Our First Challenge: Eye Contact.

Challenging?  Eh, doesn't sound too tough.  But wait, it gets interesting.  Here's what you do:

-Choose a quiet time when you know you won't be interrupted for at least 10 minutes.

-Grab a close friend, family member, or your true love.

-Sit down on the floor or couch and get comfortable.  Face to face.  Knees touching and/or holding hands.

-Set a timer for 10 minutes.

-Go!  Look into each others eyes and maintain your gaze for 10 minutes.  Go ahead and blink but don't look away!

-Come back and tell us what you think!!!  We'll be blog-sharing our reaction with you!

Since we'll be doing this 21 times we are going to choose to allow talking the first 7 times, enjoy silence the second week, and we haven't decided on the third week.

The Science!

The selective focusing of attention on a single object for a period of time appeals to traditional Buddhist meditation methods and yoga exercises. Selective attention theory espouses the general idea that focusing your attention on a single target for a measurable period of time increases your ability to identify distractions and redirect your attention on the desired object, increasing your self-regulatory abilities. When you increase your ability for self-regulation, you become more adept at identifying and detaching yourself from a whole spectrum of emotions and distractions. This detachment and purposeful focusing of attention on a target (versus your distractions) allows you to objectively accept how your body is feeling and where your brain is trying to lead you, without getting caught up in the whim of your senses and sub-conscious intent. For more info, here is an article...you may have to focus to get through the jargon :).

The target: Now, what happens when you focus all of your attention on a person? You find that your attention attempts to wonder towards the emotions, feelings, values, and thoughts about your target. In our case, each other! This correlation between focusing our attention and our sub-conscious thoughts about each other brings about all kinds of possibilities regarding our relationship, feelings of intimacy, and experiences together. This is our goal, to strengthen our bond in marriage and life together. So... 21 days, 10 minutes a day, meditation masters.. go!