The Centre of Attention

When I first saw Alex Pansier’s photograph Patterns in The Guardian’s coverage of Bird Photographer of the Year, my eyes kept looking for somewhere to settle. One bird would draw my attention, then another.

Patterns © Alex Pansier

Gazing at Patterns, yet seeing none, brought to mind five questions used by teachers to turn attention towards the mind itself:

Does the mind come from anywhere?
Does the mind stay anywhere?
Does the mind go anywhere?
Does the mind have any shape or colour?
Does the mind have any size or dimension?

Five Questions about the Mind, James Low, Eifel, 2019

James Low says these questions are not problems to solve or trick questions. They invite us to look directly at mind itself. Ken McLeod often suggests substituting the word experience for mind (for example, in the audioclip below), and I've found that very helpful.

From 37 Practices in Four Parts, 8, Ken McLeod

The point of the five questions is not to work out an answer. The questions provoke us to look. Before encountering these questions, I'd never really inquired into the nature of my experience. Suddenly it dawned on me that experience is strangely mysterious, consisting of evanescent sensations, thoughts, and feelings. But what are these? Words fail.

And when a teacher asks, “Who experiences this?” the looking goes deeper and feels even more mysterious. I cannot find anyone, yet awareness is present. When I look for its shape, colour, location or boundary, I find nothing definite or tangible. Yet experience is happening. Knowing is present. And the more I look, the less I can say about where experience, knowing, or awarenes begins or ends, comes from or goes.

Alex’s photograph brought these questions back to me. Attention keeps choosing a focus, one bird, then another. The frame of the photograph supplies a boundary. Yet, when I look at the awareness experiencing the image, I find neither centre nor edge.

Related posts:
No Big Deal
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What Will Serve?

I've recently participated in the GRACE training developed by Roshi Joan Halifax. I came to the course through my growing involvement in spiritual care, keen to learn about this practical framework for being present with people who are suffering. I did learn, but something else happened as well.

First, a little about GRACE.

GRACE was developed to help people whose work brings them into direct contact with suffering. When developing the framework, Roshi Joan asked what capacities make compassion possible in such situations. She defines compassion as the intention and commitment to alleviate the suffering of others in a non-transactional way, and describes GRACE as an emergent process made up of trainable non-compassion elements:

Gather attention
Recall intention
Attune to self and other
Consider what will serve
Engage and end

Although initially developed in the context of healthcare, GRACE has much wider application. It feels extraordinarily relevant to the world we are living in today.

We're surrounded by situations that invite immediate reactions. News and social media continually present us with suffering, injustice, conflict, and threat. Public discourse rewards certainty and rapid judgment. We are encouraged to take positions before we have taken in the situation, to identify who is right and who is wrong, and often to regard the intensity of our reaction as evidence of the depth of our concern.

GRACE asks for something quite different.

First, gather attention. Come back into the body and the immediacy of experience. Recall your intention: why you are here and what matters to you. Attend not only to the other person but also to what is happening in you. Notice whether something has activated a reaction in you. Rather than rushing to relieve suffering—or your own discomfort in the presence of it—make room for not knowing what should happen. Then consider what might actually serve. Act or not, as appropriate. And when the interaction is over, let it end rather than carrying it into what comes next.

As the course unfolded and in reflection afterward, I found myself recalling Ken McLeod’s Four Steps of Standing Up:

Show up
Open to what is
Serve what is true to the limit of your perception
Receive the result

I don’t want to collapse these two frameworks into one. They arise from different teaching contexts and use different language, but considering them together reveals some convergence. Both ask us to pause the momentum of reaction, take in more of the situation, clarify what is actually being served, act without pretending to complete knowledge, and relinquish control of the outcome.

To show up is more than being physically present. It means bringing attention into the situation rather than engaging it through the filters of fear, anger, expectation, habit or role. GRACE begins in much the same territory with the gathering of attention.

Then comes open to what is. For some of us, this may be the most demanding movement. What is includes the other person and their suffering, but it also includes our own reactions—the desire to fix, reassure or be useful; to withdraw, take control, be right, or simply wishing for the discomfort to stop.

Ken makes a particularly sharp distinction between helping that responds to a situation and helping that arises from our own difficulty in experiencing the pain. If I cannot experience what another's suffering evokes in me, I might try to manage the situation so that I no longer have to experience it. Helping then becomes a subtle exercise in control. Or I may move in the opposite direction and withdraw because I feel helpless. Neither of these is a response to what the situation requires.

The GRACE course explores closely related territory in distinguishing empathy from compassion, while recognising empathy as an important human capacity—the ability to resonate with another's experience. When that resonance becomes overwhelming, our attention can shift from the suffering before us to our own discomfort—an experience Joan Halifax describes as empathic distress.

This is one of many ways our own reactions can begin to shape what we do. Ken’s third step addresses this problem: serve what is true to the limit of your perception. In Buddhahood Without Meditation, Ken puts it directly: “You don’t serve yourself. You don’t serve the other person. You serve the whole.”

That changes the meaning of compassionate action. I am part of the situation too. So are my limitations and responsibilities. So are relationships, history, consequences, power, institutional constraints and everything else operating in the field. I cannot know all of it. To the limit of your perception builds humility directly into action. As Ken points out in Then and Now, we can only act to the limit of what we can see. If things go wrong, the result may show us what we could not see before.

GRACE expresses a similar humility in consider what will serve. We may need to act, but action does not require the pretence that we know everything. Nor does compassion guarantee that an intervention will produce the result we intend.

This brings us to Ken’s fourth step: receive the result.

We act on our best understanding of the situation and receive what follows. The result may be welcome. It may be painful. Something quite small may have mattered enormously. We may discover that we misunderstood the situation. Something we thought would help may not have helped.

Receiving the result means taking in what actually happened without immediately judging it as success or failure, or engaging in self-congratulation or condemnation. The outcome simply becomes part of the situation we are now in.

There is a further dimension in Ken’s formulation. In teaching the Four Steps, he eventually connected them with traditional descriptions of the five aspects of pristine awareness. In There Is No Enemy, he describes how a teaching by Harada Roshi provided the clue. When Ken pressed him about its source, Roshi offered a formulation that Ken recognised as corresponding to a summary of the Five Teachings of Maitreya. Ken remembered this material from Differentiating Ordinary Consciousness and Pristine Awareness, a text by Rangjung Dorje, the Third Karmapa, that he had previously read and translated.

This connection places the Four Steps within a deeper account of how awareness expresses itself. The capacities involved—knowing the whole, seeing clearly, discerning particulars, recognising balance and imbalance, and knowing what to do—are understood as intrinsic to awareness. Appropriate action, then, does not ultimately have to be manufactured by conceptually working out what to do. As reactivity loses its grip, the natural capacity of awareness to respond becomes more available.

Ken puts this very simply in Buddhahood Without Meditation. When there is no separation from the situation, “The situation tells you what the next action is.”

Compassion is often misunderstood as a feeling we ought to generate toward other people. GRACE and the Four Steps offer a clearer understanding. When reaction no longer dominates our experience, compassion emerges naturally from being fully present with suffering, without turning away from it or trying to rearrange the situation to relieve our own discomfort.

That capacity seems urgently needed now—not only in hospitals, hospices and other places of care, but in families, workplaces and communities.

Related posts:
What is Compassion?
Recognising Reactivity in Real Time – Part 1
The Rocky Path of Not Knowing

The Door of Faith

For my Dharma friends—each following her own path, yet traveling together.

Faith, rather than belief, can come into view when our reliance on understanding, control, or connection no longer holds. In these passages, Ken McLeod and James Low approach faith from different circumstances, yet both point toward what becomes possible when familiar ways of making sense of experience fall away.

From Sutra Session 35, July 8, 2012

Ken: A few years ago, I became increasingly unsettled and discontented with being a teacher, in particular a Buddhist teacher. I’ve never, ever felt like a Buddhist teacher. I’m not even sure what that is, and that may sound very strange to many of you.

Do I teach Buddhism? Do I teach the practice of Buddhism? I have for a very long time. But that somehow feels different from being a Buddhist teacher. I just don’t get along with other Buddhist teachers. Sad, but true. [Laughter] Maybe not so sad.

This reached a point where I had to take some action on it, about six years ago. So I took a sabbatical from teaching because I didn’t know what I was doing anymore, so I felt I would just stop.

It was a little bit of a shock to a small number of people who worked with me. They went, “You can’t do that, we need you.” But they discovered that they didn’t, and actually they learned a lot from it, being one of the basic aspects of life, which is impermanence and change. And I’m going to say a few more words about that.

I came back to teaching somewhat differently a year later, but the discontents hadn’t gone away. One of the ways that I began to think about this is the problem with the word teaching. What’s important here isn’t teaching, it’s learning. Learning is far more important, and being with a teacher who’s talking about things is simply one way of learning. Because when we engage in spiritual practice, we’re learning a way of approaching life, and that’s what we’re looking for. We’re trying to understand.

Increasingly, the idea that someone else can tell you, “Oh, this is how you do it,” or whatever, this just doesn’t work at all. Each of us have to discover our own way. This is something I’ve come to feel very deeply. For that reason, I moved my way of doing retreats and everything from being a teacher to creating environments in which people could learn—learn through their own experience, learn with the benefit of my own training and experience, but practicing in the ways that were really fruitful for them and not adhering to a system which had developed somewhere else for another population in another country.

That was sort of all right for a couple of years. And then something happened. Describing this to some people I’ve worked with in business circles, they said, “What happened?” I said, “Well, this is one of those Zen things, where everything just drops out of your life and you don’t know where you are.”

That was about three or four years ago. And my immediate impulse at that point was to stop teaching. There was one small problem. I was teaching two retreats back to back and this occurred in the break between the two retreats. And so I had 18 people flying in from all over the country, expecting to learn something or do a retreat with me. So, I couldn’t just stop right then. But I did start to wind down my individual consulting practice as a teacher, and just gradually wound down from there.

This is kind of the end point of that winding down process. Now, why? A number of my students really quizzed me on this one quite deeply. The reason is that I felt that I had nothing to say to anybody. And not just a kind of trivial thing, I don’t have anything to say. No, I really had nothing to say. In fact, I would call friends up and say, just ask me any question about Buddhism, and they’d say, “Well, what are the three jewels?” I don’t know. Ask me another.

I even went to a Tibetan teacher and said, “I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know what buddha nature is. I don’t know what this is, I don’t know what that is.” And he said, “Doesn’t matter.” He gave me some very interesting instruction. He said, “Just cultivate faith to the point that you can’t think, and rest there. Don’t worry about this or that.”

I thought about that instruction for a very long time. Well, what did he mean by that? And I realized that this played straight into my suspicions and discomfort with the notion of belief.

For Ken, faith seems to have come into view when the understandings he had relied on no longer gave him anything to stand on. “I don’t know anything anymore,” he told a Tibetan teacher. The response was an instruction to cultivate faith to the point where thinking stops.

My path into this territory wound through a different landscape: the failure of connection, a persistent sense of not quite fitting anywhere, of being rootless, and of not being able to rely on anyone. For much of my life this felt like a reaction to past hurts, and a lack of something other people seemed to have. But over time, the compunction to sort it out has faded. If there is nowhere to belong, if no relationship can provide unshakeable support, then another possibility begins to appear: to stop searching outside or inside for that support.

Faith, in this sense, is not a feeling that things will somehow work out, nor trust that someone will always be there. It is closer to the willingness Ken describes: to remain open without requiring certainty. And there's a huge sense of freedom in that.

James Low’s way of talking about faith opens this up further.

James: What I found with the university study was that it was just more a vast accumulation of words and concepts and theories. This was the time of structuralism with Levi Strauss and people like that and a lot of psychoanalysis around. And that wasn’t my cup of tea at that stage anyway. So I dropped out of university and went back to India.

Sam: If anything can announce the spiritual poverty of the Western tradition more than Martin Luther and John Calvin, it might be the post-structuralists like Derrida and Foucault.

James: Indeed. It’s like eating a mixture of candy floss and cotton wool. It’s a little bit tasty, but there’s nothing in it.

Sam: Yeah. Okay. So then you moved on. So bring me to your next Dharma perch.

James: So I went back to India and went to Dharamsala briefly for a few months, going to some of the teachings in the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, which was just getting going at that time. But it wasn’t my heart’s home. So I went over to Darjeeling and then I met Chatral Rinpoche and Dudjom Rinpoche, Karmapa, Kalu Rinpoche.

Sam: Wow. You got four great ones there. Give me your impression at that point. How did you, meeting Dudjom, how did you not go headlong into his Nyingma school and meeting Kalu, how did you not go headlong into his Kagyu context? And to say nothing of the Karmapa. Who struck you as an important advertisement for what was possible at that point when you met these guys?

James: I think they all did in their very different ways. Chatral Rinpoche was very physical and he didn’t like speaking very much, but he was extremely attentive to what was going on all around him. And I used to go and see him every day—he had a little room just in front of a small temple he built at a place called Jor Bungalow—and he was very, very kind. He got one of the students to teach me the beginnings of my understanding of Tibetan, and we translated a biography of Padmasambhava that I used to chant every day.

And basically, he’s just saying, as all the teachers say, faith is the main entry door. That faith is the method by which you gather yourself together, because we’re all so dispersed with our personal histories, national histories, hopes and fears, all the rest of it. But if you can develop a really one-pointed, deep, heartfelt faith, you come into one point, and then you start to see that the diversity of the different thoughts and feelings that we tend to be endlessly sorting out and making into new patterns, they all have the same nature. They arise, and they vanish. They self-arise, and they self-vanish.

Thoughts come to us. We’re not proactively thinking most of the time. Thought arises and vanishes. Feeling arises and vanishes. Sensation arises and vanishes.

So it was a strong introduction to the dynamic nature of the world, and that the whole dualistic consciousness interpretive matrix is a fruitless effort to stabilise the nature of experience so that you can make sense of it after the event. So it’s like learning about the body through doing dissection in the first year in a medical school. But you can also learn through the body through playing football, playing tennis, or dancing. So the connected body, the body that’s part of the world, is showing the co-emergence of subject and object. Whereas if you focus on trying to stabilise the world, then the subject is always concerned with its agency, with its mastery.

Am I really in charge of what’s going on here? Have I taken account of all the different variables so that I can bring my intention into the world just as I want? But of course, that doesn’t really work out.

From Patterns of Emptiness, a conversation between Sam Harris and James Low, August 12, 2025.

For more on faith and devotion read James' introduction to The Seven Chapters of Prayer and Ken's article Where the Thinking Stops.

Related posts

• The Rocky Path of Not Knowing
• Looking for Truth
• When the Picture Falls Apart

All Gone

James Low’s voice is usually recorded in the context of a retreat or teaching session, but Atmosphere 3, by drummer and composer Mark Guiliana, pairs James' voice with an original musical composition, using a passage from Clarity and Equanimity.

The music changes the space around James’ words, allowing his voice, his pauses, and the words themselves to be heard differently.

Listen to Atmosphere 3 on Waking Up →

If you don't have the app, you can listen by accessing a 30-day guest pass.

Here is the orignal passage that Mark Guiliana set to music:

From Clarity and Equanimity in a Time of Provocation

But clearly, since you were born, you've had a lot of thoughts, a lot of sensations, a lot of feelings, memories, plans, hopes. Where are they now? All gone. All gone.

All that activity making impermanence. All gone. Bye bye.

All these days in school, homework, worried about getting a grade. Bye bye. All gone.

Getting older. All gone. Having kids, they grow up. Oh my god. Bye bye. All gone.

There was never anything to grasp. But how heavy and dull we made our life by grasping, by worrying, by thinking, "It's all up to me. I've got to make it right."

So the key thing in heart of the practice is to observe the nature of experience. What is a thought? What is a memory? What is a sensation? Not as an intellectual enquiry, but as a revelation.

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An Unexpected Conversation

A complete stranger approached me on the footpath and began to pour out her heart. She was deeply upset by the tragedy in Nepal: the horror of the mudslides, the shock of realising that glaciers can collapse, and her helplessness in the face of it all. She felt there was nothing she could do to ease the suffering of those affected, and appalled that nothing stood in the way of such a thing happening again. After talking for perhaps ten minutes she asked, “Is there anything we can do?”

I took a long breath, and the Medicine Buddha mantra came to me. tayatha om, bekandze, bekandze, maha bekandze, radza samudgate soha. “You can say this mantra,” I replied. “It's the Medicine Buddha mantra. I know it sounds crazy to suggest that repeating some unfamiliar sounds could be of any use…”

Before I could finish, she jumped in. "I see how it helps," she said. "Because it calms me, it could help me stop spewing all this anxiety everywhere."

For the first time she met my gaze, and then asked, "Are you a Buddhist?" I nodded, and she began to describe things she knew about Buddhism: "Everything is impermanent, so you shouldn’t be attached to anything, because it could all be taken away in an instant, as it has been for those people in Nepal."

“Maybe there's a bit more to it." I replied. "I think it's about steering between attachment and detachment, because it’s all too easy to go from ‘shouldn't have attachments' to ‘it doesn’t matter what I do.’”

She took a deep breath. “Yeah, I can see there’s a lot to it,” she replied, and then began talking about mindfulness, being present, being in the here and now. From there she moved to the harm she felt phones and social media had done to a whole generation. "They're never really here because they're always absorbed by their screens."

I laughed. “Was our generation here? Were we present? Maybe not so much,” I said. “A lot of the time we were high on alcohol, drugs, sex, or rock ’n’ roll.”

She laughed. “Yeah, we had a drugged presence!”

Suddenly I no longer felt like a listener. Monologue had become conversation, and we began finding our way through something together.

“I think being present might be more than just paying attention to what's happening right now," I offered. "For me, it has something to do with being aware of the space between thoughts. Taking a breath before speaking really helps. When I remember to do that, I'm less likely to react and say or do something I later regret. Do you know what I mean?”

She looked surprised. Then she began to nod and smile. "If we stopped like that and listened more," she said, "then we'd be more human again, not so intolerant and polarised. We all need to be much more human with everything that's happening around the world."

"I needed this conversation today," she continued, and added that what she needs often seems to "appear out of nowhere." We smiled at each other and parted. As I walked away, I felt grateful that pointers from James Low and Ken McLeod were there just when I needed them.

James Low, Integration is a Central Concept in Dzogchen: Sleeping Beauty or Sleeping Buddha?, Starting at 35:35.

James: In this tradition of dzogchen a central point is to move into experiencing prior to the arising of thought. In the absence of thought there is a givenness of the continuity of our being but it’s not a being you can speak about because it’s not locked in to the normal signifiers: "I’m male, I’m female, I’m from this country," and so on. This quality can be called awareness or presence. Because it has no fixed content, because it’s not resting on a particular pattern of thoughts or emotions or sensation, it’s not vulnerable to the changing pattern of events. For this reason in the tradition it is described as being indestructible.

This quality of being is an openness, an availability, an openness, a welcome. A welcome to whatever arises. This openness is grounded in the awareness that it’s not improved by the presence of good thoughts, kind thoughts or shining thoughts, nor or is it defiled or debased or contaminated by the presence of what we could take to be negative thoughts.

And Ken:

From Sutra Session 1: Bringing Life Into Meditation

Ken: One is always take a breath before you speak. Now, when you’re having a conversation with a friend, how often do you wait? How long do you wait between the time when your friend stops talking and you start talking? One, two milliseconds, something like that. What happens if you start taking a breath right there? Well, the first thing that’s going to happen is you will never be interrupted and you will never interrupt anybody else. That’s quite a change right there.

The second thing that’s going to happen is that people know they’re going to have to be quiet if they want to hear anything that you have to say. Because if they start talking again, you’re not going to jump in. You’re just going to wait. And then when they stop, you’re going to take another breath. So they’re going to start listening. And this is very effective.

Related posts

• Bringing Attention Into Action
• Reality is the Best Teacher
• Recognising Reactivity in Real Time — Part 1