Ways to Interiorize Attention Revisited

By George A. Boyd ©2021

Q: I have gone to Vipassana retreats and experienced deepening insight into my mind, but when I came back from the retreat, I have found it difficult to meditate. Is there some way to go within without the need to completely withdraw from daily life?

A: Absolutely. Your challenge is to find a method that enables you to collect your attention and move it inward along the thread of consciousness. However, what might work for one person to achieve this might not work for you. For this reason, we recommend that you learn a variety of ways to interiorize your attention, and utilize the ones that allow you go within.

Some of the methods that allow you to move your attention within include:

  1. Tratakam, using your intention to move your attention to discrete focal points along the thread of consciousness
  2. Absorption of your attention into inner pranic (life force) or sensory currents—breath, inner sight, and inner sound
  3. Using visual metaphors for deeper levels of your mind, focusing your attention, for example, on steps of a ladder, floors of an elevator, chakras in an inner body of light, centers in an array—like the Sephiroth of the Kabala—or layers of a mandala
  4. Paying attention to your experience in the present time at some level of the mind until you break through into a higher state of consciousness
  5. Use of the Han Sa mantra to collect attention and absorb your attention into the focal points along the thread of consciousness
  6. Praying to God, asking the Divine to guide your attention into higher states of consciousness; this may also take the form of repeating the name(s) of God as a mantra or chanting
  7. Guided meditations, following the suggestion of your meditation teacher to travel within; becoming absorbed in the beam of attunement from a disciple or Initiate and traveling on that current of attunement to the inner worlds of Light

We teach types (4) and (5) in our beginning meditation course, the Introduction to Meditation program. We teach types (2), (3), (4), (5), and (6)—and you do have the initial experience of doing guided meditations (7)—in our intermediate meditation classes, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program. We train you in type (1) and you have multiple experiences of ever-deepening guided meditations (7) in our advanced class, the Mudrashram® Advanced Course in Meditation.

Whether you learn these methods from us or learn them elsewhere, we encourage you to acquire proficiency in a variety of meditation methods to enable you to rapidly interiorize your attention and advance to the level where you can begin to perform inner work—to resolve your life issues; to tap into your Soul’s intuition, abilities, and unconditional love and compassion; and to transform your spiritual evolutionary potentials.