I was thinking about when I was a kid playing stoop ball. If the ball came back on a bounce, it was five points. If it came back on the fly, it was ten—if you caught it. But the real game wasn’t the points. It was trying to catch it ten times in a row. If you missed at any point, you just started over.
No frustration. No analysis.
Just—start again.
It struck me today that this was the beginning of a practice I didn’t recognize at the time. The same pattern shows up now in breathing, in cooking, in conversations—anywhere attention slips and returns.
In meditation, the breath becomes the stoop.
Is the breath long or short?
Can it be felt through the whole body?
Can the body soften?
What is the feeling tone?
And then—gone.
Attention wanders.
Start again.
It shows up in smaller ways too.
Like the urge for a second piece of chocolate cake. The first piece is done, but something remains—an itch. Not just physical, not just mental. Both.
Like when you feel something on your skin—a faint tickle, like an ant crawling, or the beginning of a mosquito bite. There’s an immediate pull to react, to check, to scratch.
But before the movement, there’s a moment.
A sensation.
And then the thought about it.
The practice is to separate them.
To feel the sensation directly, without immediately following the thought that says, “Do something.”
To notice the itch, and also notice the mind building a story around it.
And then—start again.
Back to the breath.
Is it long or short?
Is the body aware?
Is there softening?
The itch doesn’t stay the same. It shifts. It fades. Another sensation appears somewhere else. Another thought comes in.
But if you wait, there are small gaps—tiny spaces where nothing is pulling.
Those spaces are easy to miss.
But they’re there.
And when they’re noticed, even briefly, there’s a kind of reset.
Not solving anything.
Not finishing anything.
Just returning.
Like stoop ball.
You don’t carry the last miss forward.
You don’t build a story about it.
You just toss the ball again
and start over.
Spiritual Gravity 