Attention, as a Practice

We are always in conversation with sensation.

Before thought. Before story. Before we decide what something means.

The body is constantly sending signals: subtle tightening behind the eyes after a long day of looking; the hollowed feeling in the belly when a plan you were hoping for changes; the way breath shortens when an email lands with unexpected weight. There are chemical cascades and muscular responses, shifts in temperature, pressure, rhythm. Much of this happens quietly, implicitly, below the level of conscious awareness, yet it shapes how we move through the world.

At the same time, the world is touching us back. The quality of light spilling across the floor. The sound of leaves in the wind disguising itself as the ocean. A kind stranger’s tone of voice. The smell of coffee drifting from the other room. A child laughing in the distance. These, too, are signals—arriving continuously.

On their own, these sensations are just information. They become experience when awareness meets them. Meaning doesn’t live in sensation itself; it emerges in the relationship between sensation, memory, context, and attention. In other words, experience is not just what happens—it is what is noticed.

Dan Siegel reminds us that attention is the doorway to integration. Where we place our attention organizes the nervous system. What we repeatedly attend to becomes more familiar, more predictable, more dominant in our inner landscape. This is not about blame or self-optimization. It is simply how minds and bodies learn.

Many of us learned early to narrow our attention for safety. To track what might go wrong. To monitor others’ moods. To scan for subtle cues of disapproval or threat. This attunement was often brilliant. It kept us connected. It kept us protected. And over time, it may have trained our awareness to hover almost exclusively around tension, urgency, or lack.

Ross Gay offers another possibility. In his writing on delight, he speaks to attention as a form of devotion—a practice of noticing what is life-giving, even in the midst of difficulty. Delight, here, is not a denial of grief or injustice. It is a widening of the field. A refusal to let pain be the only thing that gets our attention.Delight might look like noticing the way your breath can deepen when you step outside. Or the particular pleasure of warm water on your hands while washing dishes. Or the steadiness of a friend’s voice when you tell the truth about something hard. These moments are often brief. Ordinary. Easy to miss. And they matter.

Because what we practice noticing, we practice having.

Awareness, then, is an ethical and relational act: directing attention influences what we protect, what we neglect, and how we respond rather than react. Not forcing ourselves to feel better, but choosing—again and again—to stay present with what is here, and to gently guide attention when it has collapsed around fear or habit.

A simple practice:

Pause and orient.
Choose one internal signal to sense, feel into—your breath, your heartbeat, the contact of your feet with the floor.
Stay for a few moments.

Then notice something outside you: a sound, a color, a movement.
Let your awareness move slowly, like a hand tracing the edges of experience.

If it feels possible, allow your attention to include something neutral or pleasant alongside what is challenging. Not instead of it. Alongside it. This is how capacity grows.

Over time, this kind of intentional attention teaches the nervous system that the present moment is complex—capable of holding grief and steadiness, ache and beauty, contraction and ease. Awareness becomes a way of rebuilding trust with ourselves.

What we pay attention to shapes our inner, and our between.And awareness—patient, practiced, and kind—gives us back some choice in how we live inside it.