This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: One Thing; Practicing Off the Cushion, On Purpose (3/5): Monotasking. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: One Thing; Practicing Off the Cushion, On Purpose (3/5): Monotasking

The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 29, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Nice to be with you another day. Day three, Wednesday. It's so lovely to be part of this. Who knew that YouTube could actually be a force that brings people together? So often there's a lot of craziness that happens on YouTube, but I admit I don't watch so much of it, so I don't really know all the good things it has to offer.

And of course, I also want to say welcome and hello to those people who aren't in the chat, who are maybe already in a meditation posture just waiting. So, hello to you as well. Of course.

Okay, I think we'll get started here. Good morning. Welcome.

We're continuing this series on practicing off the cushion on purpose—just what are some things that we can do in our daily life that augment and support our meditation practice? Sometimes we might feel like if I'm not sitting down in a formal meditation posture, then it doesn't count as practice. It's noteworthy for me sometimes when I meet with individuals having practice discussions; often they lead with this confession, quote unquote, "Yeah, I haven't been meditating," as if that's the only measurement of practice.

I want to highlight that there are so many things that we can be doing in our daily life that are a support for our meditation practice. Or maybe there's a time in our life when we don't find ourselves sitting for whatever reason that might be, but we can incorporate some of these other practices that are tremendously helpful.

So in this morning's meditation, I'm going to focus or direct us towards having a meditation that just really highlights staying with one thing, one anchor. I know sometimes I give instructions on opening up the awareness to other things that might be arising—a perfectly legitimate practice. But today, I want to just do a practice where at the beginning we choose an anchor and stay, and stay, and stay. Because this is a practice—we're so used to flipping around—sometimes it can be really helpful to just stay.

Guided Meditation: One Thing (link)

Okay. So, if you haven't already, taking a meditation posture, letting the body settle into that posture.

Having some steadiness and some ease.

And feeling the points of contact. The back, if you're using a backrest on a chair or a couch, or if you're lying down. The backside, the buttocks as we're sitting, the back of the legs, and the feet, whatever they are touching. Feeling the contact, feeling the support.

Let the face soften. Sometimes around the eyes, there can be a little bit of tightness.

Let the shoulders drop.

And may there be a little more ease in the jaw.

And for this meditation, we choose an anchor. And we'll stay with this anchor as best we can. This might be feeling the sensations of breathing in the chest, as the chest moves with the breath. Or it might be feeling the breath with the belly as it moves in and out with breathing. Or, feeling the breath at the nose, the tip of the nose as the air goes in and out. Or with sounds, resting attention on the sounds that are arising and passing.

Choosing one of those anchors, or maybe you have another one that you regularly use, and let's hang out there. Being present for the experience of that one anchor.

With the breath, experiencing the beginning, middle, and end of an inhale.

Feeling the beginning, middle, and end of an exhale.

Noticing the transitions between inhales and exhales.

And when the mind wanders, we just very simply, kindly, begin again with the sensations of breathing or whatever your anchor is. Keeping it simple.

Allowing the attention to gather, get collected as best we can.

And we let our effort be balanced enough to stay with our anchor, but not so much that we're stiff or straining. Can it be soft enough to receive the experience of breathing, for example?

Just resting with the anchor and the simple experience of being here now.

Nothing to add, nothing to subtract. We're just here with our anchor.

What is it like to just stay, keeping the attention on one experience? Even though of course there is a pull to leave, we're just choosing to stay as best we can.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you for your practice. I'm not going to ring a bell. Maybe just bringing a little movement into the body. Fingers and toes, shoulders.

Dharmette: Practicing Off the Cushion, On Purpose 3/5; Monotasking (link)

So today I'd like to talk more about this idea of practicing off the cushion on purpose. There are so many ways in which we can incorporate practice into our daily lives. And I could say that there's also so many ways we can do anti-practice. There's a way in which we are doing things that maybe undermine some of our efforts on the cushion. Maybe "efforts" isn't the right word, just some of our meditation practice. And so I want to talk about today this idea of monotasking.

This modern habit, this thing that we do more and more of, with all these devices and so much encouragement to in fact do multiple things at one time. There's a way that trying to do too many things at once just kind of thins out our attention.

Just recently for myself in a Zoom meeting, someone asked me to email someone else in the meeting a particular thing. I often find this hard to do, but I thought, "Okay, I got to send this." So I started drafting the email while also trying to listen to what was happening in the Zoom meeting. Oh my gosh. In seconds, I wasn't doing anything well. The thread of the meeting kind of slipped away and I couldn't follow what was happening, and then the email got muddled. I couldn't quite get my mind focused around it, trying to do these two different things that require attention. I did neither of them really well. And because I felt like, "Oh, I really do need to send this," somehow I just tuned out the meeting and just sent this email, attaching the attachment and doing whatever was needed. And I just really noticed how taxing this was in a way that maybe we often aren't noticing.

There's this way, and there have been plenty of studies that show this, that in fact people don't multitask. That doesn't actually exist. We could say we micro-toggle, that we're just going back and forth. We are task-switching. We're not actually doing more than one thing at a time; we're just going back and forth. And there's this way in which psychologists describe this as each toggle, so to speak, leaves a little fog, what they were calling "attention residue"—the lingering of the task that you were doing before that kind of gets brought into the next task in a way that clouds the next. And we're not bringing all of our attention.

The Buddha named this dynamic of being pulled away into doing many things at once. He describes a river that is pouring down from the mountains, and this river is swift and powerful and carrying everything with it. And then someone opens the channels on both banks. And then this main current just gets dispersed, diffused, dissipated, and the river no longer goes as far, and it's no longer running deep. We could say this is multitasking: too many side channels opened in the mind, so the main current weakens.

And we could say, "Well, why does this matter?" It matters for a number of reasons. One is that our mental energy or the attention we have, the amount of attention we might say, is finite. And when it's spread thin, going many different places at once, it loses depth and power. And we end up just skimming the surface of so many things in our life. You don't need me to tell you this. We all know this. We all experience this way that we end up just becoming present by the bare minimum, just barely present. And we end up being busy, but meanwhile, our life is passing us by. Meanwhile, we are reinforcing this habit or this movement to not really be mindful, to not really cultivate any steadiness or attention. We could say there's this way in which multitasking numbs presence. We're not really there. We're not fully with anything.

And as you know, this Buddhist practice and this tradition is really about being fully with our experience. This is what we practice when we come to the meditation cushion. But off the cushion, we're training the mind so often with our multitasking to do the exact opposite: to not be fully with our experience.

So off the cushion, on purpose, can we be with our experience? Can we monotask rather than multitask? Because there's this way in which this continuity of this relaxed awareness grows real stability. And this stability really lets the mind gather. And this consistency really supports a deepening of presence, so that we can actually see where the suffering lies and where the freedom from suffering lies. So that we can really feel where the ease is and where the absence of ease is.

So, of course, our minds are looking about and are pulled away, right? Evolution has kind of tuned us to be paying attention to anything that might be a harm or some danger or things that are novel. Of course, our minds do this. It's just human. But we could say that practice is asking the question: what happens when we close a few of these extra outlets where the attention might go, and instead let the attention, let the mind gather? And then if we practice with this, then we discover that this gathered, unified mind feels tranquil, has this focus, it's clear, it's powerful, if we're doing this one-thing attention instead of this micro-toggling, task-switching.

And I appreciate that the Buddha is very clear here in the suttas. He says, "I do not see a single thing that when it is tamed, guarded, protected and restrained is so very beneficial as the mind." Tamed, guarded, protected and restrained. We could say this is part of what it means to just bring our attention to, as best we can, staying with one single thing. So this undivided attention, as best we can, is part of the taming, we could say, that the Buddha is using, recognizing that there's a wildness of the mind that's always looking for novelty and trying to be present. But there's this way in which this undivided attention is part of how we care, how we care for our own hearts, how we care for our minds, and how we care for others, being present simply as best we can.

So I want to make this a little bit tangible without turning this into a checklist, but just notice in your daily life, what are some of the familiar leaks, if you will, some of the ways in which attention often gets drawn? For example, on Zoom or on YouTube, there's a way in which we might be in a meeting and then at the same time we're browsing. Or I'm having a cup of tea and the mind is half there and half doing other things. And for me, it's kind of interesting being in this role of a teacher. When I'm teaching on Zoom, it's fascinating. If I have it on gallery view, I can see a lot of people. I just notice when I give a certain type of information, and then I can see so many people Google, and then they're off reading and then they have no longer really paid attention to what I've said. It's fascinating just to see how predictable it is and just to see so many people all of a sudden, boom, you can tell when people are in Zoom and they're off reading a different way.

So there's this way that the current, we might use, kind of building on this analogy of the stream, the swiftness that could once run strong just by being present, gets split in so many different ways. So what are some of the multitaskings that you regularly do that maybe you don't need to do, that leave you feeling a little agitated instead of nourished and present?

That's one thing, and we could say the Satipatthana Sutta¹ is really about this: just doing one thing at a time. And when you're doing that one thing, know you're doing that one thing. When you're sitting, know that you're sitting. When you're standing, know that you're standing. When you're walking, know that you're walking. Not as a grim drill that we have to do, but as a way to maybe respect our experience, maybe dignify the moment in which we're having, that's being experienced right now. If we're reading, reading, not while listening to this and doing all these other things.

And this is a way in which this attention thickens or coalesces or gathers into presence, into mindfulness with some steadiness and gatheredness, because the quality of our awareness is important. The value of our time, the value of our life is not about how many tasks we do or how many tasks we juggle. It's the quality of the attention with which we meet anything, in which we meet a friend, in which we meet ourselves, in which we meet a paragraph. Because attention turns out to be the primary currency of the human condition. So spend it carefully. Our attention is not infinite. We only have so much mental energy, so to speak, and we've created this attention economy where there are so many ways in which it tries to get pulled away. But why don't we bring it back?

Because there's this way it supports well-being. Not only does it support our mindfulness and our concentration, but when we are more gathered, this agitation eases. We discover a steadiness that really supports our life, that supports our practice.

So the culture, society is teaching us to maximize output, to get as much done as possible as quickly as possible. But this practice, I would say the dharma, invites us to deepen contact. So one experience, when it's met well, can provide some of the spaciousness and the presence that our hearts are really looking for.

So if you want to carry maybe one idea with you from this, it is this idea of monotasking. Can we do fewer parallel activities? Just notice, are there some places in your life where you can just simplify? Is there a way you can maybe give yourself permission to give your whole heart to what's here?

There's this way that undivided attention is a type of generosity. You could say it tells this experience, this moment, this person that it matters, because it's actually what's happening. It's the reality of the moment. So the invitation as we end today, maybe not another technique, but just a way to move throughout the day with monotasking. One thing, whole heart. Monotasking, just doing one thing, giving our whole heart, our whole mind to it as best we can.

Thank you.