Tag: mindfulness

The Ethics of Attention: Reading, Writing, and Living in a Distracted Age

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations
Photo by Oziel Gu00f3mez on Pexels.com

As I prepare for some very exciting spring workshops and begin working with a new cohort of 1–1 clients, I find myself returning again and again to the question: what kind of attention are we cultivating? And to what ends?

At the same time, I am collaborating with colleagues at the University of Surrey on a research study exploring the relationship between mindfulness and originality. I have designed an 8-week Mindfulness for Originality programme that we are currently trialing, and we will be studying its outcomes over the coming months. The premise is simple but, I think, quietly radical: that sustained, non-reactive attention is not the enemy of creativity but its precondition.

This runs counter to a certain romantic myth of originality as frenzy. But when we examine the intellectual lives of figures like Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, or Virginia Woolf, what we find is not scattered brilliance but disciplined depth. Woolf’s diaries are full of labour—patient, iterative, attentive labour. Originality emerges not from distraction but from fidelity.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we have moved from a disciplinary society to an achievement society, in which the violence is internalised. We exhaust ourselves trying to be endlessly responsive. The result is not freedom but fragmentation. In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari traces how economic and technological systems have steadily eroded our capacity for sustained attention, not as an accident but as a business model.

The ethics of attention, then, must reckon with power.

Who profits when we are distracted? Who benefits when we can’t read a long book, hold a complex argument, or sit with a difficult feeling?

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows made this argument over a decade ago, but the evidence has only intensified. We are training our brains toward interruption. And yet, paradoxically, we long for immersion.

I see this longing in my coaching practice. People do not come to me because they lack ideas. They come because they cannot hold their ideas long enough to deepen them. They skim their own lives.

Reading, in this context, becomes a form of resistance.

To read a demanding text—say, a passage from To the Lighthouse or a dense philosophical argument—is to enact a countercultural choice. It says: I will not be hurried. I will not reduce this to a headline. I will allow complexity to exceed me.

But attention is not only about texts. It is about how we inhabit our own projects.

In the 8-week programme we are trialling at Surrey, one of the early exercises invites participants to notice the precise moment at which they reach for distraction during creative work. Not to judge it. Not to suppress it. Simply to witness it. The findings, even anecdotally, are striking. Original insights tend to arise not in the first burst of enthusiasm but in the stretch just beyond discomfort—when one stays.

There is an ethics here, too. To stay with one’s work is to honour it. To stay with another person is to dignify them. To stay with oneself—especially in the face of uncertainty—is to cultivate integrity.

This is why I am so passionate about the upcoming 5 Days of Creative Abundance workshop (9–13 March, 7.30–8.00 PM GMT, £29).

Yes, it is a practical, energising, five-day immersion into creative flow. Yes, it will give you tools, structure, and momentum. But underneath that, it is an experiment in attention.

For five evenings, we gather. We turn toward what matters. We practise not skimming our own creative impulse.

Abundance, as I understand it, is not accumulation. It is depth. It is the experience of discovering that when you attend properly to one idea, it unfolds. When you give something your full presence, it yields more than you expected.

There is a quiet confidence that arises from this. Not the performative confidence of broadcasting productivity, but the grounded confidence of knowing you can enter and remain in meaningful work.

If you have been feeling scattered, thinly stretched across platforms and obligations, this workshop is designed for you. If you sense that there is more in you—but you can’t quite access it amid the noise—this is for you.

I am intentionally keeping the price accessible (£29) because I want the barrier to entry to be low. But do not mistake accessibility for superficiality. The container will be strong. The invitation will be serious.

You can register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/313206797/

And if you are ready for more sustained support, my 1–1 coaching work continues alongside these group offerings. In those spaces, we go deeper. We examine not only habits of attention but the attachment patterns and identity narratives that sustain them. We design structures that protect what is most alive in you. It is precise, relational, and tailored.

Attention, I am increasingly convinced, is a form of stewardship.

In an earlier book project, I explored the ethics of mediation in mail-order occultism—how printed texts promised transformation across distance. I am struck now by how similar the stakes feel. Every medium shapes consciousness. The question is whether we use the medium deliberately or allow it to use us.

Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the medium is the message” was not a celebration; it was a warning. If our dominant medium fragments attention, then our inner lives will fragment accordingly—unless we intervene.

This intervention need not be dramatic. It begins with small, repeatable acts. Reading ten pages with full presence. Writing one paragraph without checking a phone. Listening to a friend without composing a response.

It also requires community.

One of the reasons I continue to run workshops—even as I refine my focus and prepare for new directions—is that collective attention is amplifying. When we gather around a shared intention, distraction loses some of its grip.

There is something profoundly moving about watching a group of people choose depth together.

In my own life, this season feels like a threshold. New 1–1 clients. Spring workshops taking shape. Research that, I hope, will contribute something meaningful to the conversation about mindfulness and creativity. It is not frenetic expansion. It is intentional cultivation.

And so I return to the ethical question.

What deserves your attention?

Not what clamours for it. Not what monetises it. What deserves it?

Your most original ideas do not shout. They wait. They require a certain stillness before they reveal themselves.

If you would like to practise that stillness—and discover what abundance might mean in your creative life—I would love for you to join me for the 5 Days of Creative Abundance.

Register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/313206797/

Attention is not merely a mental resource. It is the substance of a life.

And how we give it—what we allow it to shape—may be one of the most consequential ethical decisions we make.

How to Carry Inner Stillness into Outer Action

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations
Photo by Aron Visuals on Pexels.com

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the word ‘equinamity’: what it really means, why we use it so infrequently, and how we can translate the inner stillness of equinamity into outer action.

It’s an old question, of course. The contemplative traditions are full of cautions against mistaking withdrawal for wisdom, or serenity for disengagement. And yet, in many contemporary spiritual and creative cultures, stillness is subtly framed as an end in itself, or something to be achieved, protected, even defended against the messiness of life.

My own experience suggests something more demanding, and ultimately more generous: stillness is not a place we go, but a quality we carry. Its real test is not how calm we feel on the cushion, but how we move when the world asks something of us.

Equanimity is often misunderstood as emotional neutrality or the ability to remain unruffled, untouched. But in its deeper sense (and here the Stoics, Buddhist psychology, and contemporary contemplative science quietly agree), equanimity is not about less feeling. It’s about more capacity. As William James observed in The Varieties of Religious Experience, maturity of spirit does not erase emotion; it reorganises it. Similarly, in Buddhist psychology, upekkhā (equanimity) is not indifference but balance—the ability to stay present without being commandeered by reactivity.

What matters, then, is not whether we feel disturbance, but whether disturbance determines our next move.

This distinction has felt particularly alive to me recently as I return to university teaching after a sabbatical and time away from campus to focus on my thinking and writing. Much of that time was spent working on my latest book, a project that demanded long stretches of solitude, patience, and sustained inward listening. Sabbaticals are often imagined as pauses from “real work,” but for me this one clarified something essential: inner stillness only becomes trustworthy when it is tested by responsibility.

There is a moment in many contemplative narratives that matters more than the awakening itself: the return. The Buddha leaves the Bodhi tree. Dante descends the mountain of Purgatory. The mystic goes back to the village.

For me, that return has taken the form of stepping into a new academic role at my university, taking over the MA programmes in English Literature and Creative Writing. I feel a genuine sense of excitement about this transition because it asks for a different quality of presence.

Teaching, at its best, is a relational practice. It requires attunement, adaptability, and a willingness to meet uncertainty without control. In that sense, it is one of the most honest laboratories for equanimity I know. You cannot curate the room. You cannot pre-empt every emotional current. You can only show up with clarity, boundaries, and a willingness to respond rather than react.

In my coaching and teaching work, I often encounter the fear that: If I slow down, I’ll lose momentum. If I soften, I’ll stop functioning. But stillness, when cultivated well, does not reduce effectiveness but it refines it.

Contemporary neuroscience supports this. Practices that strengthen interoceptive awareness and emotional regulation do not dampen motivation; they improve decision-making under pressure. This is where equanimity becomes practical. It shows up as:

  • the ability to pause before replying to a difficult email
  • the capacity to hold creative uncertainty without collapsing into self-judgement
  • the willingness to set boundaries without aggression or apology

These are not abstract ideals. They are trainable skills—and they matter enormously for creatives, academics, and highly sensitive people navigating complex systems.

Writers and artists, in particular, are vulnerable to confusing intensity with truth. We can mistake emotional activation for insight, urgency for necessity. Yet some of the most durable work I know emerges from a place of deep inner steadiness. Equanimity allows us to stay with the work long enough for it to become true, not just expressive.

This insight informs much of what I explore in my current writing and teaching: how attachment dynamics, attention, and inner regulation shape not only what we create, but how we live alongside our creations. Creative formation, like spiritual formation, is less about transcendence than about reliability—becoming someone who can be trusted with complexity.

If stillness is to move with us, it must be practiced in motion. This is why I’m increasingly interested in integrative approaches that bridge meditation, creative rhythm, and everyday action.

Over the coming weeks, I’m hosting a small number of workshops through The Art of Creative Practice that explore exactly this terrain:

For those seeking more sustained, individual support, my 1-1 creativity coaching spaces are currently fully booked until March. If you’d like to join the waiting list, you’re very welcome to get in touch at allan_johnson@mac.com.

Equanimity is not a spiritual personality trait. It is a practice of continuity: learning how to carry what we touch in silence into the noise of relationship, work, and responsibility.

As I step back into the classroom, into institutional life, and into new forms of creative leadership, I’m reminded that the real measure of stillness is not how protected it feels—but how generously it participates.

Stillness that cannot move will eventually calcify. But stillness that walks with us becomes wisdom.

And wisdom, as ever, is something we learn in company.

What Bookbinding Taught Me About Patience and Care

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations
Photo by Antoni Shkraba Studio on Pexels.com

There is something about the craft of bookbinding. It re-educates the hands, and through them, the nervous system. It returns time to its proper scale.

I’ve been thinking about this more since settling into my new flat, which—by a small but meaningful stroke of grace—includes a dedicated studio space. For the first time in years, my tools don’t need to be packed away between sessions. Paper can sit under weights overnight without being disturbed, and work can pause without being dismantled.

Already this matters more than I expected. Bookbinding, after all, resists the logic of efficiency. Adhesive must dry. Grain direction must be respected. Linen thread must be drawn tight but not too tight. You cannot rush a spine without paying for it later. The work teaches you—firmly but kindly—that attention cannot be compressed.

Simone Weil famously wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Bookbinding operationalises this insight. You can’t bind a book while thinking three steps ahead. If your attention wanders while folding signatures, the error will propagate. If you rush the punching of sewing stations, the whole text block will pull askew. You can’t persuade paper fibres to behave differently through force of will; you must cooperate with them.

In this sense, bookbinding has become a counter-practice to much of contemporary creative life. Online, speed is rewarded. Visibility is currency. Iteration is encouraged, but only when it looks like momentum. The slowness of binding—a practice that may take days or weeks before anything finished appears—feels almost monastic by comparison.

And yet, paradoxically, it has made me more productive, not less.

One of the biggest misconceptions about patience is that it means waiting. In practice, patience is active–it’s a verb (metaphorically at least) because you are always doing something: sharpening a blade, squaring a stack, testing tension, laying out the next stage so it will be ready when the moment comes.

This mirrors something I see repeatedly in coaching work, particularly with highly sensitive or intellectually driven creatives. There is often an underlying anxiety that if one is not producing, one is stagnating. But many forms of growth happen beneath the threshold of visible output.

Since moving into the new flat and setting up the studio, I’ve noticed a subtle shift in how I approach my other work—writing, teaching, contemplative practice. I’m more willing to let something rest unfinished.

There is also, I think, an ethical dimension to working with materials in this way. Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman, describes craftsmanship as a dialogue between hand and material, where resistance becomes instructive rather than frustrating. This is not mastery-as-domination, but mastery-as-listening.

In bookbinding, materials remember what you do to them. Paper creased carelessly will never quite forgive you. Cloth stretched unevenly will telegraph the mistake forever. This permanence sharpens responsibility. You learn to slow down not because slowness is virtuous, but because it is necessary.

This has felt especially grounding during a period of personal transition. A new home, even a welcome one, requires recalibration. New light patterns. New noises. New routines. The studio has become a place where that recalibration can happen somatically, not just cognitively. Through repeated, careful gestures, the body relearns safety.

It’s hard not to notice the symbolic resonance here. Books are already threshold objects—containers of thought, memory, and voice. Binding them by hand heightens this awareness. You become acutely conscious of the labour that precedes reading, of the infrastructure that makes inwardness portable.

All of this feeds into a broader theme that’s been shaping my work lately: the power of small, well-held experiments. Not performative reinventions, but modest shifts in practice that reorient attention.

Perhaps the deepest lesson bookbinding has taught me is that care compounds. What feels like slowness at the outset becomes reliability later. Structures hold. Work lasts. You spend less time repairing what was rushed.

This is true of creative practice, of relationships, of inner life. Patience is not something we adopt once and for all; it is something we rehearse through forms that demand it of us.

For now, I’m grateful for a studio that allows this rehearsal to continue—quietly, materially, without display. And I’m grateful, too, for the conversations that extend from it: in workshops, in coaching, in shared spaces of attention.

Upcoming Events

Integrative Meditation

  • 19 January | 7.30-8.30 PM GMT | £4

Creative Flow Co-Working Session: The Power of Tiny Experiments

Highly Sensitive Creatives: Energy, Boundaries, and Creative Rhythm

More to Explore

Four Dimensions of Stillness for Creatives

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Living in a city like London trains the nervous system in a particular way. Even when we love urban life—its density, its cultural richness, its chance encounters—it asks us to metabolise a constant low-level stimulation: noise, movement, decision-making, comparison.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about this more deliberately. I’ve recently moved into a flat in a beautiful 1920s building. It’s filled with heaps of character, and I know that I’ll be very happy here, but it’s also a significant change.I’ve spent the past decade living in new-build flats, the kind with sleek appliances, underfloor heating, and a comforting sameness to all the others. But my new flat, even before my furniture was moved in and the boxes filled every spare corner, was noticeably maximalist: crown moulding, dado rails, radiators, and, perhaps most notably, the constant sounds of neighbours on all sides.

This move has coincided with a renewed reflection on minimalism as a practice of attention, that is less about owning fewer objects (though that can help), and more about creating pockets of stillness within environments that are, by default, overstimulating.

Minimalism has been thoroughly Instagrammed. White walls, pale wood, a single ceramic cup placed just so. There is nothing wrong with this, but it risks missing the deeper point. And my old flat was certainly minimalist in the aesthetic sense.

Writers like Cal Newport in Digital Minimalism and Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing have both argued, in different ways, that minimalism is not about subtraction for its own sake, but about protecting what matters in a culture designed to fragment attention. Similarly, the Japanese concept of ma—often translated as ‘negative space’—suggests that meaning arises not from what is present alone, but from the intervals of emptiness around it that give it shape.

Big cities are where this discernment is most tested. Urban life rewards responsiveness: quick replies, constant availability, social agility. For many creatives and sensitive thinkers, this can become exhausting. We learn to override subtle signals—fatigue, saturation, the need for withdrawal—because the environment rarely validates them.

Over the years—through my own practice, teaching, and coaching—I’ve noticed that these pockets of stillness tend to form around four dimensions:

  • Spatial stillness: a chair by a window, a desk cleared of visual noise, a room that signals ‘nothing is required of you here.’
  • Temporal stillness: protected times in the week that are not optimised, monetised, or rushed.
  • Relational stillness: fewer, deeper conversations; rhythms of contact that don’t require constant performance.
  • Inner stillness: practices that allow attention to settle without forcing it: meditation, journalling, slow reading.

One theme that runs through my recent work is the idea that many creatives are finely tuned. They notice more. They process more. They feel more. Without the right structures, this depth becomes a liability. This is why I resist advice that tells people simply to “push through” or “build resilience.” Resilience matters, but so do the structures of support and nurturance around you.

A few practical reflections that may be useful:

  • Reduce friction at points of transition. The moments between activities are where overstimulation accumulates. Even five minutes of pause between tasks can change the tone of a day.
  • Let one room be functionally “unproductive.” A space that is not for work, storage, or optimisation becomes a psychological refuge.
  • Limit inputs before increasing outputs. Reading less, scrolling less, listening less can paradoxically make creative work richer.
  • Choose rhythms over goals. A daily walk, a weekly reflective session, a regular co-working rhythm—these stabilise attention over time.

None of this requires perfection. It requires kindness toward your own nervous system.

If this resonates, there are several ways to explore these ideas in a supported, communal way over the coming weeks.

For those wanting more personalised support, I also offer 1-1 coaching, focused on helping creatives and thinkers build sustainable structures for meaningful work and life. You’re welcome to book a free 15-minute clarity call here: https://allanjohnson.co.uk/coaching/

Pockets of stillness don’t remove us from life; they allow us to participate more fully, with less quiet self-erasure. In a culture that rewards constant motion, stillness becomes a form of discernment. And discernment, I increasingly believe, is one of the most important creative capacities we have.

More to Explore

Understanding Metaconsciousness for Personal Growth

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations
Photo by meo on Pexels.com

At this time of year, I always notice a subtle change in the quality of my attention. The external world doesn’t necessarily slow down, but something inwardly does. Even the light feels different. Darker, yes, but also more permeable. I’ve been feeling that contrast keenly over the last few weeks, particularly as I prepare for the turn into a new year.

It’s also been on my mind recently while reading Kate Atkinson’s Festive Spirits for my local book club’s Christmas meeting. Atkinson’s stories, playful and unsettling in equal measure, brush up against the unseen dimensions of experience without making grand metaphysical claims. They hover at the threshold. That, in its own way, is where much of my thinking about superconsciousness currently lives: not as an abstract spiritual pinnacle, but as a working edge of awareness that we keep rediscovering in different vocabularies.

In my last book and in much of my recent teaching, I’ve returned again and again to the idea that a large proportion of what we call “consciousness” is, in fact, automatic. It is hormonal, patterned, reactive, efficient. William James hinted at this more than a century ago when he described habit as the “enormous fly-wheel of society.” Freud, in his own way, mapped the vast subterranean machinery of the psyche. Contemporary neuroscience has largely confirmed what contemplative traditions have long suggested: most of what we do, think, and feel happens before we decide.

This is where the idea of metaconsciousness becomes so important, the capacity to notice that we are being moved by processes that are not, in any simple sense, “us.” It is the moment when you realise you are mid-reaction and something in you steps back just enough to witness it. Not to suppress it. Not to spiritualise it. Just to see.

But superconsciousness, as I’m increasingly working with it, points to something slightly different again. It is not merely awareness of the machinery. It is awareness that is not exclusively organised by the machinery at all. It gestures toward a dimension of mind that is less bound to survival, identity maintenance, or historical conditioning. Roberto Assagioli—whose work in psychosynthesis continues to shape my own—described the superconscious as the source of creativity, meaning, ethical insight, and transpersonal experience. Not an escape from the human, but its latent extension.

One of the things I’ve become more cautious about over the years is how easily “human potential” gets packaged as something to be maximised, extracted, or branded. The language of fulfilment can slide so quickly into performance metrics. Abraham Maslow’s later writings—often neglected in organisational culture—are far more subtle than his pyramid suggests. Self-actualisation, for Maslow, was never a static achievement, but an ongoing alignment with what is most alive and truthful in us.

Superconsciousness names a direction of travel, not a finish line.

In my own life, this shows up less in fireworks and more in micro-adjustments: choosing not to override tiredness with willpower; noticing when the body says no long before the intellect catches up; letting an idea take months instead of forcing it into productivity. It shows up in teaching too—in learning when not to fill the silence, when to let a group sit with not-knowing.

Even reading Festive Spirits this December has felt like a small act of this alignment. In between sessions, planning for the new year, and working with clients, sitting with a beautifully written short story by the fire (or, more accurately, a very convincing YouTube fire) has felt like a reminder that imagination itself is a superconscious faculty. We don’t manufacture it. We host it.

There is a tendency to associate higher states of awareness with peak experiences: mystical visions, altered states, moments of transcendence. And certainly, those exist. But what interests me far more now is how the superconscious expresses itself in the ordinary:

  • In ethical instincts that arise before rational justification
  • In sudden creative insight that reorganises months of confused thinking
  • In moments of compassion that interrupt long-established narratives about self and other
  • In the quiet certainty that a particular season of life has ended—even when nothing dramatic has occurred

This is not about becoming perfect. It is about becoming less confined.

I notice that many of the people I work with—particularly academics, creatives, and reflective professionals—are weary not because they lack insight, but because their insight has nowhere to land. They understand their patterns. They often know exactly where those patterns came from. But knowing is not the same as reorganising the centre of gravity from which one lives.

Superconsciousness, in this sense, is not an abstract spiritual add-on. It is deeply practical. It changes: how decisions are made, what counts as success, how time is experienced, where authority is located.

And perhaps most importantly, it reshapes the relationship between effort and surrender. Not everything meaningful can be solved through optimisation.

As this year draws to a close, I find myself more attuned than usual to thresholds between exhaustion and renewal, between endings and beginnings, between old strategies and new capacities for trust. This is exactly the territory that both my coaching work and my group workshops increasingly inhabit: not self-improvement as escalation, but re-orientation.

If this reflection resonates, there are a few gentle ways to continue the conversation:

🌿 1–1 Coaching

If you’re navigating a threshold of your own—professionally, creatively, or existentially—I offer integrative 1–1 coaching rooted in psychosynthesis, contemplative practice, and depth psychology.

You’re very welcome to book a free 15-minute Clarity Call here:
👉 https://allanjohnson.co.uk/coaching/

✨ Reflect & Reset: Quarterly Planning Workshop

5 January | 7.30–9.00 PM GMT | £10
A spacious, grounded evening to review the last season and consciously set the next one—without forcing premature certainty.
Register here:
👉 https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311948616

🧘 Integrative Meditation

12 January | 7.30–8.30 PM GMT | £4
A guided practice evening bringing together somatic awareness, imagination, and reflective presence.
Register here:
👉 https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311944273

Superconsciousness, for me, is no longer a speculative peak. It is a daily negotiation between who I have been conditioned to be, who I consciously try to be, and who sometimes appears unannounced in moments of clarity, creativity, or courage. It does not always feel elevated. Often it feels quiet. Sometimes inconvenient. Occasionally unmistakably right.

And perhaps that, more than anything, is the true measure of human potential: not how high we rise, but how deeply we learn to listen.

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