Meditation

The trained practice of attention — named across this canon, given a whole book of it, and never given a page.

At its plainest it is the deliberate training of where attention goes and how long it stays. Sit; let the body settle; notice that the mind has wandered; return. The returning is the practice — not the staying, which arrives later and on its own schedule (Focused Attention As Discipline, Breath, Discipline).

Its forms differ in what attention is placed on and why: on the breath or the body, to steady; on a phrase or an image, to deepen; on an open field with no object, to see what is there; on a question, to let an answer arrive rather than be constructed; on another being, as the ground of compassion. The canon uses the word in this last, older sense too — a meditation as a thing meditated upon, a short written contemplation offered to a reader (Silence And Stillness As The Ground, Listening, Attunement).

It is load-bearing because almost everything else here asks for a capacity that has to be trained. Weaving coherence before acting. Reading a gradient rather than a rule. Staying composed when something is at stake. Hearing an objection without defending. Discerning what is true when several things feel true. None of these is a technique to be learned once; they are functions of a trained attention, and attention is trained the way a body is (Mastery Of Emotions, Composure Under Threat, Discernment, Wisdom).

It also stands against the thing the canon most often warns about: speed. A body that never stops cannot notice that it has drifted, and cannot tell the difference between urgency and importance. The pause is not a break from the work; it is the instrument by which the work stays aimed (Drift, Rest And Regeneration, The Daily Way, Sabbath).

Also called: the trained attention · a meditation Stands on: Silence And Stillness As The Ground · Focused Attention As Discipline · Discipline Opens onto: Prayer · Breath · Attunement · Mastery Of Emotions · The Daily Way · The One Hour A Day Practice · Wellness · Mental Health · Types Of Knowing · Consciousness In play: Home — daily; and in the first minutes of a gathering, in silence Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Blogs/Jordan Nicholas/Above The Chaos, Meditations (a 2023 dispatch announcing a book of them; author's voice preserved) · The LIØNSBERG Book of Meditations (named in the canon's own audit; a book of short contemplations) · Silence And Stillness As The Ground, The Daily Way (wiki) · lionsberg.wiki: Silence And Stillness As The Ground Open: The canon holds a whole book of meditations and no page for the practice; this is a first articulation. · The two senses — the practice, and a written contemplation — share the word throughout the corpus and are nowhere distinguished.