Spying On Your Perceptions With Mindfulness - by Daron

COURSE

Spying On Your Perceptions With Mindfulness

With Daron

It’s surprisingly satisfying to pay closer attention to your life without drawing attention to yourself. This course covers several creative ways to turn your mindfulness practice into a secret mission—whether you have an established daily meditation routine or not. Using the analogy of an undercover agent, the practical techniques you’ll learn will reveal the extraordinary richness hiding in plain sight. You’ll discover a variety of ways to quietly bring more attention to sights, sounds, and sensations throughout the day without blowing your cover. This doable, playful approach will enliven your senses and help you inhabit your life more fully. Music: Backplate by Joseph Dade

StressStress & AnxietyClarityPerformanceHappinessHealth & HappinessMindfulnessSecularPresenceResilienceMindfulness MeditationSecular Mindfulness

Meet your Teacher

Daron
Columbus, OH

Mindfulness coach Daron Larson practices and shares exercises that develop focus, self-regulation, and resilience to feel more at home in the messiness of real life. He uses what people already know about physical fitness to help them navigate the challenges of cultivating attention. Daron has maintained a daily meditation and annual silent retreat routine since his first retreat with Phillip Moffit in October 2002. He has been speaking, teaching, and coaching since 2009. His work has been strongly influenced by Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness approach. You can listen to his 2015 TEDx talk on Insight Timer.

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10 Days

1.4k students

4.7 stars

14 min / day

Stress

English

Lesson 1

Decoding Mindfulness

Spies learn to decipher what most people accept at face value. In this initial session of Spying on Your Perceptions with Mindfulness, we’re going to crack the code on mindfulness to make it immediately more doable. You’ll learn to distinguish two contrasting modes of attention right away. Becoming more familiar with these two human ways of attending to life, reveals a deceptively simple way to switch modes whenever you want. Instead of just thinking about mindfulness, getting curious about attention itself equips you to be more present in any situation. The remaining sessions walk you through specific ways to bring this practice to life.

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Lesson 2

Eavesdropping On The World

So far, we’ve explored paying attention to attention itself. Today we’ll begin experiencing what it means to get better at coming back to your senses—literally. When you’re working undercover, listening in on important conversations can be a fundamental part of collecting vital intelligence. Practicing mindfulness without drawing attention to yourself can transform the way you listen. You’ll learn a trick of the trade to clarify your understanding of mindful listening that will help with any mindfulness exercise you try. With practice, you’ll get better at redirecting your attention and increase the odds of really hearing what people are saying.

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Lesson 3

For Your Eyes Only

Undercover agents develop their ability to see what others overlook. They’re able to get their eyes on the information they need to make strategic decisions. Today you’ll practice trying to see what’s right in front of your eyes. Have you ever arrived somewhere and realized you had no memory of driving to get there? It’s universal to develop this kind of blindness of familiarity. We can drive—and live—on cruise control. This leads to missing a lot of life’s visual richness. Let’s consider how this happens and ways to unlearn it by steering your attention back out toward the world around you.

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Lesson 4

Living In A Sophisticated Biofeedback Device

As you’ve noticed by now, it can be fascinating to see and hear for a few seconds without rushing to make sense of the raw sights and sounds themselves. Today, we’ll investigate a simple way to detect and savor physical sensations in the body. Just as a person can learn to relax using real-time data from a biofeedback device, empowering self-awareness and self-regulation skills can be honed without relying on external technology. With a little bit of consistent practice, you can gradually and secretly develop the sensitivity to experience ordinary life in higher definition.

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Lesson 5

Become A Connoisseur Of Ordinary Moments

At least in the movies, globe-trotting spies seem to have spent a lot of time refining their palate for the finer things in life. As we’ve been learning, though, savoring richness doesn’t require expensive wines or gourmet meals. A multi-sensory approach to mindfulness practice leads to becoming a connoisseur of ordinary sensations and perceptions. Just as a person can get better at recognizing the specific ingredients and subtle spices in a bite of food, you can get better at teasing out the sensory components of mundane moments and savoring them with greater satisfaction. Plus, every day is dripping with free opportunities to develop this invaluable skill.

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Lesson 6

Turning Enemies Into Allies

It’s very important for undercover agents to distinguish allies from enemies. Some relationships can be counterintuitive and tricky to manage. There’s a similar challenge in mindfulness practice. This session walks you through a powerful way to practice listening to your thoughts instead of focusing on what they’re about. Instead of trying to get rid of your thoughts, you can practice gently coaxing them to ride along in the back seat once in a while, rather than always letting them take the wheel. When developed, this skill becomes a liberating superpower.

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Lesson 7

Sipping Emotional Cocktails

Yesterday we began shifting the way we relate to our thoughts. Today you’ll learn a powerful method to build on what you’ve already learned. It’s easy to get tangled up in thoughts. However, we can practice detecting the various emotional flavors that fuel our most persistent and intoxicating ruminations. It builds on the work we started with body sensations by adding four physical aspects related to our feelings. When practiced consistently, this helps build your emotional palate. It also prepares you to befriend unpleasant feelings and to take your emotional reactions less personally.

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Lesson 8

Life On The Move

Staking out a suspect involves a lot of waiting around for something to happen. Things get more interesting when it’s time to tail them. In today’s session, you’ll explore an important theme of every contemplative tradition: impermanence. When you pay close attention to what’s happening in the present, you can often observe various subtle and not-so-subtle fluctuations. This is true for all of the perceptions we’ve been working with—including thoughts and feelings. Mindfulness can look like something done in stillness, but it becomes dynamic when you learn to spot and surf these natural, observable, and surprisingly plentiful waves of impermanence.

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Lesson 9

Spotting Shared Humanity

People who develop the skills of spycraft learn not to trust anyone. The stakes are too high and the examples of deception are too abundant to be ignored. In fiction and in reality, people working undercover have a reputation for manipulating, lying, and double-crossing each other. Sometimes they're able to do this by convincing themselves that the ends justify the means. But the means tend to leave a lot of negative personal consequences in their wake. What if instead of cultivating an internal lack of fear and trust, we were to habitually remind ourselves to recognize the humanity we share with everyone we encounter? This session describes a doable, enjoyable way to do just that.

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Lesson 10

Making Yourself More At Home Everywhere

Spies and detectives train for the unexpected. This includes getting good at being outside their comfort zones. In this final session of the Spying on Your Perceptions with Mindfulness course, we’ll look at how to let comfortable sensations train us to relate more effectively to uncomfortable ones. While mindfulness doesn’t solve specific problems, it can change how we relate to our lives—which can paradoxically lead to getting better at resolving what can be resolved. When we become more comfortable being uncomfortable, we’re preparing to respond more skillfully to the inevitable challenges of life and to stop waiting to inhabit our lives until the circumstances become ideal.

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4.7 (42)

Recent Reviews

Deb

February 19, 2025

This course is excellent. The spy metaphor helped me better understand and practice mindfulness in a deeper way. Thank you!

Lloyd

September 2, 2023

This is a fantastic course. The idea of 'acting like a spy' towards perceptions helped give a sense of stepping back and just witnessing. The sessions are short, but intriguing and packed with applicable practices. <3

Zai

August 30, 2023

Some great tips for being mindful in the moment.

Gina

May 5, 2023

Those were the coolest lessons on mindfulness ever! I learned so much. I suspect what I learned will come back to me in bits and pieces as I continue experiencing my life. I also suspect I will partake in this course again in the future. It's definitely going into my "Practice Again" folder so that I may reinforce what I learned this time around. I am looking forward to listening to more courses by you, Daron. Thank you for your service! 😊🙏

Maggie

September 9, 2022

It's been a quiet adventure practicing these techniques throughout my day, "learning to be at home in the messiness of my life". Wonderful, simple, practical. Thank you!

Cory

July 30, 2022

I really enjoy how Daron makes the informal practice of mindfulness into a playful game. I am excited to spend more time with the exercises from the lessons to bring more mindfulness into the ordinary events of my day and to get more comfortable with the uncomfortable in life.

Rachel

June 4, 2022

Interesting, useful and really well presented. I’m going back to Day 1 and listen to it all again 😊 Namaste 🙏

Marianne

October 26, 2021

The idea of spying on my perception has given me a wonderful new way of beeing in the present moment. I gained a lot from the course.

Alex

October 9, 2021

Really good, concise, practical teaching. Thank you!

Laura

September 26, 2021

A unique and wonderful course; I highly recommend giving this a try. From the first lesson, I’ve been enjoying the idea of “noticing without being noticed” as a playful way to approach mindfulness. I now use this regularly in my informal practice, and I’m finding it a very useful way to kind of sneak up (as it were) on mindfulness of everyday experiences. The last lesson’s careful instruction about how to approach uncomfortable experiences in right-sized amounts was also extremely helpful, really just what I needed, something I’ve never been taught and wouldn’t have known how to ask for. Thank you so much, Daron, for creating and sharing these light-but-serious little lessons with us!

Angela

September 23, 2021

Thank you, I love this course. I think that I need to start again and remember to practice.

Derek

September 16, 2021

This course from Daron was exactly what I needed! His way of teaching using the spy analogy was both creative and helpful and really helped me deepen my mindfulness practice. I am very grateful for Daron for putting this together!

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