Lexicon
Noting
Giving what has distracted you a one-word label, then returning.
- Published
- 21 Aug 2026
Noting is the smallest possible intervention: a single quiet word — planning, worry, remembering, itching — applied to whatever took attention away. The word is not analysis and does not need to be accurate. Its function is to mark the event as an event rather than as reality.
Two rules keep it useful. First, the label is one word, not a sentence; a sentence becomes a commentary track. Second, the label is applied once and dropped; repeating it turns a note into a chant.
→Practices that use this term
- Metta on the move 8 minutes
- Practice in a queue 5 minutes
- Practice in a noisy room 15 minutes
- Tension mapping: left against right 20 minutes
- Anchor at the sink 4 minutes
- Metta for someone difficult 20 minutes
- Bells and their decay 12 minutes
- Ten-step walking 10 minutes
- One breath before the inbox 2 minutes
- Three-minute desk scan 3 minutes
- Thirty-minute full body scan 30 minutes
- Ambient sound as anchor 10 minutes
- Four phrases for yourself 12 minutes
- Hand to shoulder: a half-body scan 12 minutes
↔See also
- Wandering mind — Attention leaving the chosen object without permission; not a defect, but the raw material.
- Anchor — The one thing attention is asked to return to when it wanders.
- Equanimity — Steadiness that does not depend on things going well.