Daron Larson, Mindfulness Coach

06/01/2026

"Of all human qualities, intelligence is relatively common. Much rarer are the character traits that make intelligence useful: courage, curiosity, humility, and agency."

~ Gurwinder Bhogal

I’m trying to convince my four-and-a-half-year-old grandson that waiting is a superpower. One that anyone can improve with practice. He’s skeptical.

He rattles off the powers he knows: flight, strength, web-spinning, and various forms of explosive destruction. I explain that those are just the flashy kinds they put in movies and on TV, and that the most important powers never make it to a screen because they’d be too boring to watch. No one would stick around for the commercials.

I tell him all superheroes develop their powers over time, but most people don’t know this because we never get to see that part. He’s still not convinced.

As I struggle to make my case, it strikes me that you don’t have to be four for this lesson to be lost on you. That’s a shame, because understanding it might actually help save the world.

06/01/2026

In 2019, when I was hospitalized with a severe infection, I well remember the first time I was able to get out of bed and walk down the hospital corridors using a walker. The physical therapist accompanying me seemed to find me quite amusing. At one point, she said, “It’s not a race, you know. You’ll get farther if you stop and rest periodically.” I started taking that as advice for my life in general.

Sometimes it feels like we have to run a race. We have to beat the onslaught of hatred and divisiveness, the beleaguered planet, the economic and po­liti­cal disenfranchisement. They threaten to rush past us, as though the planetary metabolism ­ were speeding up. But in truth, stopping and resting periodically helps us go farther.

05/31/2026

Every seasoned meditator knows that insights from a recent retreat will make you wince next year. Sometimes it takes less time.

The process only feels like a personal to the uninitiated.

05/31/2026

Mindfulness can sound like just one more unforgiving task on your self-care to-do list, one that doesn’t seem worth the effort. One of the trickiest parts of talking or writing about mindfulness practice is making it sound doable and something you’d actually want to do. Not just once, but regularly, in the midst of real life, with people who need you, deadlines creeping up on you, and distractions coming at you from every direction. It’s a tough sell.

The problem isn’t the practice itself but the ideas most of us hold about how it’s supposed to go. The role model we picture is a monk, or at least someone who resembles one, sitting in a serene place, eyes closed and mind quiet. That image’s appeal also creates unrealistic expectations: its simplicity, silence, and absence of daily realities. Although monasteries support transformation, if you don’t plan to live in one, trying to practice like a monk may actually get in your way.

What I find more useful — and more realistic — is the opposite: practicing like a secret agent.

A secret agent is embedded in the real world, surrounded by noise, juggling demands, and navigating interruptions, boredom, and other people—none of whom are aware of what she’s quietly working on. What the secret agent is actually doing is habitually making small, invisible shifts in her attention. Not removing herself from the scene, but choosing, on purpose, to pay closer attention to what’s already there while managing her composure from the inside.

That’s what my practice looks like from the outside. A person loading the dishwasher, picking up the grandkids from preschool, and running errands. Nothing unusual to see. Nothing special or dramatic that anyone around me would stop to notice. What’s invisible to anyone watching me live my life are the frequent shifts inside: from the internal stream of remembering, planning, evaluating, and problem-solving that fills an ordinary day to the direct experience of what I can see, hear, and feel in my body. When I make those shifts, there’s no audience to track them, because they’re unobservable to anyone but me.

I want people to know that this seemingly strange hobby is available to them, too—no need for a quiet mind, a perfectly comfortable body, or a sense of calm to feel like you’re doing something important. Cultivating mindful awareness means working with what you have, wherever you are, at any moment.

Follow the link for an attention exercise that invites you to make room for the thoughts and sensations that arise as you listen. It acknowledges the mind’s natural activity, making mindfulness more accessible and grounded in everyday life.

What happens when you stop treating thinking as a problem to solve?

05/13/2026

“The public conversation about mental health has become remarkably sophisticated in some ways and yet remains tethered to a picture of psychopathology that is far too simple: diagnoses as discrete things you either have or don’t have, rooted in identifiable biological malfunctions, waiting to be discovered by the right clinician.”

This refreshing and much-needed perspective on psychiatric diagnostics from Dr. Awais Aftab resonates with what I observed over ten years as a mental health case manager. I left the field long before social media began to complicate the general understanding of mental health disorders.

One theme I’ve observed since then is that most patients in the past resisted their diagnosis. We documented evidence of their denial of addiction, depression, and psychosis, which we often took as further confirmation of the diagnosis’s accuracy.

Denial has been replaced by identification. Now people take their self-diagnoses to their physician so they can be documented and used to inform medication prescriptions.

Psychiatric charts over the recent decades are full of treatment goals related to patients needing to gain insight into the reality of their various conditions. Now it seems people often take comfort in a description they take as an explanation. The need for insight has

I try to remind people that diagnoses aren’t cures. They’re imperfect descriptions—summaries of symptoms that are subject to revision. You don’t need to base your identity on your diagnosis. You can learn to respond to your symptoms differently and shape a life informed by your values, despite them."

Essay in the New York Times

05/13/2026

Ever try to force yourself into being more present?

Most people start exploring mindfulness because they feel they haven’t been present enough in the past.

That was a big part of what originally motivated me. I hoped there was some trick I just needed to understand.

Now I see mindfulness practice as attentional exercise that helps me be more present in the future.

Can you just will yourself to be physically stronger than you are right now?

Ever tried to force yourself to relax when you’re really anxious? Neither of these actually works that way.

But I do know you can get so tuned in to what’s actually happening—moment to moment—that you start focusing more and wrestling with it less.

Like any skill, attentional capacities build up over time. If you want to inhabit the present more fully in the future, you need to have invested some time and energy in the past.

This isn’t a new idea. Even the ancient Greek poet Archilochus said, “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

Now is always the perfect time to exercise your attention. The bar is lower than you think.

Remembering to do it is the real challenge. It’s just easier to chug along on autopilot without disrupting it to witness a fleeting perception—as if really seeing, hearing, or feeling it actually mattered.

daronlarson.substack.com/s/attention-exercises

05/07/2026

A secret attentional fitness mission from Reid Wiseman, NASA astronaut and commander of the Artemis II lunar flyby mission:

“If there are kids listening, I want to give homework.

One thing I’ve noticed since we’ve been back. We have an appreciation for the beauty of nature that I didn’t recognize before we launched.

We were touring a very special area of the White House, and we went into the flower shop. We were very lit up. You could just tell. The smell, the sights, everything was incredible.

And as we were walking in here today, spring is here, and there was just a row of tulips that were in bloom.

My homework would be: The next time you see something in bloom or something growing out of the ground, just stop for a second and look at it.

Just take a second and be impressed by it. Because sometimes you have to leave and look back and then come back to realize the simplest little thing can be the most impressive thing you have seen all week.”

The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission discussed what the journey was like and what they ate for dessert in space.

05/03/2026

“The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness.

This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action.

The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.

These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives.”

~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, from Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Or: If you're so smart, why aren't you happier?