The Dharma of Distraction

For most of my life, I believed I was failing at stillness. I sat on meditation cushions in silence, surrounded by the hum of my breath and the ticking of clocks, as I attempted to calm my mind. My body twitched, my thoughts ricocheted, my attention scattered. I was told again and again to “just sit still,” and I tried, with a quiet desperation that often turned into shame. I thought the stillness everyone else seemed to find meant they were better at being human than I was. I didn’t yet know that my mind was wired differently, that what I experienced as failure was simply another way of paying attention.

When I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid-20s, everything rearranged itself. My years of struggle with meditation began to make a new kind of sense. Suddenly, what I had called distraction looked more like aliveness—what I had labeled chaos began to resemble movement. Attention, I realized, wasn’t something to hold in a clenched fist; it was something to witness, something fluid, responsive, alive. I started to wonder whether the stillness I’d been chasing was ever the point. Perhaps awareness didn’t need to look calm to be deep.

The first time I mentioned this to a respected meditation teacher, she smiled. “You know,” she said, “attention isn’t a laser beam—it’s weather.” That phrase stayed with me. For years, I’d treated my mind like an unruly student I needed to discipline. But the weather can’t be disciplined. It can only be observed. There are winds, currents, shifts. The sky doesn’t apologize for clouds.

I used to meditate under what I can only describe as a quiet cloud of shame. Every fidget, every stray thought, every impulse to move was met with self-reproach. “Real practitioners don’t squirm,” I told myself. “Serious meditators can sit through anything.” Silence for me, though, was never silent. It carried static—the buzz of the light fixture, the pounding of my own pulse, the whisper of someone else shifting nearby. It was like being locked in a room with my nervous system amplified. I didn’t know that the discomfort was neurological, not moral. I didn’t know that I wasn’t broken.

When I began reading about neurodiversity and mindfulness, I saw reflections of my own experience in the research. Dr. Lidia Zylowska, a psychiatrist and researcher who has pioneered mindfulness-based programs for ADHD, believes that mindfulness can be profoundly beneficial for neurodivergent people—but only when it’s adapted to fit them. “Mindfulness can help with awareness of attention and emotional regulation,” she says. “It can really improve how you’re showing up in relationships and how you manage stress. However, the challenge must be the right size. You don’t start with an hour of sitting still—you start with awareness in motion.”

I’m struck by how compassionate that sounds. For years, meditation had felt like a test I couldn’t pass. Now, it begins to sound like something that can meet me where I am. Research shows that the ADHD brain’s attention doesn’t sustain itself by force—it’s driven by interest, novelty, and emotion. When meditation is stripped of those elements and reduced to neutral repetition, the brain disengages. “Traditional practices were designed for minds trained to seek stillness,” Zylowska says. “But neurodivergent minds often seek movement, texture, sound. Awareness can live there too.”

That insight changes my practice. I stop trying to suppress movement and begin weaving it into my meditation. I practice strolling, breathing in time with my steps. I chant softly while washing dishes, feeling the water against my skin. I notice how awareness rises and falls, not as a failure but as a wave. In Buddhist psychology, the mind is described as a series of fleeting events—moments of perception, thought, and feeling that arise and dissolve in rapid succession. Reading that again after my diagnosis, I realize that my mind’s restlessness is not so different from this ancient description. Impermanence isn’t a problem to fix; it’s the fabric of experience itself.

Christina Feldman, cofounder of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, argues that traditional meditation methods can unintentionally disadvantage certain neurotypes. “The idea of ‘one right way’ to meditate is deeply limiting,” she says. “Stillness can be beautiful, but awareness is much larger than stillness. For some people, movement is the most direct path to presence.” Feldman describes teachers experimenting with movement-based vipassana, sound meditations, and micro-practices—short bursts of mindfulness rather than extended sessions. “A few moments of conscious awareness,” she says, “can be just as transformative as an hour on the cushion if it’s genuine.”

These conversations open something tender in me. Buddhism has always taught that the mind is not fixed, that selfhood is fluid, that reality itself is impermanent. Why had I assumed, then, that my attention had to be static? If impermanence is the truth, then distraction is not a betrayal of mindfulness—it’s its expression. Each flicker of thought, each shift of focus, is another reminder that everything is in motion. To be distracted is to be touched by the world.

I begin to think of my attention less as a spotlight and more as a constellation of stars. Each point of light—a sound, a thought, a sensation—is part of a larger pattern of awareness. When I stop trying to control the constellation, I can finally see the sky. Distraction, I realize, is not the opposite of concentration; it is the broader field in which concentration appears.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor and founder of UMass Memorial Medical Center’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, tells me, “The real practice isn’t about having no thoughts. It’s about knowing that you’re thinking and not being owned by it.” He explains that awareness doesn’t mean silencing the mind—it means seeing it clearly. “If your attention wanders a thousand times,” he says, “that’s a thousand chances to wake up.” 

That sentence undoes years of guilt. Each moment of distraction becomes not a failure but an invitation to learn and grow. When my mind wanders, I don’t scold it; I follow it with kindness, curious about where it wants to go. Instead of judging myself for being distracted, I gently remind myself to return to the breath or the object of meditation each time I notice my attention shifting. This is what Kabat-Zinn means by “a thousand chances to wake up”: The mind will wander, but each moment of awareness is a chance to come back to the present. It leads to creative insights, sometimes to notions, sometimes to nothing at all. But it is always alive.

Psychologists now talk about the ADHD brain’s “novelty bias”—its tendency to scan for stimulation, connection, and movement. What Buddhism calls impermanence, neuroscience might refer to as neuroplasticity: the mind’s capacity to shift, adapt, and transform. The more I think about it, the more parallels I see. ADHD, in its own way, embodies the Buddhist truth of change. It refuses to be pinned down.

My practice now bears little resemblance to the one I was taught. I still sit, but not for long. I walk, hum, write, breathe. Sometimes my meditation is simply pausing in the middle of chaos to feel the air enter and leave my body. Sometimes it’s watching sunlight flicker on a wall and letting my mind wander toward it. I no longer try to empty myself. I try to listen.

I no longer try to empty myself. I try to listen.

Pamela Weiss, a Zen and Theravada teacher who integrates movement and creativity into her teaching, tells me she invites students to draw or move their hands during meditation, creating what she calls “kinetic focus.” “When we stop fighting our minds,” she says, “they stop fighting back. For many of my students with ADHD, stillness is agony. We use sound, poetry, and even music. The mind’s movement isn’t the obstacle—it’s the practice. You learn to ride it.”

What strikes me now is how many people I meet who have been told they’re too restless, too distracted, too sensitive to meditate. They come with a quiet ache, certain that spiritual depth is for the calm and the disciplined. I tell them what I’ve learned: Awareness doesn’t have to be still to be profound. The mind in motion can be just as wise as the mind at rest.

The myth that concentration equals worthiness is one of the most damaging legacies of modern mindfulness culture. The still, silent meditator is treated as an emblem of virtue, while the fidgeter is seen as undisciplined. But true mindfulness isn’t about perfection—it’s about intimacy. To know your own mind, in all its movement and multiplicity, is a radical act of compassion.

These days, when I teach or write about meditation, I speak less about focus and more about tenderness. Awareness, for me, is no longer something I achieve; it’s something I allow. Jack Kornfield, Buddhist scholar and cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, tells me: “Mindfulness isn’t about getting anywhere. It’s about being where you are.” For those of us whose minds move like rivers, that’s a liberation. We don’t have to stop the current. We have to learn how to float.

The more I live inside this understanding, the more I realize that distraction is not the enemy of awakening—it’s its teacher. To pay attention to the shifting currents of thought is to see impermanence directly. To stay open to the flicker and the flux is to participate in life’s unfolding. My mind may never be still, but it is awake. And maybe that’s the truest kind of calm: not the absence of motion but the presence of love for whatever moves.