Dr. Les Fehmi worked with training different forms of attention over more than 45 years. More recently, John Yates, former neuroscience professor and meditation teacher, used neuroscientific insights on attention to help meditators who were stuck after 20 or 30 years, to make more progress in a few months than in previous decades.

The basic principle is simple. The kind of attention we use when we "pay" attention is usually detached, with a strong sense of trying to "control" and manipulate the object of attention. It is often separated off or even detached from feeling, emotion, sensation, imagination and intuition.

By learning to shift from hard "object" fascination to awareness of space (the brain has a very difficult time "grabbing" on to "space") this gives our customary tense attention style a chance to rest.

In fact, we can learn a variety of attention styles and by learning to adjust between them as necessary, reduce an immense amount of stress. Here's a sample of how to do it, with an attention game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3rG57d0mR4