Thursday, May 19, 2016

Blog #3 Beyond the Dimming Fog

At this moment, I am in New York City, house-sitting for a family vacationing in Italy. I love coming to NYC to work because I find it easy to write when I am in unfamiliar environs. For instance, I have an unfamiliar refrigerator and pantry, which forces me to eat more simply; because I am travelling, I receive fewer calls and texts which reduces my activity; I don’t have my stereo, TV, car, musical instruments, etc., so hell…I might as well work.

I wrote my book, When Bad Lands, under similar circumstances. Two years ago, I was in NYC for five weeks, writing in a friend’s studio on the 11th floor on the upper west side. I worked hard on my writing, but when I needed to change the channel for my amusement (and for a quick energy fix), I would hit the elevator button, and in one minute, I would be walking down Broadway, where the world was jumping.

Two nights ago, I closed my laptop, descended onto Broadway and took the subway downtown to the Blue Note, to hear the legendary McCoy Tyner and to visit with my friend, Hope Martin. After the set, she and I discussed my recently completed webpage. I expected to sit back and rest on my laurels for having completed such a project, but she gave me some pushback. As she made comments about my work, I couldn’t help notice my mind drifting. I much preferred to plant my feet in the secure ground of what I had understood and unearthed, and I didn’t particularly want to listen to her observations, because her acute observations reminded me that I hadn’t really fully examined my own…in other words, there was still more I needed to investigate.

Hope provided me a mental sketch of what was coming into view for her, bringing together her experience as a long-time Alexander Technique teacher and a meditation instructor. Through her work, The Shape of Awake, she has observed the way people lock out awareness of the world around them, and how this shows up in their body and posture. When people hold attitudes, judgments, hopes and fears about how things are supposed to be, or how they are not measuring up, this all gets sublimated and transferred into the body. We’ve all learned that the mind and body are not separate, but it usually takes a build-up of stress for us to link these two.

Basically, when the mind’s experience runs contrary to the cocoon of habits we surround ourselves with, there is body tension. We go on lock-down. We busy ourselves trying to maintain and project an idealized version of ourselves or try to hold back our negative attributes, and by doing so, we limit our awareness and hold back on the world, as well. What is the result? We are not really in the world that surrounds us; we are trapped inside ourselves.

We’re probably quite familiar with this phenomena: the body tightens, the chest and throat tighten, the shoulders get tense, etc. As we know, these are signs of stress – signs of our hoping that things are otherwise, even when they are not. So we start feeling uncomfortable; maybe even angry. We feel a little off-balance; maybe even panicky.

As Hope explained this concept, a self-generated fog started to gather around me. Deeply shrouded in that fog, messages dimly reverberated in my brain, trying to be heard: “Hey Alan, look – you’re being combative. You are being litigious. You’re trying to be right.” (Of course, it is annoying to recognize this; but as I mentioned in Blog #1, the bane and blessing of my current existence is that I now admit to everything! I don’t want to, but I let myself admit to it. I let myself laugh, and I humble myself. I try to not be afraid of being a fool.)

Out of the mist, I begin to identify this schema I’ve concocted. I definitely hear Hope speaking, but my mind is struggling to sort out this confusion—which is that I am doing exactly what she has been describing! And yes, I am talking to myself in order to cut through my dullness…“Alan, not only is it true, what she’s saying, it’s happening right now, and it’s happening to you!” I feel my body tightening; I notice that I am not really listening; I’m preparing my rebuttal; I feel my body hunkering down...and here it is—my body is doing exactly what my mind is doing; it’s disengaging from the world.

Then it pops. It pops and I am grounded. I come back to my senses. I’m no longer lost in my body that is currently attempting to padlock my mind.

Hope showed me that the body creates a great deal of resistance when the mind is fearful or feels threatened. As the mind and body collude to resist the truth of things as they are – thinking that perhaps we are not good enough, or we are being unjustly challenged – we block our world. We try to manage this cognitive dissonance between the world-as-we-would-like-it, and the world-as-it-is. We generate unnecessary interference so we can remain comfortably ensconced in our habitual patterns. Why? Because, we really don’t want to wake up. It’s too unpredictable out there, so we dismiss the possibility of engaging with the vibrant, pulsating, unpredictable world, and it passes by unnoticed.

Hope recommends that we become extremely friendly with this strange diversionary behavior, because it is actually quite precious to us—these are the activities that have helped us survive. At least, we think they do. We want to be in this world of our own making, because we think that’s how we have always survived and have moved forward. We allow the body/mind to lock down, and close the gate to protect this private space, this comfort zone.

An alternate strategy is to get close to our own misapprehensions, work with them as they are, and own them. As the very astute sociologist, BrenĂ© Brown says, “How can we expect someone to give up a way of seeing and understanding the world that has physically, cognitively, or emotionally kept them alive? None of us is ever able to part with our survival strategies without significant support and the cultivation of replacement strategies.” In other words, we can’t simply extract our confused habits and toss them aside. As is said, nature abhors a vacuum, so those things that have sustained us all these years can’t simply be dismissed. We cannot reject who we are and who we have been, because the more we chastise ourselves, the more confused we become and we harden ourselves even more than we already have.

When we own our habits and own who we have been—when we don’t fight that—we soften. We might even begin to relax. When we relax our body and mind, that is the best wakefulness—as good as that of any saint or sage.

How we move to this zone, is to pay more attention to ourselves. We can practice being on the dot…being spot on. Perhaps we could take up mindfulness meditation, which helps us to be kind to ourselves and fearlessly pay attention to our ever-shifting states of mind. In this way, we learn to stay with ourselves and our discomfort over longer periods of time. When we see ourselves as we truly are, without rejecting any part of it, we relax and become friendlier to ourselves over time. Not to be too blunt, but when we feel kinder to ourselves, we stop feeling we’re such fuck-ups.

I am grateful to Hope to be reminded that this journey is never done. I’ve only just scratched the surface of trying to adjust my own screen – trying to adjust my moment-by-moment outlook—so my path forward will bear fruit through kindness and gentleness to myself. As a great teacher of mine, Sakyong Mipham says, it takes wave upon wave of gentleness for us to make lasting changes in ourselves.

Does the mind, alone, change the channel on our ever-morphing psychological state? Definitely not...and the body is its marker. The body is proof. It provides us with definite clues as to whether we are being receptive to this brilliant world or we are trying to shut it down. We discover that we can’t hide the body’s message from ourselves, and we don’t need a dimmer switch to help us survive discomfort.

Can we free ourselves from our body’s lockdown? How about daring to take an even further leap and be willing to admit this not only to ourselves, but to the rest of the world—or at least to our close allies? My guess is that the world will love it.

© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson