Episode #4 Building Focus & Intent
In this episode, we look more closely at HOW to grow into coherence.
There are four obvious types of meditation, mindfulness, contemplation – whatever you want to call it– and we explore how these four types form the foundation of this work. All of them help us to build our focused attention into intention.
As we’ve said already, the key to successful practice – to building enduring habits – is to evoke a background affective texture (that is, a feeling) that is intimately woven with the act of our practice. The feeling of Joyful Curiosity – the child-like wonder of something truly magical happening – is the key to this. If each breath, or each moment of watching a candle flame, or a leaf or whatever we choose, is utterly magical, then it’s far more likely to be engaging and we’re far more likely to want to bring our mind back again to the single point of focus.
And then we move to Open Focus meditation, which is the same kind of life skill, but spread out into everything we experience in the moment: everything we see, hear, smell, taste, feel – all of it, as it happens, in the moment. This is an eyes open meditation and a really good grounding for becoming fully present through the days.
The music that book-ends the podcasts is created by Caro C and is called ‘Sense Ability’ – you can find it here.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE THESE RECENT EPISODES
Falling in Love with the Future – with author, musician, podcaster and futurenaut, Rob Hopkins
We need all 8 billion of us to Fall in Love with a Future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. So how do we do it?
ReWilding our Water: From Rain to River to Sewer and back with Tim Smedley, author of The Last Drop
How close are we to the edge of Zero Day when no water comes out of the taps? Scarily close. But Tim Smedley has a whole host of ways we can restore our water cycles.
This is how we build the future: Teaching Regenerative Economics at all levels with Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann
How do we let go of the sense of scarcity, separation and powerlessness that defines the ways we live, care and do business together? How can we best equip our young people for the world that is coming – which is so, so different from the future we grew up believing was possible?
Brilliant Minds: BONUS podcast with Kate Raworth, Indy Johar & James Lock at the Festival of Debate
We are honoured to bring to Accidental Gods, a recording of three of our generation’s leading thinkers in conversation at the Festival of Debate in Sheffield, hosted by Opus.
This is an unflinching conversation, but it’s absolutely at the cutting edge of imagineering: this lays out where we’re at and what we need to do, but it also gives us roadmaps to get there: It’s genuinely Thrutopian, not only in the ideas as laid out, but the emotional literacy of the approach to the wicked problems of our time.
Now we have to make it happen.

STAY IN TOUCH
For a regular supply of ideas about humanity's next evolutionary step, insights into the thinking behind some of the podcasts, early updates on the guests we'll be having on the show - AND a free Water visualisation that will guide you through a deep immersion in water connection...sign up here.
(NB: This is a free newsletter - it's not joining up to the Membership! That's a nice, subtle pink button on the 'Join Us' page...)