Chapter 4: Two Types of Attention

Picture yourself in a classroom, chatting with a friend during a lesson. The teacher calls out: “Pay attention!” What happens? Your focus instantly swivels from your friend to the front of the room where the teacher stands pointing at the board.

It feels like there’s a spotlight inside your head that just redirected itself. One moment illuminating your classmate’s face, the next moment lighting up the teacher and the equations on the board. This is how we typically experience attention - as a beam of light we can point at things. The breath during meditation. The words on a page. The person speaking to us.

When the Spotlight Works

Sometimes, the spotlight is bright and steady. You sit down with a dense article and actually read it. You follow complex instructions without getting lost.

There are even glorious moments when the spotlight locks on with intensity. Taking an exam, the world falls away and there’s just you and the problems. An hour passes like minutes. This is flow. Being in the zone.

When the Spotlight Fails

But more often, the spotlight refuses to cooperate. You’re reading the same sentence for the third time, words sliding past without meaning. You want to focus on this article you actually care about, but your attention has other ideas.

Worse, the spotlight has a cruel habit of illuminating exactly what you wish would stay dark. That slight from a friend. The worry about tomorrow. The embarrassing moment from last week. These thoughts take center stage, uninvited and unwelcome.

You try to redirect your attention to something useful - to the task at hand, to solutions, to anything productive. But it won’t budge. It stays locked on the discomfort, the anxiety, the things that make you squirm.

The Meditation Promise

This spotlight model of attention makes intuitive sense. And just like learning to ride a bike, learning to control where we point our attention seems like a practical skill worth developing. Life throws plenty at us - distractions, worries, constant demands for our focus. Being able to steady that spotlight, to keep it pointed where we choose, would make navigating all of it easier.

That’s certainly what drew me to meditation.

And I began my meditation practice just like my first bike ride. With force.

The meditation teacher was like my dad at that bike - patient, encouraging, holding the seat steady. She guided me to the cushion, helped me find my posture. “Bring your attention to the breath,” she said. Then she added the crucial instruction: “When your attention drifts away, notice it, and bring it back.”

Simple directions. Like learning to ride, really.

I settled in and started pedaling - bringing my attention to the breath. One breath, then two. The teacher’s voice faded. I was on my own now, trying to stay steady.

But I’d come to this session with a mind full of storm. Someone had insulted me - a dismissive comment that kept replaying in my head. Though I’d rationally decided to move on, those thoughts sat in my mind like a stalled storm, thunder rumbling, lightning still flashing, refusing to move on even though I had.

Before I could take three breaths, my spotlight careened away from the breath, pulled toward that scene playing in my mind. Just like on the bike - that immediate lean to the right, that loss of control.

Aha! I caught it. I gripped that spotlight tight and yanked it back to the breath, the mental equivalent of white-knuckling the handlebars.

A few breaths passed. Then another thought jolted through - a flash of the insult, a fantasy of revenge. The spotlight swung away again. This time I was lost in it for minutes before I even realized what happened.

Crash. Just like the trash can.

I pulled my attention back, over and over, each time with more force. By the session’s end, the pattern was clear: my spotlight was unruly, getting dragged by every unwanted thought that crossed the horizon. I was that jet skier whose boat had forgotten about him - being battered, scraped along, hitting every obstacle.

But just like after that first bike crash, I picked myself up determined. I’d felt something in those brief moments when I caught my attention drifting. Not quite balance yet, but the possibility of it.

The problem was clear. The solution seemed obvious: I needed to grip that spotlight harder. Practice more. Build up my concentration muscle.

Like with the bike, I understood the power of effort - forced concentration, aggressive focus. What I didn’t yet understand was that meditation, like riding, required something more than just pedaling harder.

But that realization was still many sessions away.

For now, I would do what I knew how to do: pedal harder.

The Campaign

That first session led to changing my daily routine to go to the Zen center every morning for an hour of meditation. Next I added a daily evening sit at home. And impromptu sessions whenever the schedule allowed.

And it seemed to be working. During those sessions, I’d catch moments of subtle sensations - a sense of expansion, sublime states that felt elevated and rewarding. These experiences validated the approach. The concentration was paying off. I just needed to do more of it.

The answer seemed clear: longer and deeper practice. If daily sessions gave me glimpses, perhaps intensive retreats would deliver the breakthrough. I signed up multi-day residential retreats whenever I could.

One Christmas break I signed up for a 10-day Vipassana retreat.

On the fifth day, the instruction came to sit for one hour without moving. I settled onto my cushion determined to maintain focus through the entire hour.

Within twenty minutes, every aspect of my body was in revolt. My legs screamed. My back seized. A pressure built in my head like it might explode. I tried to redirect my attention back to the breath, to use concentration to override the pain, but the spotlight was overwhelmed. There was too much sensation demanding attention all at once.

I couldn’t do it anymore. I gave up trying to concentrate my way through it. I just… sat there.

The hour ended. But I was defeated. My efforts to subdue my concentration had failed. Perhaps this was as far as my practice would go.

But when I returned to the cushion for the next sit, something unexpected happened. I just sat there. No excruciating pain. No revolt. Just calm observation of breath, of sensations, of thoughts passing through. Nothing special. Nothing dramatic. Just… sitting.

Wait. What was that?

I hadn’t done anything different. Or had I? In that previous session, I’d been gripping the spotlight so tightly, trying to force it to override everything else. But in this session, I wasn’t trying at all. The attention was just… present. Spacious. Aware of everything without trying to focus on anything in particular.

There was something else going on here. Something I’d been missing entirely while I was so focused on concentration.

Two Types of Attention

It turns out attention isn’t just one thing. There are two different modes of paying attention, and I’d been using only one of them.

The writer Alan Watts described them as spotlight attention and floodlight attention.

Spotlight attention is what we typically think of as “paying attention.” It’s directed, focused, concentrated on a specific object. When you’re solving a math problem or reading a complex sentence, you’re using spotlight attention. It’s effortful - you can feel yourself directing it. This is concentration.

Floodlight attention is different. It’s ambient, diffuse, spacious. Rather than focusing on one thing, it’s aware of everything at once without trying to control or direct anything. It’s effortless - you’re simply present to whatever’s happening. This is awareness.

In that second meditation session on Day 5, after I’d exhausted myself trying to concentrate, I’d accidentally stumbled into floodlight attention. I wasn’t directing my spotlight at the breath. I was simply aware - of breath, of sensations, of thoughts, of everything, without trying to control any of it.

Researchers who study meditation have found that practices fall into two main categories. They call them Focused Attention (FA) and Open Monitoring (OM) practices.

Focused Attention meditation trains the spotlight. You pick an object - usually the breath - and practice directing attention there. When your mind wanders, you notice and bring it back. This is what most meditation apps teach. This is what I’d been practicing for months.

Open Monitoring meditation trains the floodlight. Instead of focusing on one thing, you maintain spacious awareness of whatever arises - sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions - without directing attention anywhere specific.

Just like riding a bike requires both pedaling and balance, meditation requires both concentration and awareness. Both spotlight and floodlight. Both are necessary. Both are powerful. They work together.

The problem is that most of us - like me - only practice one. We grip the spotlight and try to force it to stay where we point it. We pedal harder and harder, exhausting ourselves, never realizing there’s this other skill we need to develop.

Understanding this changed how I approached meditation. I didn’t need to concentrate harder. I needed to learn to work with both types of attention - to develop both concentration and awareness, to practice both pedaling and balance.

That’s what the rest of this guide is about.