Mindfulness isn’t about distance from emotion, but space aroand it. The feeling is as intense, but it is not the only thing in the field because the field has b roadened. This space around felt emotion allows us to choose, to respond; when weave lost in an emotion, rather than present in it, humans tend to react.
picnic to the earth
here let’s jump rope together here
here let’s eat balls of rice together
here let me love you
your eyes reflect the blueness of the sky
your back will be stained a wormwood green
here let’s learn the constellations together
from here let’s dream of every distan thing
here let’s gather low-tide shells,
from the sea of sky at dawn
let’s bring back little starfish
at breakfast we will toss them out
let the night be drawn away
here I’ll keep saying, “I am back”
while you repeat, “Welcome home”
here let’s come again and again
here let’s drink hot tea
here let’s sit together for a while
let’s be blown by the cooling breeze–Shuntaro Tanikawa
1.
A couple nights before I started my current lab rotation, I dreamt I was at lab meeting. I was attentive, but I didn’t understand the material. After the meeting, Andy, the PI, pulled me aside.
“You couldn’t follow that, could you?” he asks.
“No.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt. Everyone else already knows the stuff; I can just look it up.”
“You have to speak up when you don’t know something,” he tells me, annoyed, harsh. “You can’t be flustered by not knowing things. How are you going to give lab meeting or job talks if you get flustered when you don’t know things?”
2.
The next night I fall asleep listening to Tara Brach talk about meditation and trauma. I dream that I am watching a video of a woman talking about mindfulness, about the important of staying present. “Aft
er all,” she says, a chesire grin coming over her face, “all you have to miss is your life.”
3.
A week later, I dream I’m walking outside. Green, lush. I come across tall wooden stairs, the kind made of slabs of wood with space in between them, the kind I was terrified I’d slip through when I was younger and so small. A large tree hanging over it. Ripe oranges. All sensory; no thoughts. I walk up the steps to a dwelling with a series of bedrooms accessible from outside, a kitchen, a library room. I know that one of the rooms is mine, and I go in, and I sit on the floor, and I cry so hard. I cry for a for a long time. Not relief. An emotional state I don’t have a word for, for once. One of the other women there glances in, and then lets me be. When I’m done, I join the others in the kitchen.
From Pab:
It’s always the same core, but it takes different shapes. In my twenties it went thusly:
“I’m someplace hot and green and full of old cultures. Blended civilization and primal energies, foreign tongues that have somehow fended off the brutality of life with smile lines and easy laughter.
It’s alien, but I’m at home in that; between my cameras and the National Geographic sponsorship I’m comfortable that I’m doing exactly what I’m meant to be doing. These journeys always change me – there will be things made of brass and bone to be shared when I come ‘home,’ stories to tell, but the real magic is in being lost; becoming a part of everywhere by belonging nowhere.
Oh, and the pictures are good too.”
That dream got eaten by disease and Capitalism after my first trip abroad. I’ve had time to chew on it myself.
–
I want to move to America.
You know, that place they told us about in school, where the government is just an organizing tool for the general population? Where freedom and creativity and love of diversity are areas where everyone excels? Where “capitalism” is just an excuse generous people made up so that they could help each other out without seeming creepy? I want to move there and live happily ever after.
–
Plausible: Get some Contact Improv, add some Parkour. Video. Add music. Participate in the read-write culture that TV nearly killed and the Internet is bringing back. This is the easy one.
–
The most frustrating experience I have reared it’s head right before those guys tried to bash my head in. Here’s the thing: we’re creating our experience. Every moment, every breath. Every thought expressed and action taken, or not, is a choice shaping every moment to come. This has been understood for thousands of years, and yet somehow … somehow when you try to explain that violence is a nasty, self-perpetuating problem to a couple of thugs who want your wallet in an alley, it doesn’t work. At least, not with words.
It’s a constant problem – Everyone on this rock has consciousness – on some level we all get this. But apparently we suck at it.
Poetry is the erotic in language. It can serve as a keeper of a sense memory or a moment of realization. It can be a paean. It is neither logical or illogical inherently; the point is it communicates that which is deeply felt, and the receiver, if open and able to interface with the poem, will feel deeply hirself. Poetry can create encounter across space and time.
I seem to have temporarily misplaced my ability to communicate articulately, but I want to get this thought out.
One of the radical shifts I’ve made in the last few years is in how I talk to myself. My head is a much kinder place to be. I’ve written about some of those shifts here–using metta meditation, trying to talk to myself the way I’d talk to a friend (who says you have to love yourself first?), shifting to a language of discernment rather than judgment, mindfulness, reforming my ideas around human nature so as to let go of shame around pain, integrating my friendships into my sense of self–and it’s ongoing work.
That said, I feel like I’m moving on to the next step. I spent part of New Year’s Eve reading Marshall B. Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. The book is mostly about how to communicate with people empathically. A lot of the techinques are legit, practically speaking. I have beef with some of the theory, which ends of being morally relativistivic in a way that doesn’t sit well with me.
Whatever the failings of the book, one of the strategies it suggested for NVC with yourself is to think about the goal or intention of everything you do, especially the tasks which irritate you–or anything you think of as a “task”. He says that thinking about something as something we “have” to do builds resentment because being commanded (even by ourselves) violates our need for autonomy. The suggestion is to think about the goal, and if the goal isn’t life-nurturing, ditch the task. If it is, talk to yourself in terms of choice instead of what you have to do, connecting the activity to the larger goal or value which motivates it. Acting out of the wish to support life, to nuture yourself and others, cuts the irritation and/or resentment associated with the tasks, and enables you to do them with more energy. As Shigeki put it’s about “deconvoluting the practice from the purpose”. You build your power by exercising will and acting on your deepest wishes.
I’ve been working with this as one of my resolutions of sorts. This is pedestrian, but as I said to Shigeki–well, I do walk places. One thing I’ve been working with the past few days is going to the gym. Usually this is something I do because I “have to” for health, and acting out of that is draining, even though I usually get it done decently. The last few days though, I went thinking a few times during the workout, “I’m choosing to take care of myself.” The vibe was different–running felt easier, and the whole thing was a lot less mentally fatiguing.
A couple years ago, the moment of realization was: I’m not willing to abandon myself anymore. The realization I keep having these past few months is: I’m not willing to fight with myself, or do things with myself that are out of force. Force and love are irreconcilable. And the same action performed out of self-love, rather than force–and not necessarily love in a sentimental sense but in a concrete, Fromm-ian sense–has a different impact.
From M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled:
…I draw the analogy between marriage and a base camp for mountain climbing. If one wants to climb mountains, one must have a good base camp, a place where there are shelters and provisions, where one may receive nurture and rest before one ventures forth again to seek another summit. Successful mountain climbers know they must spend at least as much time, if not more, in tending to their base camp as they actually do in climbing mountains, for their survival is dependent upon their seeing to it that their base camp is sturdily constructed and well-stocked.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy–ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what–at last–I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
–Bertrand Russell
h/t Eli
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.
–Audre Lorde, from “Poetry is Not a Luxury“
Unquestionably, the sensitive human brain adds immeasurably to the richness of l…ife. Yet for this we pay dearly, because the increase in over-all sensitivity makes us peculiarly vulnerable. One can be less vulnerable by becoming less sensitive—more of a stone and less of a man—and so less capable of enjoyment. Sensitivity requires a high degree of softness and fragility—eyeballs, eardrums, taste buds, and nerve ends culminating in the highly delicate organism of the brain. These are not only soft and fragile, but also perishable. There seems to be no effective way of decreasing the delicacy and perish-ability of living tissue without also decreasing its vitality and sensitivity. If we have to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains.
–Alan Watts, from The Wisdom of Insecurity
