Reply To: Is centering supposed to be "enough"?

[Luís]

Hi again!

I actually had another question about focus.
I had done some mindfulness “training” before I started this course (maybe you’ve heard of Headspace?). One of the things that’s mentioned is that, in order to “quiet” your mind you should not try too hard. It’s a sort of like drawing with a pencil. If you press too light, you won’t draw a line but if you press too hard, you keep breaking the tip.
Now this actually leads me to two questions:
I found the “Be Hear Now” exercise to be really hard exactly because when you think of something else, it’s already over and I couldn’t actually go further than the first few bars. It felt like the “green polar bear” thing you wrote on one of your blog posts. Am I the only one? I’m certainly going about this the wrong way.

Also, is the focus required to play sort of the same as the one for meditating? The idea that thoughts and distractions naturally occur but the skill is not not having them but being able to not pay attention to them? Because I have a lot of difficulty really focusing on a piece that I know really well – my mind wanders very easily.