Lessons at 2AM

Loud noises woke me up and… what I did instead of lying there awake and angry

Someone was talking loudly on the sidewalk outside my bedroom. Just having a loud good bye conversation without realizing rest of the world is asleep.

My sleep broke. I was awake. And in that small window between sleep and full waking, I noticed something I want to describe carefully, because the noticing itself is the thing.

There was a shift from nobody to somebody. A few seconds where presence was there but no "I" had formed yet. Then the I-self gathered, and now there was a person — me — being woken up by a noise.

The more my attention went to the voice on the sidewalk, the more contracted I became. The voice wasn’t hostile. The voice was harmless. It was the attending to that was contracting me. My awareness was narrowing toward the source of the sound, gathering into a tight little fist around the I that was being disturbed.

And then I felt annoyed.

Here is what I want you to notice about the annoyance, because everything that followed depended on this. I was not annoyed at the person on the sidewalk. I was annoyed at the fact that here "I" was. The annoyance was at the formation of this contracted, disturbed self. It was not directed outward at the cause. It was directed inward at the contraction itself.

This kind of annoyance is interesting. Most of the time, when something disturbs us, we get angry at the disturbance. The noise is the enemy. The neighbor is the problem. The world should be quieter. We try to suppress the irritation, or we let it flare and ride it out, but in either case the object of our attention is the disturbance.

What I noticed in that moment was different. The annoyance was not pointing at the noise. The annoyance was pointing at me — at my own contraction. It was telling me something specific. It was telling me that the way I was relating to the noise was the actual problem, and that the way I was relating to the noise was something I could change.

The annoyance was not the obstacle to getting back to sleep. The annoyance was the door.

Most mindfulness is taught as a method of attention. Notice the breath. Notice the body. Notice the sounds. Notice the thoughts. The instruction is always to attend to content — the actual stuff arising in awareness. This is good practice and it works for many things.

But there is another level of attending that almost nobody describes, and it is the level I want to say here. You can attend to the content, or you can attend to the relationship between awareness and its content. These are not the same.

When you attend to the content, you are tracking the noise itself, or the people talking, or the annoyance itself, or the breath itself. You are watching the thing.

When you attend to the relationship, you are tracking how awareness is meeting the thing. You are watching the meeting.

The first is what most meditators do. The second is what the meditation eventually becomes, and it is what becomes available only when the body is steady enough that attention does not have to hold its own ground.

In the middle of the night, with my sleep broken and a voice continuing on the sidewalk, I tracked the relationship. I noticed that awareness was contracting. I noticed that the contraction was tightening as attention went to the source of the disturbance. I did not need to do anything about the noise. I needed to change the relationship.

Two steps followed. They came naturally because the diagnosis was clear.

First, I brought my attention back to the body. Not to suppress or ignore the noise. Simply to relocate the ground of attention from outside (the source of the sound) to inside (the body itself). The body is steady. The body is here. The body does not need to track external threats in the same way a contracted I-self does.

Second, I expanded attention to the space in which the sounds were travelling. This is the step that did the work. I stopped attending to the noise as a thing happening to me, and started attending to the field that contained both the sounds and the listening. The voice on the sidewalk was in that field. My listening was in that field. The bedroom was in that field. The night was in that field. There was no longer an "I" being assaulted by a "noise." There was the spaciousness within which the voice and the listening were both happening, and they were both being held by something larger than either.

The body relaxed. The voice continued. Fighting stopped. Sleep returned.

This took maybe three to five minutes. It did not require any technique I had not already practiced. It did not require any extraordinary state. What it required was that I track the relationship rather than the content, which meant I had to notice the annoyance for what it actually was. It was not a problem to be solved, but a precise diagnostic signal showing exactly where the intervention needed to happen.

I am writing this because there is a lesson underneath it that I think more people could use, especially people in demanding work, in transitions, in moments when their state seems to be the obstacle.

Every unpleasant state contains, within itself, the pointer to its own resolution. The signal is in the shape of the discomfort, if the discomfort is attended to with sufficient precision.

The annoyance was not telling me to make the noise stop. The annoyance was not telling me to suppress my reaction. The annoyance was telling me that the relationship between awareness and the noise was contracted, and that the contraction was the variable I could shift. It was fully in my control.

If I had attended to the content of my experience, I would have spent the next hour fuming, getting up to look out the window, screaming at someone outside, and lying awake angry. None of those would have helped me sleep, and all of them would make the experience even worse.

By attending to how awareness was relating to its content, the diagnosis became precise. And precise diagnosis is what made the intervention small and effective. I did not need a meditation or breathing technique. I did not need to talk myself down. I needed to recognize that the contraction was happening, and that I knew how to widen.

This is what I want to leave with you. Whatever state you are in right now: irritation, anxiety, restlessness, discomfort of upcoming meeting, the larger grinding discomfort of a life in transition; that state contains its own diagnostic signal. The discomfort is shaped a particular way. It is pointing somewhere. If you stop trying to manage the content of your experience and start attending to how awareness is meeting your experience, the signal becomes available.

You will not always be able to shift in the moment. Sometimes it is deeper than the body's current capacity to hold a wider field. Sometimes you need sleep first, or eat, or have human contact, before the shift is accessible. But the signal is still there, and the signal still tells you something true.

The relationship between awareness and what awareness is meeting is the variable. Once you can find that variable, most of the suffering you thought was being caused by external circumstances reveals itself to be something more local and more tractable than that.

The states are already pointing where they need to go. You only have to be precise enough to read what they are saying. This is mindfulness as a lived experience.