Practice in Practice
Reflections on experiments in Attention Activism
Last Sunday, ten of my friends came over and sat on my floor. After grounding together with Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness as our shared reference point, I passed out blindfolds and, one by one, placed random objects on the floor in front of each person — some soft, some strange, some belonging to my guests themselves. In the first round of practice, everyone sat blindfolded, touching their objects in silence for two minutes before jotting notes. In the second round, new objects circulated; still blindfolded, folks took turns describing their experience aloud for one minute. For the third round, we had a single participant experience and describe a new object while blindfolded as the rest of the group observed them, blindfolds off. It was my very first Independent Sensory Study, a small gathering that sought to explore the intricate tapestry of our eight senses (within Siegel’s frame) and the shifting “selves” that appear as we move from sensing to interpreting that sense to expressing that interpretation.
I hoped to explore how attention travels across thresholds between internal/external, private/public, listening/speaking, and conscious/unconscious. People’s attention diverged in fascinating ways — some stayed close to the physical texture of their object, while others spoke from the emotional or relational currents stirred by touch, presence, or the strangeness of being seen or unseen. The room held ten distinct inner landscapes, yet it also revealed (to borrow from labor activist Grace Lee Boggs) the exquisite connectedness of our experience.
I’m already imagining refinements to the practice (what if I placed the object upside down? What if participants didn’t get to touch their object before sharing?) and the discussion that followed. We asked: Where do “I” get involved in this process? Is every sense a “sense of self”? Would there be anything to sense without a self, however fluid, to perceive it? And would there be a “self” to sense without ever-changing streams of observable phenomena? There is so much possibility here: to clarify, to deepen, and to honor the elusive points of intersection where attention becomes experience and experience becomes us.