Simple-sounding instructions are not so simple (or sometimes IMPOSSIBLE) to actually do.

I mean, seriously, what could be simpler than: “Just keep your attention focused on your breathing as it goes in and out,” right?

Well, it turns out, when you TRY to keep your attention focused on your breathing, it seems that building a nuclear power plant with twist ties and Gummi Bears would be easier.

I discovered there’s another way.

Instead of simple-sounding instructions, there are simple concepts that, once  we understand them, can lead to rapid changes in our mental state.

Here’s an example, that I call the Foreground/Background Confusion:

When we perceive anything there’s the foreground — the part that has caught our attention — and the background, the part that allows us to notice the foreground.

Think of the sky.

One example of foreground is the clouds. Or the sun. Those are the things we SEE, that catch our attention.

The “background” is the big, wide, open, spacious thing that the foreground items seem to move through.

The background is so familiar that we usually don’t even pay attention to it… our brains are wired to notice the foreground events (after all, when we were in the savannah hundreds of thousands of years ago, it wasn’t important to pay attention to ALL the grass that was waving in the breeze, only  to the bits that WEREN’T… because behind those blades of grass is where the saber-toothed bunny could be hiding!).

The background, it seems, is untouched by whatever appears in it. Even if the foreground items totally take over (a REALLY cloudy day, for example), we know that it just seems that way, that it’s just temporary, and that, somewhere back there, is a clear, spacious background.

The background, we could say metaphorically, doesn’t have a preference or problem with whatever shows up as the foreground.

Now what I’m about to suggest isn’t a meditation technique, per se, but it could, nonetheless, lead you to a dramatic shift in your experience.

Check out your current experience — sensations, thoughts, images, sounds, smells, feelings. Those are the foreground.

In the same way that you could shift your attention from the clouds (foreground) to the sky itself (background)… or even sense the existence of the background (sky) even when it’s totally obscured by foreground (clouds)…  do the same thing with your experience.

See if you can find the “background” of whatever you are experiencing.

See if you can notice that it’s as if there’s something (we don’t need to name it), in which the thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc. happen to arise and pass away within, like the way the sky holds the clouds.

See if, instead of trying to do something to or with the foreground of your experience, you can take a step back and rest in/as the background, the spacious, open thing that doesn’t have a problem with whatever arises in it.

I’m not asking you to hold onto this state for any specific amount of time (that would be like asking you to do something that SOUNDS simple but isn’t!)… just see if you can get a tiny taste of hanging out with the background instead of the foreground.

Let me know what you experience.