November 24, 2024

Let’s Talk About Hands

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Free Monk Meditation photo and picture

Open them, shut them, open them shut them,
Give them a great big clap.
Open them, shut them, open them, shut them,
put them in your lap.


The classroom called special education holds labors and wonders and chants including this one with a hands-in-your-lap finale. This position can be a remarkable point of pause in the hands-busy lives of those students… and the rest of us.


You see, students in class learn life skills that most of the rest of us take for granted, as they pour a cup of juice or tie shoelaces. Hands dedicated to careful and slow pouring or tying is a thing of beauty to watch. To succeed, students like Dolores and Charlie and all of their peers paid rapt attention! And after awhile some teachers began to wonder: who is teaching whom?


What if we all sat still for a moment with our hands in the “pupil mudra”, simply in the lap? Or we could experiment with the symbolic hand gestures associated with various religious traditions like the meditative dhyana mudra: palm up right hand atop palm up left hand, thumbs touching. One could sneak the right hand from the lap to touch the ground even as the left hand remains in the lap. That’s the “earth witness mudra”–see the grand legend for that background story!


Pausing with hands in our lap invites a contemplative state. It sets the stage for the movements that follow. In fact, an interesting mindfulness practice is to simply watch our hands. After all, so many of our daily activities involve mindless hand-based movements, as we day-dream our way through pouring or tying or typing a sentence. We call it “muscle memory”, a kind of motor memory that joins the motor cortex with a part of the brain responsible for behaviors of habit. This efficiency, while essential, can lead to a lost-in-thought lifestyle.


Watching hands deliver these automatic actions now and then is to notice the miracle that we are. Next we could observe the thousands of similar automatic movements dedicated to eating a meal or driving a car or scrolling on a phone. Extraordinary!


No wonder that, in the classroom called special education, Dolores would exclaim in utter joy, “lets talk about hands!”

 

November 19, 2024

Noticing Stuff

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Free Boobook Owl photo and picture

Much has been written on judgment in contrast with discernment and this short essay may add little to that literature. But here goes:


We notice stuff. Our senses are constantly filled with input from the physical world around us and within us. So much so that we automatically select certain inputs, and habituate to the rest, all to minimize the overwhelm from our dynamic surroundings.


Sensory input becomes perception as we organize and interpret these data. One aspect of that process might be called discernment and one expression of discernment could be called judgment. Discernment is a function of mindfulness. It is fluid noticing from moment to moment. Judgment notes and solidifies; it takes a stand. Each has a place.


Judgment has numerous contexts and meanings from religion to law to medicine to the childhood admonition to “show good judgment”. Many of us failed that one!


Some religions have a final or last judgment as well as cautions about judging others; to stand in judgment. Clinical judgment relates to professionals in medicine, nursing and psychology, and a call for rational evaluation and healing. Law presents the archetypal deliverer of judgment, a judge. At best justice emerges from the rigor of good and fair judgments, and at worst, injustice ruins lives by fine or incarceration with financial and reputational harms done. Lastly there are the everyday, ubiquitous judgments of daily decisions to cross the street against a red light or wait for the green; to take an umbrella when storm clouds appear…or not.


Now consider the judgment of others. All around us we notice similarities and differences in appearance, opinion and behavior. And sometimes extreme and harmful behavior requires strong judgment and a hard NO. But in a world fueled by social media, cancel culture and our imperfect perceptions, too many judgments promote misunderstanding, a lot of ill-will and a big mess.


What if we paused instead and looked carefully, with discernment. It does not disappear the mess but invites us to engage and take a deep look. That judgment off-ramp is at hand, but we could hold off for a moment. It can be uncomfortable as we discern similarities and especially differences between people, places, things and situations. Resisting snap judgments allows us to fully engage with that experience.


The steadfast observer might persevere. Discernment after all is about noticing differences, suspending judgment and experiencing. It brings our wisdom and compassion to the forefront and gives a chance for our irrationalities and ill-will to recede.


We could wake up to our capacity to discern the world clearly and take a stand now and then. With practice, judging takes its proper place in moment-to-moment discernment.

 

May 6, 2024

When No Comes Before Yes

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Following a nine-month (or so) gestation, birth is our first big “yes” to the lifespan. Many more moments of yes will follow. The body says yes and the mind says yes to our newborn human life. Our cerebellum doubles in volume by three months. The number and density of brain synapses (connections between neurons) grows in dramatic affirmation of our mental potentials.

But then negation comes in the form of synaptic pruning, a cutting away of less used connections in favor of making fewer stronger ones. Yes, no, yes…

We could notice the ebb and flow of yes and no through the years, and even in the moments of our lives from the very start. Babies are a symphony of yeses and nos. A cacophony sometimes.

Think of it, consciousness placed in our tiny selves (the first yes?) as we womb float and then crunch through a canal into a human life, crying “No” all the way! We learn to move, then move to learn. And we start thinking, not in words at first, but in sensory and motor intelligences or schema. Words are learned as we go and added to the mix.

At the center of thought (and actually created by it) is “me”. The infant’s myriad of experiences begins to have a constancy and predictability in a world that truly does seem to revolve around “me”. We are called by a name. My name.

So perhaps there is a second gestation of say 1-24 months. After all, it is said that a sense of “me” is formed over those first couple of years. An ego. And it begins not with a yes but with a resounding NO! No I am not you, I am me! That is not yours, it is mine! For the toddler, no truly comes before yes.

This brand new “me” is glorious and seems to include you and, well, everything. As marvelous as that sounds, it is also pretty scary and feels massively out of control.

Toddlers are big on control.

That brand new me needs external limits set consistently and with love. Thus, the ego is protected, contained and at least partly stabilized toward autonomy. Children need those external boundaries that model the internal ones they will erect. Boundaries, inside and out, hold the “me” and prevent the “you” from swallowing me. Children could learn to trust trustworthy others and begin to feel safe in their world.

What then? Growing up, we all start to believe in “me”; in its solidity and reality. Each sensation and perception and thought is mine. And it is all “me”, an illusion increasingly understood as a function of brain regions dedicated to the theme of my mind; my body.

There is little doubt as to the survival value of higher cortical functions like planning, tool making and language in its various forms. And we should put the individual, the ego, in that same category of evolutionary advantage. The illusion of a “me”, separate from everything else, is an adaptation that gains momentum over our lives.

But maybe, at this juncture of human history, the advantage is disappearing.

It seems that after several hundred thousand years, more or less, our individualism has developed to the extreme. One could argue that besides reason, love and empathy, we have all become masters of poisons like greed, hatred and ignorance in ten thousand forms and ways. Modern economic systems, armies and media all seem to double-down on those poisons.

What to do?

Maybe recognize what we forgot long ago or never fully understood. That my thoughts do not come from me, but rather, a me-illusion develops from all my thinking (and emoting and perceiving). But I am not my thoughts. Illusions and opinions should not be taken too seriously. With that a fluidity emerges…a flow. Like a river that is always the same and never the same and where egos evaporate. The river sound holds our collective experience, every yes and every no of everyone.

Listen: Flow.

 

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