Week Three

This week, your focus becomes attention itself.

What to Focus On This Week

This week, Find Your Flashlight is still your touchstone practice. But as we shift into River of Thought, the focus of your attention is now your own mind. Remember: with River of Thought, you visualize your own mind as a moving river. All kinds of stuff is going to float by in that moving water—your job is to observe it and let it go. Don’t reach down to grab any of those thoughts or worries or memories—simply notice them and let them float on by. Draw on the decentering and Watch Your Whiteboard mini-practices offered to exercise your capacity to step back and observe the mind. If you do find yourself wrapped up in something, go back to your breath—think of it as a boulder in that river that you can rest your attention on and regain your stability. Then begin observing the moving water again.

What Week Three Might Feel Like

Not engaging and not elaborating are active attentional skills that require core strength to perform. You will build this capacity over time, but doing this for the first time in a twelve-minute formal practice can feel as hard as trying to hold a plank when you can’t yet do a push-up. You’ll get better at this. If you find yourself engaged with thoughts, worries, or memories that have floated up, remember: that realization is a win. That’s meta-awareness—you just did it. Reclaim your flashlight, redirect it to the breath to anchor yourself for a bit, and then move back into observing the River of Thought again.

Frequently Experienced Challenges

You’ll start to become more aware of how much your mind is wandering. This can feel uncomfortable, or make you wonder if you’re getting worse instead of better. You’re not! You’re simply growing more aware. Remember: your mind has always been wandering, but you’re just catching yourself more. Again: success point.

You may start noticing what’s arising in your mind more and more (both during formal practice and throughout the day), and it might not always be nice. You may find yourself realizing, Man, I get angry a lot. Or: I’m obsessing over food (or sex or video games) and can’t stop. These are not fun things to realize. Reframe it: this is information you can use. It’s like getting to know a new friend. You are supportive yet firm, befriending yourself, quirks and all.

How Week Three Skills Will Show Up in Your Life

You grow the capacity to reflexively ask yourself, What’s happening right now? What’s my mind doing? What am I really upset about? Why am I consumed by this?

You’ll notice that you start defaulting to taking a more observational stance toward your own thought processes; you get in the habit of checking with yourself to see if you have a story, and how it might be affecting your interpretation of events or feelings. This is an important part of what having a peak mind means, and you’re starting to get there: you are able take a broad, receptive, observational stance.

You can “monitor” your mind in this way, outside of formal practice. Try this: While driving, walking, or riding the subway, don’t listen to music or a podcast; don’t take a phone call. Just sit and let your mind roam. Notice where it goes and what comes up.