Culadasa: Disentangle From Your Thoughts and Emotions
By Culadasa One thing that all successful meditation practices have in common, whether it’s acknowledged or not, is stable attention and mindfulness. You could even say these are the two functional objectives of the meditation process. And although you may have never noticed before, conscious experience takes two distinct forms: attention and peripheral awareness. Attention and peripheral awareness are associated with different brain networks that process information in fundamentally different ways. They are two quite different ways of “knowing” the world. Paying attention involves a bilateral dorsal network of structures that selectively engages specific objects, is top-down, voluntary and intentional, focal, highly verbal, abstract, mostly conceptual, and evaluative. Peripheral awareness involves a right-lateralized ventral network that provides an open awareness that automatically orients to new stimuli, can disengage and redirect attention, is bottom-up, stimulus-driven, panoramic, minimally verbal, concrete, mainly sensory, and non-judgmental. The main thing these two systems have in common is that both contribute to conscious experience. To be successful in your practice, you must work with both attention and peripheral awareness to stabilize …
