Three Attentional Skills: How Shinzen Young Shapes My Practice
For years, Shinzen Young's teachings have moved quietly through my work and life. His model of mindfulness—grounded in three attentional skills—has given me language for what I experience in meditation, in therapy, and in the most ordinary moments of being human.
These three skills—concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity—are not achievements or states we turn on. They're capacities we can cultivate, ways of meeting experience that become available even when life is hard, confusing, or profoundly tender.
The Three Skills
Concentration is the ability to stay with what matters—to return again and again to a sensation, a thought, a person, or a moment, even as distractions rise and fall.
Sensory clarity is noticing the fine details of experience as it unfolds—the subtle shifts in body, emotion, and thought that often go unnoticed.
Equanimity is the gentle permission to let experience move as it does, without clinging or pushing away.
Together, these skills can, over time, create a kind of steadiness. Not perfection, not constant calm—just more choice in how we meet what arrives.
Why This Framework Matters to Me
What draws me to Shinzen's work is its practicality. These aren't esoteric concepts. They're embodied capacities that can be trained—slowly, imperfectly—into the nervous system itself.
Unlike cognitive strategies that require remembering the right thing at the right time, these skills become available even when thinking is overwhelmed, when grief is acute, or when the body is exhausted. They live in the senses, not just the mind.
For me, this has been transformative—in my own practice, in how I show up with clients, and especially in my work with people facing illness, dying, and end-of-life decisions.
How These Skills Show Up in My Work
In Therapy
In session, these skills mean noticing tiny changes: a shift in posture, the edge of sadness in a voice, the return of tension after a moment of ease, or helping someone notice a lighting up of their spirits when something seems to feel right. It's less about interpreting and more about acknowledging what's present—even when what is present is confusion, pain or uncertainty.
Sometimes concentration is simply the willingness to stay with a topic that feels tender, to return to it with gentle curiosity rather than moving on too quickly.
Sensory clarity might be helping a client notice where anxiety lives in their body—the tightness in the chest, the shallow breath—so it becomes something knowable rather than overwhelming.
Equanimity is making room for grief or anger without needing it to resolve right away, trusting that feelings can move and change without being fixed.
In End-of-Life Work
This is where Shinzen's framework—and specific practices he teaches—truly transformed my experiencing of being with the dying.
When someone is facing death, whether their own or a loved one's, the mind can swing between terror and numbness, longing to hold on and wishing everything to be over as soon as possible. Emotions the body has held over a lifetime can be present or cycle through: fear, anger, sadness, and joy. Sometimes there can be profound stillness, deep exhaustion or immense relief. All of this can come and go in both expected and surprising ways.
Three practices in particular have shaped how I support people in this threshold:
Noticing endings or 'gone' — a practice of noticing when sensations, thoughts, or emotions fade or dissolve. In dying, so much is about letting go. Practicing with "gone" helps people become familiar with impermanence in small ways—the end of a breath, the fading of discomfort—so that larger endings feel a little less foreign.
Feeling flow — noticing sensation as movement, as something fluid rather than solid. For those with physical pain or illness, flow can sometimes create spaciousness around suffering. Instead of "this pain is unbearable and permanent," it becomes "this sensation is moving, changing." Not always, but sometimes.
Finding rest — noticing moments when nothing is happening, when the body or mind is quiet. In the intensity of illness or pain, rest can seem rare and precious but is often still present when we know how to be sensitive to its presence. Learning to recognize and allow these moments—even if they last only a breath—can be deeply nourishing and restorative, even at the end of life.
More than techniques I see these practices as invitations, offered gently, adapted to what someone can meet in any given moment.
Living With These Skills
I don't have concentration, clarity, or equanimity completely mastered. Some days they're relatively easy to access, a clear awareness of what's needed for example. On other days—when I'm tired, overwhelmed by my environment, or worried about someone I love—these skills can feel well beyond what I'm capable of, or even interested in.
But the practice itself has taught me that absence is part of the process. When I notice clarity is gone, concentration has wandered, or equanimity feels impossible—that noticing itself is practice.
For me, it is working with ordinary moments: the softness of a favourite scarf or the flicker of leaves outside a window that has had the greatest impact on my overall sense of wellbeing and my capacity to weather the stormy days of aging or a world that feels unsettled. Nothing dramatic, just an ongoing commitment to being curious about what is real, and true.
An Invitation
If you're curious about how these skills might support you—whether in daily life, in therapy, or in facing profound change—I welcome your questions.
This framework isn't for everyone, and it doesn't have to be formal or perfect. Sometimes it's just learning to notice a little more, to stay a little longer, to let things be as messy as they are.
If exploring concentration, sensory clarity, or equanimity feels meaningful—in everyday life, in therapy, or in facing illness or loss—conversation is always possible. Begin whenever it feels right.
If you have questions, want space to reflect, or wish to explore support, my door is open. There is no obligation and no rush—begin whenever feels right for you.