Westminster Hall is an imposing place even if you’re not there to present your life’s work to members of the UK Parliament as well as top military and emergency services leaders. Huge and turreted, some parts of it almost a thousand years old, it sits in the heart of London and looms over the River Thames. The room in the House of Commons where I was presenting, along with other experts on mindfulness training, had the hushed, weighty feel of a courtroom. It was long and high-ceilinged, with deep-green walls and tall, narrow windows that looked out onto the river. Everything was antique yet pristine—the weight of history was heavy in that room. Rows of benches, a deep, polished mahogany, ran the length of it. And they were all filled with some of the most important, influential people in the country.
I already felt rattled. I’d been preparing for this presentation—at that point, one of the more high-profile ones of my career—for weeks. The original plan had been this: Walt Piatt, who was then a major general, and I would present together. He’d have ten minutes, then I’d have fifteen. I’d been told to have slides prepared and to be ready to go immediately after him. I spent hours prepping my talk, honing it down, going over the slides. I was ready.
And then, two days before the big day, Walt had to pull out. (When you’re a major general and something “comes up at work,” it’s not negotiable.) So, we pivoted—the organizers asked me to absorb Walt’s time, rework my material, and present for twenty-five minutes. I took a deep breath and dove back in, reworking my presentation. But it threw me. And arriving in London, after the long plane ride, a bit jet lagged and groggy, concerns had started to creep in. Was my message sufficiently honed? Was my timing on track? Had I represented the broader view well, now that I was absorbing some of Walt’s message?
And there was an extra, even more personal layer to all this for me. I would be walking into the seat of government in the country that had ruled over the place of my birth for nearly ninety years. I was born in the town where Gandhi organized his nonviolent resistance against British rule. And I’d be talking about the merits of peace-promoting practices to war leaders. There was poignancy to it—and a lot of pressure. As I settled myself with the other presenters at the front of the room, I was feeling it all: the last-minute changes, the weight of history, the concerns welling up about my presentation’s clarity. And then, the event organizer approached us. There was another twist.
The evening before our meeting, the room we were in had been used for a closed-door meeting about whether or not to keep Theresa May in place as the UK’s prime minister. This was October 2018, in the middle of the Brexit decision—tensions were high, and everything was up in the air. The organizers had just discovered that someone had sabotaged the audiovisual equipment to eliminate the possibility that the discussion regarding May could be secretly recorded. They had literally ripped it out of the wall. There was no way to get it back online. The organizers dragged in an external speaker system and scrambled around trying to find a projector, but three minutes before I was supposed to go on, they called it: No slides. Wing it.
As I readied myself to speak, I remember thinking, everything in my life has brought me to this moment. Not because if I failed, there would be dire consequences—in the grand scheme of things nothing terrible would happen if I tanked. It wasn’t the same as it was with some people I worked with: I wouldn’t get blown up by a grenade or engulfed by a fireball. I was not in jeopardy of losing an important case for a client or a multimillion-dollar sports contract. What I had in front of me was an opportunity. I had the chance to land my message with people who possessed the power to make decisions that radically affected other people’s lives—people who were put in life-and-death situations every day. I had a narrow opening to make a difference. I could either take it, or let it slip away.
My thoughts seemed to settle and focus. I spread the printouts of the slides out in front of me, looked up at the crowd, and began to speak. I talked about the power of attention, how it can—and so often does—go wrong. And then I spoke about how it can go right: how mindfulness training can hone our focus and expand our awareness. How it lets us rise above the cacophony of a chaotic or confusing situation, take in the landscape, and in the blink of an eye make the right move amid so many potential wrong ones. And I talked about how the capacity to be present—to take in an experience without elaboration, judgment, or reactivity—allows us to absorb, learn, and discern so much more clearly and effectively than we would otherwise. I said that this kind of ability can change not only the moment you’re in, but even the trajectory of an entire life.
When I was finished, I felt satisfied knowing I’d delivered as tight and powerful a presentation as I could have. And the last-minute changes that had threatened to undermine me had instead transformed into a kind of gift—with the longer time and the slides scrapped, I felt myself connect more fully with the audience. I had the time to expand on my ideas and results and to allow myself to relax into the rhythm of communicating my message with this esteemed audience. And instead of staring at a glowing screen as I spoke, clicking a projector remote from slide to slide, I’d looked out at my listeners, making eye contact, talking to them.
This was what I’d been missing all those years ago, when I lost sensation in my teeth and realized that I was numb to so much more in my life. I’d been pushing hard and moving fast, my mind always churning on something; I was overwhelmed and disconnected, never at rest and observant. I was lost in a maze, unable to see my way out. Now, I had a tool to lean on. I had learned how to find my focus and own my attention. I could zoom in to direct my mind to what mattered, and zoom out to surveil the landscape, seeing each obstacle clearly, finding a new, better way around. It was like flexing a muscle I hadn’t even known was there before.
I left the grounds of Parliament practically floating. I’d accomplished exactly what I’d set out to do—I’d communicated as clearly and dynamically as I could, and maybe made a difference. I imagined the knowledge I’d shared settling in each listener like a seed, one that each parliamentarian, military leader, police chief, and first responder could carry back to their own slice of the world to take root, grow, and spread. I hoped it would help people navigate through stress and crisis, making the kinds of decisions—even under pressure—that aligned with their ethics and their goals. Maybe, like my husband, Michael, someone might achieve a better awareness of their own mind and find their focus so they could reach for their dreams. Or like the firefighter who’d sought me out thousands of miles from his home, could learn to broaden his attention to hold in mind the bigger picture, the larger goal, without getting fixated on small distractions and “engulfed” by the inevitable overwhelm of life. Or like Walt Piatt, who wrote to me while he was deployed to Iraq about his mindfulness practice, and told me how that daily mental training helps him hold to the ultimate goal—peace—even through stress and pressure, crisis and complexity.
People often say, “There’s just too much action that needs to happen right now. How am I going to just sit there with my eyes closed?”
I hear this from everyone, from business leaders to social activists, from parents to police officers. And I get it—I felt the same way. People want to change the world. They want to get things done. They want to be fulfilled. To accomplish all this, it seems that we need to become a perpetual motion machine.
My response to that, as someone who once also prioritized endless motion over ever sitting still: If you want to take action for lasting change, you need to have all your capacity to get you there. This is about claiming, and using, all your resources.
As humans, we are facing unprecedented challenges with our attention systems. We live in a world that now seems built to fracture and pull at our attention. The innovative digital and technological tools that allow us to stay connected to each other, to do the work we love, to learn and progress in our lives, are the very same tools that place relentless demands on our attention, pulling us away from what we want or need to do.
When we engage in mindfulness practice, we learn to keep our attention present in the moment for the unfolding of our lives. We step away from the mode where we’re simulating and planning, and we experience life directly. I said in the introduction that the present moment is the only place you can use your attention. It can’t be saved up for later. It is a superpower—but it has to be used now, it can only be used now.
We used to think of attention as primarily a tool for action—a system for constraining information so we can direct our minds to do something with it. What we’re seeing now through contemplative neuroscience and the new science of attention is that for us to lead full and successful lives, attention must not only be focused for us to take action, but it must also be receptive so we can notice and observe. We can use it to open up to what is occurring before us. We can withhold judgment and story-making and see what is. We can not only frame and reframe problems, but can de-frame problems and see them through new eyes. And by doing so, our thinking, decisions, and actions will all become better aligned with what is needed in the moment, and what we want out of this precious life we have.
This “new science” of attention has an empirical basis that is fast growing. What you are seeing in this book is the vanguard of this field—the push forward. We are breaking new and exciting ground on the incredible value of mindfulness and other contemplative practices. This is a direction we vitally need to go, and because I’ve seen the impact this work has had on people across a broad range of professions, people from many walks of life, I’m thrilled to be a part of it.
That day in historic London, presenting to Parliament, I had only one regret: that I would not be able to share anything about it with my father. During each of the highs of my life—getting my PhD, my wedding, opening my lab, the births of my children—there has always been one missing piece, a shadow in the shape of him.
Earlier, when I talked about trauma and triggers, I mentioned how many of us have experienced them. In my life, it was a car accident that had a big impact on me. It changed my life, because it took my father’s. Driving back from a family road trip to Yosemite National Park, a drunk driver slammed into our car, veering us off a cliff and onto a field below. My sister and I, aged thirteen and five, in the backseat, were spared the worst of it; my mother on the passenger’s side, less so. My father, in the driver’s seat, was not.
My memories from the accident are vivid but choppy. I remember the way the car moved just as I woke up into an unfolding nightmare. Then: the car on its side, the hissing of the engine, the slow realization that this was not merely a dream. I remember how quiet it was all around us. I could see a man on the cliff looking down and it struck me that he wasn’t running to help. We later surmised that he was likely the driver. It had been a hit-and-run—at some point after I spotted him, he must have just left, because nobody called for help. In the distance, I could see a small house. I knew we needed to get to it, call an ambulance. I picked up my sister and carried her toward it, through the field.
I was only a kid then, and I didn’t know the first thing about how the brain worked, or how mindfulness could transform it. This fatal accident that took my father’s life, and severely injured my mother, was an experience that shaped a great deal of my life, including my work as a neuroscientist. When I first started on this journey, embarking on my research into the science of attention, I didn’t know exactly what I would discover. And yet a part of me knew what I was searching for: that it’s not simply about being able to focus on an assignment or project or task. It’s not only about being more productive, or performing better at work, or being a more-present parent or partner. It is about those things, but it’s about something more, something bigger. Having a peak mind means living fully in the face of everything we have to deal with as human beings. Through stress and grief, through joy and tragedy.
I said at the beginning of this book that the battle for your attention is the battle for the resources to live your life. In my decades of research into the science of attention and mindfulness, everything I’ve uncovered along the way has only served to prove how true that really is. It is a battle—but it’s one you can win, over and over.