What It’s Not

Oliver: I’ll just come out and say it: I hate the word concentration. To me it has a kind of furrowed brow, clamp-down quality that actually hindered my early years of meditation practice. Many tight, serious, headache filled sessions later, I came to better understand what my teachers meant when instructing me to “concentrate”. If you’ve studied art, you know that paintings can be analyzed by examining negative space. In music, one can study the silence in between notes. In the same way, this week I want to explore concentration by talking about its opposite and hopefully give a better understanding of what it is by checking out what it’s not.