The Depth of Your Attention Determines the Depth of Your Experience

Sadhguru is the founder of a school of meditation and yoga called Isha Yoga. If you get the chance, make sure you go take the Inner Engineering course that is the core of his work.

I was lucky enough to spend three days in a live seminar with Sadhguru in 2012, and it was an unforgettable experience. Don't be fooled by the apparent simplicity of his teachings — he is one of the world's greatest living teachers on consciousness, and still very active today.

One of the things Sadhguru describes beautifully is how managing and training your attention is the key to opening the doors to so many new and valuable experiences in life. The depth of what you experience in any moment is not determined by what is happening around you — it is determined by the quality of the attention you bring to it.

What Depth of Attention Actually Means

Most people experience life at a shallow level of attention — in a muddle of sensory information constantly moving from one stimulus to the next, and often barely aware of which sense they are receiving information from. This isn't a character flaw. It's what our current media environment has trained us to do. Our school system - and most of western culture - doesn't tend to either train or reward using our attention in a deliberate and deep way. Most education trains just a narrow range of senses - rote memorization and thinking primarily.

But depth of attention is something else entirely. When you bring your full attention — not divided, not half-present — to a single experience, something changes. The experience itself appears to open up. Perception sharpens, and suddenly there is more information than there was before. Colors are richer. Sounds have more texture. Emotions have more detail. Memories have layers and depth.

This isn't mystical. It's the natural result of giving consciousness what it was designed to do: observe closely, with full focus, and preferably, with a clear awareness of which sense you are using.

The practice is simple to describe and not demanding to do: take any ordinary experience and give it your complete, undivided attention. Don't analyze it, don't narrate it — just give your full attention. Then, simply notice how you change when you do. As Sadhguru so perfectly states:

The depth of your attention is the depth of your experience. If your attention is profound, your experience of life is profound.

You can find out more about Isha Yoga at Inner Engineering

NeuroYou is not affiliated with or sponsored by Isha Yoga.