I think this is part of it, but another part of it is that The Power of Now recommends something like directly facing your suffering in order to transmute it into consciousness.
The Mind Illuminated recommends the same thing. Its model is that the suffering from pain actually comes from your aversion to the pain, rather than the pain itself, and that putting your attention on the sensation itself tends to improve matters. Can confirm that stubbing my toe while not meditating involves cussing, while stubbing my toe while meditating involves my attention going to a particularly interesting sensation in my toe for a little while.
Aversion is… a “negative mental state involving judgement, reject, and denial. Includes hatred, anger, resentment, dissatisfaction, criticism, impatience, self-accusation, and boredom”. As to weather a “mental state” the same or different from an “emotion”, and if different what the difference is, I have no idea.
This led me to nonlinguistically focus on any distracting feelings such as not wanting to be doing what I was doing and wanting to procrastinate instead. This was somewhat interesting, but disruptive of productivity.
Thinking about your framing from TMI, perhaps I’m supposed to put my awareness but not my attention on the distracting thoughts. The reason it is tempting to do more than this is to “fully integrate the part of me that wants to not be doing this”—IE, put full awareness onto it to dialogue with it, and decide what I really want to do with the fullness of what I want right now.
In your experience, is it enough to have awareness on the stubbed toe, or is it necessary to put attention on it? You describe your attention going to the toe.
For the stubbed toe, attention is definitely required. However, the mind sense is very different from the other senses. If I understand correctly, if you have attention but not awareness on your thoughts, that is thinking. And I don’t know about you, but I personally have little mind awareness. (If I had more, I could notice that I was thinking thoughts before my mind wanders off while meditating, but I only ever notice after I’ve caught it.) The Mind Illuminated says that I’m going to develop more mind awareness in Stage 4, which I’m not at yet.
Anyhow, that was a tangent. The Mind Illuminated has a table of seven mental problems that might get in your way of meditating, and what to do about them. It sounds like yours is most similar to “procrastination and resistance to practicing”, for which you are supposed to “Frequently recall the benefits of practice [in your case, your work], constantly refresh and renew your motivation, and ‘just do it’. See Stage one.” So, no special meditative solutions here, just ordinary ones.
I think there’s some looseness in the Mind Illuminated ontology around this point, but I would say: thinking involves attention on an abstract concept. When attention and/or awareness are on a thought, that’s metacognitive attention and/or awareness. For example, if I’m trying to work on an intellectual task but start thinking about food, my attention has moved from the task to food. Specifically my attention might be on a specific possibility for dinner, or on a set of possibilities. If I have no metacognitive awareness, then I’m lost in the thought; my attention is not on the thought, it’s on the food.
The Mind Illuminated recommends the same thing. Its model is that the suffering from pain actually comes from your aversion to the pain, rather than the pain itself, and that putting your attention on the sensation itself tends to improve matters. Can confirm that stubbing my toe while not meditating involves cussing, while stubbing my toe while meditating involves my attention going to a particularly interesting sensation in my toe for a little while.
Aversion is… a “negative mental state involving judgement, reject, and denial. Includes hatred, anger, resentment, dissatisfaction, criticism, impatience, self-accusation, and boredom”. As to weather a “mental state” the same or different from an “emotion”, and if different what the difference is, I have no idea.
Ah, I wouldn’t have expected that. Good to know!
Thinking about your framing from TMI, perhaps I’m supposed to put my awareness but not my attention on the distracting thoughts. The reason it is tempting to do more than this is to “fully integrate the part of me that wants to not be doing this”—IE, put full awareness onto it to dialogue with it, and decide what I really want to do with the fullness of what I want right now.
In your experience, is it enough to have awareness on the stubbed toe, or is it necessary to put attention on it? You describe your attention going to the toe.
For the stubbed toe, attention is definitely required. However, the mind sense is very different from the other senses. If I understand correctly, if you have attention but not awareness on your thoughts, that is thinking. And I don’t know about you, but I personally have little mind awareness. (If I had more, I could notice that I was thinking thoughts before my mind wanders off while meditating, but I only ever notice after I’ve caught it.) The Mind Illuminated says that I’m going to develop more mind awareness in Stage 4, which I’m not at yet.
Anyhow, that was a tangent. The Mind Illuminated has a table of seven mental problems that might get in your way of meditating, and what to do about them. It sounds like yours is most similar to “procrastination and resistance to practicing”, for which you are supposed to “Frequently recall the benefits of practice [in your case, your work], constantly refresh and renew your motivation, and ‘just do it’. See Stage one.” So, no special meditative solutions here, just ordinary ones.
Meta comment: are your upvotes worth 7 points?
Seems that way. I don’t know what the exact formula is, but it is based on karma.
Note: normal upvotes are 1-3 points depending on karma. Strong upvotes are more variable.
I think there’s some looseness in the Mind Illuminated ontology around this point, but I would say: thinking involves attention on an abstract concept. When attention and/or awareness are on a thought, that’s metacognitive attention and/or awareness. For example, if I’m trying to work on an intellectual task but start thinking about food, my attention has moved from the task to food. Specifically my attention might be on a specific possibility for dinner, or on a set of possibilities. If I have no metacognitive awareness, then I’m lost in the thought; my attention is not on the thought, it’s on the food.