mindfulness meditation is a psychological technique that involves paying attention to your present-moment sensory experience in a nonjudgmental manner, and which makes the unconscious conscious for the purpose of improving your life.

The goal is to get you meditating 30 minutes a day, at least five days a week. That’s an achievable goal for most people. At that level, you’ll begin to get the advertised benefits of mindfulness meditation very quickly (a month or two at most), and be able to sustain and grow those benefits over time. Of course, it’s not required that you do that much. Even 10 minutes a day will get you far.

mindfulness meditation is a psychological technique that involves paying attention to your present-moment sensory experience in a nonjudgmental manner, and which makes the unconscious conscious for the purpose of improving your life. 

The goal is to get you meditating 30 minutes a day, at least five days a week. That’s an achievable goal for most people. At that level, you’ll begin to get the advertised benefits of mindfulness meditation very quickly (a month or two at most), and be able to sustain and grow those benefits over time. Of course, it’s not required that you do that much. Even 10 minutes a day will get you far.

In meditation class, we also begin with a concept of three separate but interconnected pieces: concentration, sensory clarity, and acceptance (CCA). No matter what meditation technique you’re using, it will probably be composed of some ratio of these three core elements.

Concentration means being able to train your attention on whatever object you choose, and sustain it there over time. Sensory clarity means having a lot of resolution of the details of whatever object you’re focusing on. Acceptance means having an attitude of openness, curiosity, and nonjudgment with whatever is happening in the moment.

It’s natural and even healthy that, in the beginning, your attention is going to be captured by things that are not your meditation object. (“Meditation object” or “focus object” are the clunky-but-concise phrases I’ll use to mean the thing you’re supposed to be focusing on.)

The solution is simple: brute force repetition. Each time your attention is drawn away from the meditation object, gently bring it back. Over and over, notice that your focus has wandered and return it to the chosen object. Each one of these returns can be thought of as a concentration “rep,” just like a weightlifting “rep” at the gym. With each weightlifting rep, your muscles are growing stronger. In the same way, with each concentration rep your concentration grows stronger. Luckily, concentration is a trainable skill, so it just keeps getting more buff as you iterate your reps. Bulking up your focus power is one of the most widely demonstrated benefits of meditation46 practice.

We can model concentration as a kind of extremely simple algorithm: 1.Place attention on the focus object. 2.Check if attention has wandered. 3.If no, continue. If yes, then 1.

Iterating through this algorithm not only creates focus as you’re doing it, it permanently builds your concentration “muscle,” your focus power. Iterating through this a large number of times (something like 106 or 107) will build immense concentration that can stay on a single object for a very long time. So this sort of iteration increases the time dimension of your concentration. Your attention span gets huge.47

The good news is that your attention span doesn’t just become longer during meditation practice, it becomes longer for all the other activities of your life. You can do better at school work, work projects, or anything else you want to devote attention to. Even a two-week course in mindfulness meditation has been shown to increase working memory and GRE performance.48 Gaining the ability to focus on anything you want to, for as long as you want, is one of the most powerful ways the mindfulness meditation can improve your life.

If, however, you’ve developed a bit of sensory clarity, something different happens. Let’s say you’ve worked for a year on your mindfulness meditation practice, and you’ve developed a walloping 128 pixels of sensory clarity anywhere on your body. Then, when the warm, soothing shower water hits any part of your body, you can experience it with startling resolution and depth. Each pixel feels good in its own way, so the experience is much richer and more rewarding. Secondly, it takes up much more room in awareness—hogs more of the RAM in your working memory—and so pushes out extraneous thoughts and feelings. There’s far less room in your mind for anxiety about the day, for example. So the whole experience of the warm shower goes from something that’s “nice” to an all-consuming experience of quasi-orgasmic pleasure all over.

The third of the three elements of meditation is acceptance.52 Acceptance is extremely simple, much simpler than the other two. Just accept whatever your experience is, that’s all.

Mostly acceptance means to not judge your sensory experience.53 The motto for acceptance is, “It is what it is.”

It’s important to notice that acceptance means accepting your sensory experience, not accepting the conditions of your life. You’re free to take all the actions necessary or desirable to make your life better. Acceptance doesn’t mean becoming passive or inactive. It just means that the current sensory experience is what it is, and you accept that part of things.

Most of us live in a state of perpetual “could be better.” We’re so used to having control over every little parameter of our lives that we cannot focus on what’s going right, only on what’s going wrong. That’s the viewpoint we always seem to be coming from, and it means that we are perpetually unsatisfied, unhappy, disappointed, and ungrateful. These are not pleasant emotions to be constantly soaking in.

Another metaphor for how the three elements work comes from a video screen. Concentration means you can direct your attention to any part of the screen you want. Sensory clarity is like switching the screen setting from low-res to HD. And acceptance is how the screen displays whatever signals it gets, without judging or controlling the content.

Each of the three elements of meditation—concentration, sensory clarity, and acceptance (CCA)— can almost function as a complete meditation on their own. That is, there are practices that strongly utilize only concentration, sensory clarity, or acceptance individually. Putting them all together in a single practice, however, each one of them tends to reinforce the others.

Just as concentration can be expressed as an algorithm, the process of mindfulness meditation can also be modeled as a repeated sequence of steps. This algorithm assumes that you’ve already sat down, relaxed, and gotten all set to meditate. It also assumes that you know which meditation technique you’re going to practice. Once you are ready to actually meditate, the practice is expressed by this algorithm: 1.Notice the focus object. 2.Label the focus object. 3.Allow awareness to deeply contact the focus object. 4.Feel acceptance toward whatever you find there. 5.Continue focusing, contacting, and accepting for about 5 seconds. 6.Repeat.

In meditation class, we also begin with a concept of three separate but interconnected pieces: concentration, sensory clarity, and acceptance (CCA). No matter what meditation technique you’re using, it will probably be composed of some ratio of these three core elements.

Concentration means being able to train your attention on whatever object you choose, and sustain it there over time.   Sensory clarity means having a lot of resolution of the details of whatever object you’re focusing on.   Acceptance means having an attitude of openness, curiosity, and nonjudgment with whatever is happening in the moment.

It’s natural and even healthy that, in the beginning, your attention is going to be captured by things that are not your meditation object. (“Meditation object” or “focus object” are the clunky-but-concise phrases I’ll use to mean the thing you’re supposed to be focusing on.)

The solution is simple: brute force repetition. Each time your attention is drawn away from the meditation object, gently bring it back. Over and over, notice that your focus has wandered and return it to the chosen object. Each one of these returns can be thought of as a concentration “rep,” just like a weightlifting “rep” at the gym. With each weightlifting rep, your muscles are growing stronger. In the same way, with each concentration rep your concentration grows stronger. Luckily, concentration is a trainable skill, so it just keeps getting more buff as you iterate your reps. Bulking up your focus power is one of the most widely demonstrated benefits of meditation[46] practice.

We can model concentration as a kind of extremely simple algorithm:   1. Place attention on the focus object. 2. Check if attention has wandered. 3. If no, continue. If yes, then 1.

Iterating through this algorithm not only creates focus as you’re doing it, it permanently builds your concentration “muscle,” your focus power. Iterating through this a large number of times (something like 106 or 107) will build immense concentration that can stay on a single object for a very long time. So this sort of iteration increases the time dimension of your concentration. Your attention span gets huge.

The good news is that your attention span doesn’t just become longer during meditation practice, it becomes longer for all the other activities of your life. You can do better at school work, work projects, or anything else you want to devote attention to. Even a two-week course in mindfulness meditation has been shown to increase working memory and GRE performance.[48] Gaining the ability to focus on anything you want to, for as long as you want, is one of the most powerful ways the mindfulness meditation can improve your life.

If, however, you’ve developed a bit of sensory clarity, something different happens. Let’s say you’ve worked for a year on your mindfulness meditation practice, and you’ve developed a walloping 128 pixels of sensory clarity anywhere on your body. Then, when the warm, soothing shower water hits any part of your body, you can experience it with startling resolution and depth. Each pixel feels good in its own way, so the experience is much richer and more rewarding. Secondly, it takes up much more room in awareness—hogs more of the RAM in your working memory—and so pushes out extraneous thoughts and feelings. There’s far less room in your mind for anxiety about the day, for example. So the whole experience of the warm shower goes from something that’s “nice” to an all-consuming experience of quasi-orgasmic pleasure all over.

The good news is that the opposite is also true—positive emotional experiences can make physical pain much less intense—and we can use this fact to our advantage in meditation. By cultivating a stance of acceptance of and even curiosity about painful experiences, we reduce the emotional distress about them, and can often reduce the experience of suffering as a result.

The third of the three elements of meditation is acceptance.[52]  Acceptance is extremely simple, much simpler than the other two. Just accept whatever your experience is, that’s all.

Mostly acceptance means to not judge your sensory experience.[53] The motto for acceptance is, “It is what it is.”

It’s important to notice that acceptance means accepting your sensory experience, not accepting the conditions of your life. You’re free to take all the actions necessary or desirable to make your life better. Acceptance doesn’t mean becoming passive or inactive. It just means that the current sensory experience is what it is, and you accept that part of things.

Most of us live in a state of perpetual “could be better.” We’re so used to having control over every little parameter of our lives that we cannot focus on what’s going right, only on what’s going wrong. That’s the viewpoint we always seem to be coming from, and it means that we are perpetually unsatisfied, unhappy, disappointed, and ungrateful. These are not pleasant emotions to be constantly soaking in.

Another metaphor for how the three elements work comes from a video screen. Concentration means you can direct your attention to any part of the screen you want. Sensory clarity is like switching the screen setting from low-res to HD. And acceptance is how the screen displays whatever signals it gets, without judging or controlling the content.

Each of the three elements of meditation—concentration, sensory clarity, and acceptance (CCA)— can almost function as a complete meditation on their own. That is, there are practices that strongly utilize only concentration, sensory clarity, or acceptance individually. Putting them all together in a single practice, however, each one of them tends to reinforce the others.

Just as concentration can be expressed as an algorithm, the process of mindfulness meditation can also be modeled as a repeated sequence of steps. This algorithm assumes that you’ve already sat down, relaxed, and gotten all set to meditate. It also assumes that you know which meditation technique you’re going to practice.   Once you are ready to actually meditate, the practice is expressed by this algorithm:   1. Notice the focus object. 2. Label the focus object. 3. Allow awareness to deeply contact the focus object. 4. Feel acceptance toward whatever you find there. 5. Continue focusing, contacting, and accepting for about 5 seconds. 6. Repeat.

However, like most upgrades, our planning ability comes with its own concomitant set of new problems. The important one here is that we can imagine future scenarios that are very troubling. You may be sitting at home in a warm, safe home, with a belly full of food, and absolutely no immediate problems, and yet you can be acutely distressed about the tax bill that you know will be coming nine months hence. Depending on your psychology, you can even be distressed about an impending alien invasion or the Rapture. In other words, our ability to imagine means that we can be worried about things that are not currently happening, and may never happen at all. Although our stress response

Imaginary problems in a distant future are the cause of much chronic stress for human beings. We worry so much about the future that our stress response is on almost all of the time. And all of the advantages of the stress response—the beautiful things it does to our bodies in order to get us out of danger—become disadvantages when they continue over time. Chronic stress actually damages you both physically and psychologically. Chronic stimulation of the HPA system disrupts serotonin levels, and is a major factor in the development of depression and anxiety. The physical problems that can be caused or assisted by stress include heart disease, stroke, immune deficiency, cancer, serious gastrointestinal disorders, eating disorders, cancer, chronic pain, sexual and reproductive dysfunction, sleep disturbances, and other problems including allergies, skin problems, hair loss, periodontal disease, as well as increased probability of drug and alcohol addiction, and other unhealthy lifestyle choices. Clearly, chronic stress is a major cause of serious problems in our society, and drastically reduces our sense of wellbeing.

Meditation training reminds me of training for a track race. The important difference with meditation is that there’s never a race. It’s not really training for any specific event in the future. Instead, it’s training for every event in the future. It’s upgrading your abilities to succeed at whatever activities you do all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The trouble is that you have to practice meditation almost every day—at least five days a week—to fully reap the benefits of the mindfulness we’ve been discussing. Meditation is much more like brushing your teeth or taking a shower than training for a marathon. The best mindset is to just make it an integral part of your daily routine.

The good news is that the opposite is also true—positive emotional experiences can make physical pain much less intense—and we can use this fact to our advantage in meditation. By cultivating a stance of acceptance of and even curiosity about painful experiences, we reduce the emotional distress about them, and can often reduce the experience of suffering as a result.

However, like most upgrades, our planning ability comes with its own concomitant set of new problems. The important one here is that we can imagine future scenarios that are very troubling. You may be sitting at home in a warm, safe home, with a belly full of food, and absolutely no immediate problems, and yet you can be acutely distressed about the tax bill that you know will be coming nine months hence. Depending on your psychology, you can even be distressed about an impending alien invasion or the Rapture. In other words, our ability to imagine means that we can be worried about things that are not currently happening, and may never happen at all.   Although our stress response

Imaginary problems in a distant future are the cause of much chronic stress for human beings. We worry so much about the future that our stress response is on almost all of the time. And all of the advantages of the stress response—the beautiful things it does to our bodies in order to get us out of danger—become disadvantages when they continue over time. Chronic stress actually damages you both physically and psychologically. Chronic stimulation of the HPA system disrupts serotonin levels, and is a major factor in the development of depression and anxiety. The physical problems that can be caused or assisted by stress include heart disease, stroke, immune deficiency, cancer, serious gastrointestinal disorders, eating disorders, cancer, chronic pain, sexual and reproductive dysfunction, sleep disturbances, and other problems including allergies, skin problems, hair loss, periodontal disease, as well as increased probability of drug and alcohol addiction, and other unhealthy lifestyle choices. Clearly, chronic stress is a major cause of serious problems in our society, and drastically reduces our sense of wellbeing.

Meditation training reminds me of training for a track race. The important difference with meditation is that there’s never a race. It’s not really training for any specific event in the future. Instead, it’s training for every event in the future. It’s upgrading your abilities to succeed at whatever activities you do all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The trouble is that you have to practice meditation almost every day—at least five days a week—to fully reap the benefits of the mindfulness we’ve been discussing. Meditation is much more like brushing your teeth or taking a shower than training for a marathon. The best mindset is to just make it an integral part of your daily routine.

Feel Your Emotions — Meditating on emotional body sensations is a little more challenging, but has several advantages that make it worth the effort. You contact the place in your body where it feels like an emotion is happening. For example, if you are happy, you might feel your face lighting up in a smile, or an uplifting feeling in your chest. Continuous contact with emotions in the body keeps you aware of how you’re feeling moment by moment—something that many of us could use more of. This technique also allows you to notice when unpleasant emotions die down or fade away entirely—often accompanied by a soft wave of relaxation and relief.

In the context of meditation practice, you can think of two kinds of acceptance. Acceptance One is experienced in the body as some degree of physical relaxation. Your body is not tensing against an experience, whether physical or mental. Acceptance Two is experienced in the mind, as a lack of psychological resistance. Psychological resistance could take the form of certain types of mental talk (“This sucks. This shouldn’t be happening. I’ve got to get out of here.”) or certain types of mental images (such as pictures of escaping, hurting what’s hurting you, and so forth). Acceptance Two means you’re not mentally resisting the experience. Of course, these two aren’t literally different, but thinking about them this way can be helpful.

Meditation has been shown in several powerful studies to re-engineer your relationship to pain in a way that makes it much less difficult to bear. Mindfulness teaches you to feel your body sensations more accurately and completely, so you might think that that would make pain worse. And, indeed, fMRI studies show that long-term meditators do experience pain more completely—they are in essence meditating on the painful sensation, feeling it deeply. Non-meditators, on the other hand, show activation in the areas that suggest they are thinking about the pain. The paradoxical outcome of this is that the meditators actually have a much easier time bearing the pain. Why? Because they are not resisting

The equation is simple: P x R = S, or “pain times resistance equals suffering.” This means that your level of suffering from pain is dependent upon how much you can let go of resisting it. In other words, relief from pain is all about how much you can accept the pain. Don’t resist it, and you suffer much, much less. Japanese author Haruki Murakami has a famous quote, which sums up the situation nicely, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

This way of looking at emotions is so useful that there is a short mnemonic I want you to use whenever you’re trying to understand an emotion that you’re experiencing: just say to yourself “guidance system.” It forces you to look at an emotion for what it really is: an evolved response. In this sense, there’s no such thing as a positive or negative emotion. They are all positive emotions, because they are part of the evolved human guidance system trying to get you to behave in a survival-enhancing manner.   I have to make an important warning here: I’m not saying that your emotions are correct or that you should always act on them. Most human evolution occurred a long time ago under very different conditions, so it’s not that our emotional responses are necessarily good ones in the current environment.

Instead of saying that emotions are right, I’m saying that emotions are natural responses—not to be suppressed or denied, not something to feel guilty or ashamed about. If you wanted to be a little more accurate about it, you could call them an “ancient guidance system,” one that may feel a little out of date or off the mark sometimes.

If I were impolite, I would suggest that the idea that you were going to someday feel good all the time is a childish fantasy, which even the slightest scrutiny by a reasonable adult would reveal to be utterly non-viable. There are at least two problems with the glittering dream of permanent joy: (1) it couldn’t work, and (2) you wouldn’t like it if it did.   It’s impossible to be permanently happy because the system always corrects itself. No matter how far you push the needle away from zero into the realm of super happiness, your biology will adjust and make that place the new zero. It’s a self-adjusting, homeostatic system, and its tendency to return to a set-point is called “hedonic adaptation,” or the “hedonic treadmill.” (Hedonic, comes from the same root as “hedonism,” and means to pursue pleasure.)

Which brings me back to why you wouldn’t actually want to feel happy all of the time. If emotions comprise a guidance system, a sort of compass to find your way in life, feeling only constant euphoria would be like sticking a huge magnet to the side of the compass. You would lose all ability to tell direction. Every decision would seem just wonderful, and you would soon end up deep in a ditch. Evolution has “figured this out” and created a system that constantly resets our emotional baseline to zero, whatever our circumstances. That way, we always have a useful and functional emotional guidance system at work in our lives.

The fantasy that when you have a better job, find the right partner, buy the right car or home, have a baby, or when you (fill in the blank), you’ll finally live happily ever after is simply not true. You may find these things satisfying, and they can contribute to your quality of life, but they’ll not make your emotional tone change to a permanent or even abnormally high state of happiness. You will adjust and that will become your new normal, and—at least in terms of emotion—you will be back to zero. And that’s a very good thing.

Viktor Frankl—the neurologist, psychologist, and Auschwitz survivor—once wrote that “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” This brilliant quote points to one of the deepest and most important benefits derived from meditating on the emotions: it increases your behavioral flexibility. Human beings display a surprising amount of automaticity in their behavior; that is, under the same conditions, we tend to do the same things over and over again. Regardless of whether the behavior is effective or desirable, we automatically repeat it with a kind of mechanical predictability. To put it in Frankl’s terms, there is no distance between stimulus and response. For the same stimulus, you get the same response, every time.   Meditating on the emotions, however, does something very interesting: it builds a kind of gap, or as Frankl puts it, a “space” between the stimulus and the response.

The Focus on Emotion technique reverse engineers this, in a way. The idea here is that by very closely monitoring subtle emotional expressions in the face and body, you can understand what you’re thinking and feeling with much greater clarity. Given the utter centrality of emotions to our daily sense of wellbeing, it should be no surprise that cultivating this sort of skill with regard to feeling emotions is so effective.

As he explains in his 2011 book Flourishing, Seligman worked hard to revise the definition of a positive psychology goal to make more sense to an adult trying to have a “good life.” He created a five-part definition of “flourishing,” dubbed PERMA, and posits these five qualities:   Positive emotions Engagement Relationships Meaning, and Accomplishments.   Positive emotions — means having at least some ability to feel happiness, but also qualities such as interest, excitement, awe, and pride.   Engagement — is Seligman’s way of talking about a flow state, when we are absorbed in doing things we find intrinsically interesting.   Relationships — probably the most important driver of wellbeing is having family, friends, lovers, and other people to do things with.   Meaning — feeling that what you are doing is important, worth doing, interesting, and contributes to the greater good is vital. Accomplishments — human beings find joy in pursuing success and mastery, even if it causes some difficulty and stress.   This formulation represents a more fully considered and powerful view of wellbeing than the simplistic phrase “being happy.” It includes the fact that activities like raising children may not make a person “happy”—most studies show that people’s happiness is actually reduced while child rearing—yet still contribute massively to a sense of wellbeing and having a life well-lived.

Csikszentmihalyi’s formula for achieving flow involves manipulating the difficulty of the activity in order to induce it. You adjust the level of difficulty to match your skill level until you hit the Goldilocks zone. But there is another possibility that I don’t believe Csikszentmihalyi ever mentions: cultivating your ability to focus. Intentionally training your concentration ability so that it’s much stronger than normal. And, as you might have guessed by now, I’m here to tell you that meditation is a powerful and effective way to do just that. A host of studies have shown that one of the chief measurable effects of meditation training is to increase your attention

If something is pulling your attention away from your chosen concentration object, that is distraction. Distraction dilutes brainpower, frazzles the nerves, and results in non-optimum outcomes. You end up stressed out and spun around, and don’t even get the satisfaction of a job well done. We supposedly live in a multitasking world, but multitasking (called “task switching” in neuroscience) is very inefficient, mainly because there is a cognitive cost each time you switch between

Listening effectively is a powerful skill, yet few people in our society have taken the time to develop it. Most people will talk more or less continuously, and when they actually are quiet, they are thinking of what they are going to say next while pretending to listen to others. “Conversation” becomes a duel of clever sound bites, delivered with little interest in what others are saying. How often do you have some remark locked and loaded, ready to fire, just waiting for a pause in the other person’s remarks? If there’s a moment of silence, we nervously jump in, filling it with speech.

If you listen for a few minutes to two people talking like this, you will notice several features about the conversation. First, there is never any silence. Second, because there is no silence, the conversationalists are never actually taking in what the other person is saying. They are not actually listening. Third, since they aren’t taking it in, they aren’t really thinking about it or responding to what’s being said in a meaningful way. The conversation skates along on the shallowest possible level, a mere tennis match of rote verbal reactions triggering rote verbal reactions. Conversations like this are extremely tiring. They contain no food for the brain or heart; the verbal equivalent of junk food—empty, unsatisfying, and ultimately bad for you. And given the shortness of life, why even bother?

The first step in learning to listen is to learn to be quiet. Make a friend of silence. This can be difficult because nobody wants to be judged as being dull. There is a natural desire to respond quickly, and to be seen as interesting and smart. But if you resist this urge even a little bit, it removes the reactivity from conversation, and opens up the space for some actual responding.

The data revealed something important to us in terms of wellbeing: people were on average least happy during mind wandering, and this was true no matter what activity they were doing. Hence the title of Killingsworth and Gilbert’s article, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.”

So the default mode is like a never-ending reality TV show starring ourselves, in which we ruminate on things that happened in the past, and things that may happen in the future. To describe it generously, we might say that the default mode network is concerned with evaluating the outcomes of past actions and using that as a basis for planning future actions. In fact, such evaluation and planning is probably the intended function of the default mode network in the brain. More often, however, it’s the mode in which we beat ourselves up over things from the distant past that we can’t change, and worry ourselves sick about future events that will never occur. Mark Twain’s snarky remark; “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened,” serves as a perfect description of DMN activity.

Default mode network activity is roughly the opposite of a flow state. In a flow state, you begin to lose your sense of self in a task; most thought is self-referential in the DMN. A flow state is intrinsically rewarding and serene, whereas mind wandering typically leaves you feeling bad. The essence of a flow state is concentrated activity; the DMN turns on when you are not focused on any activity. In fact, DMN activity is so closely associated with not paying attention that scientists found that they could use it to predict people making a mistake on a concentration task almost thirty seconds in advance—just by measuring  an increase in DMN

This connection with effortlessness gives you a pointer about a way to increase the power of your meditation practice in general. Brewer studies the DMN extensively, and has found (along with others) that the less effort you expend in meditation, the more powerfully you switch off the DMN and the easier it is to enter a flow

FOCUS ON NOW – GUIDED PRACTICE Before you begin, find your meditation seat, either sitting in a chair, on a bench, a cushion, or the floor.  Sit up straight, extending your spine upwards toward the ceiling. Make sure your chin is pointing just slightly (5 degrees) below horizontal.  Next relax your entire body. Take three deep breaths, and let each one of them out long and slowly.  Now you’re ready to begin the Focus on Now practice.  Lightly focus on your meta-attention; the thing that tells you what you’re focusing on right now.  Now just allow your attention to notice any aspect of the present moment. It doesn’t matter what it is. Just notice, using your meta-attention, that attention is pointed at some aspect of the present. Just sit with that. If meta-attention tells you that attention has left the present moment, bring it back. Do this as gently, softly, and kindly as you can.  Try to do this meditation with as little sense of doing anything as possible. You are simply sitting and noticing where attention is going, and gently bringing it back to the present moment.  Continue with this for as long as you like. When it’s time to finish, spend at least one minute just sitting quietly, meditating on relaxed sensations in the body before continuing on your day.