Exercise- Playing with Free Attention
by meditative - November 17th, 2010.Filed under: Insight Meditation Exercises.
~ Adapted from “Inner Revolution”- Robert Thurman
Take a few moments in a quiet place. Gently close your eyes and picture a coin, a quarter with George Washington’s head on it. Where does this image manifest? At first it may seem to be in your head- like an image projected on a screen. It is hard to hold this image stable, so let if rotate around in the lens of your mindsight until you see it sideways, and then let it flip over to the eagle side.
Envision the quarter in your throat then in the center of your torso, at solar plexus level up against your spine. Next, visualize it at the base of the spine, and move it down your leg to your knee or foot. We can visualize this quarter always fleetingly, wherever we decide to see it.
So we can imagine the inner awareness monitor of mindsight to be like a “mobile cam”, functioning wherever we direct free attention, not only in the head. We energize, illuminate, and move all objects (i.e. inner images) of attention in this manner.