Paying Attention

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
November 17, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Sometimes our lives can be so fast paced that we fail to notice the beauty all around us. Societal turmoil keeps us from noticing the suffering of others. We fail to cherish the moments with those we love. We will explore mindfulness and directing our attention toward all that we value.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

REVERENT ATTENTION
by Rev. Chris Jimmerson

We gather in reverence
Mindful of the gift of each other and this our beloved community.

We gather in courage
Focused on doing justice and growing the beloved community in our world.

We gather in solemnity
Mindful of the sufferingJ sorrow and injustice still present in our world.

We gather with gratefulness
Expanding our awareness of the great beauty and wonder also to be found in our world.

We gather to worship
Turning our attention now to the sacred interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

from “AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD”
by Barbara Brown Taylor

The practice of paying attention really does take time. Most of us move so quickly that our surroundings become no more than the blurred scenery we fly past on our way to somewhere else. We pay attention to the speedometer, the wristwatch, the cell phone, the list of things to do, all of which feed our illusion that life is manageable. Meanwhile, none of them meets the first criterion for reverence, which is to remind us that we are not gods. If anything, these devices sustain the illusion that we might yet be gods-if only we could find some way to do more faster.

Sermon

“Your attention is like a combination spotlight and vacuum cleaner: It highlights what it lands on and then sucks it into your brain-for better or worse,”

That’s a quote from psychologist, senior fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and New York Times best-selling author, Dr, Rick Hanson,

We’ll come back to Dr. Hanson’s ideas on how to grow the good in our brains through self-directed neuroplasticity a little later.

For the month of November, our religious education classes and activities have been exploring the question, “What does it mean to be a people of attention”, so this morning in worship we will turn our attention to, well, attention!

With so much vying for our attention these days, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed and distracted, We can end up just sort of moving through our hurried days on autopilot, simply reacting without much conscious thought or mindfulness of our lives, our world, our loved ones,

I caught myself doing this just the other day,

I’d had a long and somewhat frustrating day at the church, having spent much of it struggling both online and over over the phone with a financial institution that seemed to be fighting mightily not to release some funds that properly belonged to the church,

Then, after I left my office here at the church, I made an evening pastoral visit, ran several errands, including picking up laundry from the dry cleaners and finally made it home after dark and late for dinner,

My spouse, Wayne, was on the couch, reading and curled up with our Basenji dogs, Louisa Mae Alcott and Benjamin Franklin, The dogs both jumped up to greet me,

I walked right past them, went into the bedroom, closing the door behind me, hung the laundry in the closet, went into the bathroom and completed my nighttime get ready for bed routine, got my robe on and only then remerged into the living room, suddenly realizing that I had absentmindedly walked past everybody without so much as an even perfunctory greeting.

Wayne was kind enough not to give me a hard time about this.

Louisa and Ben not so much – a lot of complaining and fussing at me ensued until I had finally completed a proper greeting with them.

And it’s not surprising that we can easily lapse into inattentive states like this in situations both small and more significant.

We have so much competing for our attention these days.

Our busy schedules
Social media
Social division
Cell phones
Text messages
Email messages
The Twitter monster in the White House
Impeachment hearings
Etc., Etc. Etc.

A recent study found that on average each single minute results in 204 million emails, 16 million text messages and 350,000 new tweets.

The average smartphone user unlocks their phone in response to a notification between 80 and 110 times per day.

Columbia University professor Tim Wu says that we are being subjected to a multi-billion dollar industry that devises ever more ingenious and intrusive ways to farm and monetize our attention.

He calls them the attention merchants, who offer us “free” services and content – social media, search engines, mass media that use targeted ads, clickbait and sponsored articles and videos to lure our attention.

Thus having ensnared us into a distracted state, wherein we’re most susceptible to advertising, they “harvest our attention for commercial exploitation”.

His words. I don’t think Wu thinks very highly of the attention merchants!

Here are some ways Wu and others say that we can try to avoid having our attention distracted by these types of tactics so that we can focus instead on our values, relationships, goals – just the moments of our lives we may otherwise be missing.

Limit accessing news, social media and the like to at most twice per day
Turn our smarts phones off when not expecting urgent or emergency calls or texts. Just check them a few times each day.
Shut down our email programs and only check email at a few set times every day. (I sense a trend here).
Avoid “clickbait”: articles or videos with sensational and/or controversial titles or descriptions.
Look to see if a link contains the phrase “sponsored article”. If does, don’t click on it.
Ignore Twitter Monster Tweets.

OK, actually, I said that last one. Well, Rachel Maddow and I did.

Anyway, it turns out that gaining as much control as we can over where we focus our attention is important to our mental, physical and spiritual well-being.

Dr. Rick Hanson, whose quote I read at the beginning, describes how neurological research has shown that where we direct our attention can actually alter the structures and neural patterns of our brains.

For example, London cab drivers develop thicker neural layers in their hippocampus, which is associated with visual, spatial memory. This is likely from them having been required to pay great attention to London’s spaghetti snarl of streets in order to find their way around.

Long-term meditators have been found to have changes in the brain associated with reduced anxiety and stress, along with several other neurological changes thought to have enduring psychological benefits.

In general, directing our attention mostly toward negative thoughts, emotions and experiences wires the brain in ways that lead to greater reactivity, anxiety, depression, a focus on threats and an inclination toward anger, sadness and guilt.

Conversely, directing our attention toward the generally positive aspects of our lives can lay down neural patterns conducive to resilience, realistic optimism, positive mood, a sense of worth and less stress and anxiety.

As Dr. Hanson says it, in perhaps a bit of an oversimplification, “Mental states become neural traits.”

Attention is also vital to our relationships with our loved ones, as well as at work, in our larger community and here at the church.

Sociologist, clinical psychologist and MIT professor Sherry Turkle has studied this and found that relationships depend on authentic conversation. She also found that authentic conversation requires us to give our undivided attention to others, as well as depends upon our own capacity for self-reflection.

So just a couple of practical notes here. If you are at home talking with your spouse, and you take your smart phone out and start looking at the internet or checking Facebook, you are not paying attention. You are not having authentic conversation.

If you meet your friend for lunch, and the entire time they are sharing something with you, you are mentally preparing what you plan to say next, you are not paying attention. You may be having a competition or an argument, but you are not having authentic conversation.

Now, I mentioned that capacity for self-reflection, paying attention to what is going on inside ourselves is also important.

This can be harder than it might seem. Particularly when strong emotions have been provoked, we tend to just react in the moment. We don’t stop to reengage the reasoning areas of our brains.

Here’s an example, from an experience I had just recently.

Last Sunday, I sat in on the early service. Wayne and I sat over on that side way in the back, which I have not done since the new section of the sanctuary was completed.

The singing and music during the time for meditation and lighting candles in the window was absolutely beautiful.

And suddenly, I found myself with tears in my eyes. I couldn’t stop them. The story I told myself is that it was the beautiful music and that I always am touched by this part of the service anyway, and I hadn’t seen how magnificent the new area of the sanctuary really is from the vantage point of being across from it and that I have been feeling blessed lately more than ever to being doing ministry in this place and with this religious community.

And that was all true and all correct. And all of that was only part of the true story. The emotions were more complicated than that.

The other part of the story is that I had just officiated at a memorial service the day before and that in the days and weeks before, both as a minister and in my personal life, I had spent a good deal of time with folks who were grieving and/or suffering in other ways.

So, when I had time later that Sunday to go back to that experience and pay attention to what had been going on within me, I discovered that I had internalized some of the grief of other folks that wasn’t really mine to take on.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean we shouldn’t feel our own empathetic emotions when we witness other people suffering.

And it can be very easy to unconsciously absorb some of the grief and suffering of others. In extreme cases, this is called secondary trauma.

I just mean I think we have to pay attention to the possibility of this happening because if we don’t

those feelings will find a different and potentially more destructive way to get out anyway and
I do not think we can be as fully present for our our loved ones and others who may need us if we have not dealt with this within ourselves.

And this need to examine what is going on within ourselves plays out in so many settings.

So, for instance, when we find ourselves angry with someone else … when we are feeling anxious about something, if we stop, pay attention to what we are feeling and the story we are telling ourselves as a result, what we often discover is that there is a more accurate and less dire story than our negative emotions are causing us to construct.

One of the pernicious things about negativity is that it tends to be self-reinforcing.

Clinical psychologist and mindfulness coach, Tara Brach has a practical technique with the acronym RAIN for bringing our awareness back to a closer version of reality when we have been overwhelmed by such emotions.

R – Recognize what is happening. Pay attention to the emotions cOIning up within us, as well as any physical reactions such as shortness of breath or muscle tightness. Don’t judge them, just acknowledge them, which in and of itself sometimes reduces their power over us.

A – Allow life to be just as it is. Let yourself experience the feelings and the situation as it is. That does not mean we may not work for change later, but first we have to accept what the reality is.

I – Investigate inner experience with kindness. What story am I telling myself and is it accurate? What within me or in my life most needs my attention? In what ways am I judging myself and causing shame? How can I treat myself and others with the same kindness I would show to a hurt child?

N – Non-Identification. I am not the current situation. My present emotions are not the totality of all that I can and will feel. I have the agency to rewrite this story.

So, Dr. Brach’s RAIN is a practical way to stay mindful.

And I think contemplative practices can also help us become more capable of remaining mindful.

Meditation, journaling prayer. And prayer does not have to be directed to a higher power but can just be a way of focusing our intentions and attention.

Just sitting on the ground and truly paying attention to the intricacies of life all around us.

Noticing the sound of the water when we shower in the morning. Stopping to pay attention to how the sunlight feels on our face when we first walk out the door.

Stop. Pause. Notice. It can be that simple.

Dr. Hanson offers another practical way to draw our attention into the present moment and to focus it upon positive experience.

I’d like to invite you now to engage with me in his meditation for self-directed, positive neuroplasticity.

I invite you to close your eyes – close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and then follow along as I read Dr. Hanson’s guidance for this meditation.

Have: Find a pleasant sensation that’s already present in the foreground or background of your awareness.

Perhaps a relaxed feeling of breathing, a comfortable warmth or coolness, or a bodily sense of vitality or aliveness. Perhaps warmth you sense from those around you.

The sensation could be subtle or mild.

There may be other sensations, or thoughts or feelings, that are uncomfortable, and that’s alright.

Just let go of those for now and bring your attention to the pleasant sensation.

Enrich: Stay with the pleasant sensation. Explore it a little. What’s it is like? Help it last. Keep your attention on it.

Come back to it if your attention wanders. Open to this sensation in your mind and body.

Without stressing or straining, see if it can become even fuller, even more intense.

Let the pleasure of this sensation help keep it going.

See if you can embody it through small actions, such as shifting your body to breathe more fully or smiling softly.

Absorb: Intend and sense that the pleasant sensation is sinking into you. Imagine the experience weaving its way into you like water soaking into a sponge.

Let the sensation become a part of you.

In this absorbing, let there be a sense of receiving, softening, sinking into the experience as it sinks into you.

As we come out of the meditation now, I hope Dr. Hanson’s exercise gave you at least a sense of the potential power of paying deep attention to the good. If it did not this time, I hope you will give it a few more tries.

The latin roots of our word, “attention”, mean “to stretch toward”. Where we place our attention may well determine the direction that calls us into our future.

I leave you with words from writer and poet, Annie Dillard.

“At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening … “

As you go back out into the world now may your attention be drawn to that which is life giving, that which nourishes our soul.

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