Catching Flirts

Mindell’s practice from Dreaming While Awake, paraphrased:

1. Adopt “second attention.” Ordinary (“first”) attention notices what’s useful and goal-relevant. Deliberately soften into a looser, receptive awareness that’s willing to notice the irrelevant, the marginal, the barely-there.
2. Catch the flirt — the moment before you choose to look. Let your gaze drift around a room or scene. Notice the instant something grabs your attention on its own — your eye is pulled to a spot, an object “flirts.” The key is to catch it in the flicker before your rational mind says “that’s just a chair.” Mindell stresses this earliest, pre-verbal stage.
3. Don’t dismiss it — pause. Resist the automatic “so what?” Stay with the thing that flirted for a moment.
4. Let it unfold / “shapeshift.” Gently ask the flirt to tell its story. What is it about that object — its quality, mood, movement? Let an image, feeling, or fantasy arise from it. Mindell suggests imagining you are the thing that flirted, or letting it speak. Follow where it leads, the way you’d follow a dream image.
5. Find the message. Notice what the unfolded flirt is “saying” — often it points to a feeling, need, or quality (a secondary process) that your everyday self has been overlooking.
6. Apply it. Ask how this awareness wants to change something small in how you’re living right now. Daily version: throughout the day, periodically catch whatever just flirted with you — a sound, a body twinge, a stray thought, a stranger’s gesture — and give it three seconds of real attention instead of editing it out. Mindell frames the whole day as a continuous, lucid dreamfield you can read. (Sourcing note: “flirts,” “the Dreaming,” “second attention,” and “catching the seeds of dreaming” before they differentiate are Mindell’s documented terms and method in Dreaming While Awake. Steps are faithful paraphrase.)

Arnold Mindell (1940–) developed this in Dreaming While Awake (Hampton Roads, 2000), extending Process Work’s tracking of subtle signals into a general waking-awareness practice.

He explicitly drew on Taoism (the unnameable Tao that “flirts” into form), Zen, lucid-dreaming research, and indigenous Australian/shamanic concepts of “the Dreaming.” It is conceptually close to his clinical “signals” work and to the “sentient” awareness he later developed in ProcessMind.

Mindfulness / open monitoring — receptive, non-selecting awareness of whatever arises; the secular cousin (without the “message” interpretation).

• Castaneda’s “second attention” / stalking — noticing the normally-unseen; a clear influence on Mindell’s vocabulary.
• Jungian synchronicity & active imagination — treating a salient outer event as personally meaningful and letting it unfold.
• Taoist “following the Tao” — attending to the subtle before it manifests.
• Gendlin Focusing — staying with a barely-formed felt sense until it speaks.

Catching too late. Once you’ve named the object (“a lamp”), the flirt is over. The skill is the pre-verbal flicker — be quick and soft.

• Forcing flirts. You don’t manufacture them; you relax and let them happen. Trying hard narrows attention and kills the effect.
• Literalising the message. A flirt unfolds into your associations, not a fixed external meaning. Hold interpretations lightly.
• Stopping at “so what?” The whole practice lives in refusing the automatic dismissal for a few seconds.
• Over-doing it. All-day hyper-vigilance is exhausting and not the point; sprinkle brief catches through the day.