach the middle of the circle
Where light issues forth.

….

The empty valley receives the clouds.
The cold stream cleanses the moon.

Everything, everywhere, returns to this old ground.”

Step backwards… And reach the center from where the light issues forth. This is our meditation instruction. Step back into your intention. It’s waiting for you. All it needs is your honest attention and a little time to grow each day, and it will bear wonderful fruits for your life.