Aiming and Sustaining

A colleague coming off retreat said she thought meditation practice was all about aiming the attention and then sustaining that focus moment by moment. I wrote it off at the time as being pretty self-evident, almost trivial. Besides, it had too much of a sense of agency to it, I thought to myself, judgingly, too much of a sense of doing something, and therefore too much reliance on someone to be doing the doing. It took me years for the value of that insight to sink in and be revealed as fundamental. …