Dearest Friends,

Thank you for the gift of your presences and your participation in our gathering today.

In today’s session, we explored the second of the “filters” that alter our perceptions of reality, which is the filter of tunnel vision. Like I shared in my brief reflections, tunnel vision is a medical condition that involves the constriction of a person’s visual field, resulting in the loss of side or peripheral vision. For people with this condition, their visual experience is like looking through a tube. 

We also use the phrase tunnel vision to refer to what happens to our attention when our awareness gets fixated on particular dimensions of our experience to the exclusion of other aspects. Tunnel vision usually arises when our attention gets hijacked by urgency, stress and anxiety. While it’s adaptive and appropriate in emergencies, it often leads to misinterpretations, misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and needless suffering when it operates in excess. For example, many of us have probably experienced receiving feedback…and then getting preoccupied with one critical comment to the point of failing to notice that the overall assessment was actually positive!

Mindfulness practices can help mitigate the excesses of tunnel vision in the following ways:

1. First, by training us to pause and slow things down, mindfulness interrupts the narrowing of attention that accompanies moments of intensity and urgency.
2. Second, by training us to shift our attention deliberately, mindfulness helps us attend to neglected, overlooked or sidelined aspects of our experience.
3. Third, by giving us methods to cultivate spacious awareness, mindfulness fosters our ability to hold multiple aspects of our experience simultaneously rather than fixating on just one dimension.

Of course, like many invitations on the path, there’s a middle way to navigating the extremes between holding a narrow vision and a broad one. The American dancer Ann Reinking described it quite beautifully in the following quote: “You have to have tunnel vision as a dancer to get to where you’re going. But once you get there, you have to save yourself by spreading your horizons.”

SUGGESTED PRACTICE:

Sit quietly and attend to your breath with your gaze lowered or your eyes closed. After a minute or so, focus your attention on your belly and attend to the subtle movements and sensations that the breath causes in the belly. After two to three minutes of this, expand your attention to cover your belly and your chest. Attend to the subtle movements and sensations that the breath causes in the torso. Then after two to three minutes of this, expand your attention to cover your entire body. As best as you can, be present to your entire body breathing, all at once. Before you end the practice, notice what it feels like to carry this broadly receptive kind of awareness. See if you can carry it with you into your day.

Reflection Questions

1. In what areas of our life do you have a tendency to slip into tunnel vision?
2. In what ways has slipping into tunnel vision increased your stress and anxiety or those of others?
3. What’s a simple practice you can explore this week that can help you break out of tunnel vision in real time?