Developing Concentration by Practicing Practice

This is inspired by a TED talk I recently watched. Dandapani talked about unwavering focus which was life changing. He talked a lot about things I was already debating about with myself, and it helped me reach a very good and meaningful conclusion.

Concentration is a by product of your ability to focus.

I will help you understand this, while using what he said as pointers as to have a concrete base to build on.

Focus is very fickle.

An average person is not able to concentrate on a specific thing for more than 20 minutes (that’s why this won’t be that long). This is because our mind has many sections which are used to think about different things. We have love, anger, thoughts, sadness and other sections and our focus wanders to each one of them.

Focus is being aware about something.

Let’s assume our mind is a country and awareness is like a rain cloud. Like in actual life, the rain cloud moves from one place to another. In a similar fashion our awareness keeps on moving from one section to another, now you are able to relate to it; and now you’re distracted.

As Dandapani rightly said 'we have been asked all our life to concentrate and are never taught how to concentrate.’ funny, isn’t it?

Though we are not taught to concentrate, we are taught one thing, which is to practice. And we have been practicing the wrong thing. We have for the last as many years as we have lived, have practiced distraction, because that is what we do and now we need to practice the correct thing.

So, to practice focus you need to learn how to focus, because the formulae goes like this stable awareness-> unwavering focus-> ground breaking concentration.

The first step in developing focus is to learn to control your mind and the movement of your awareness. Once you start your practice of keeping your awareness in one place, you’ll start unwinding the practice of distraction that you have been practicing your whole life.

This actually sums up the whole 18 minute talk of ‘Unwavering Focus’ that Dandapani talked about. I would like to end it with a quote-

“As soon as we control where awareness goes we control where energy flows.

As soon as we control where energy is flowing we control what is manifesting in our life.

And meditation is the art and science of directing awareness.”

~ Dandapani

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