How To Be Sick

 1 Response »
Jan 042011
 

One day Toni Bernhard got sick and she never got better.

The illness she contracted first reduced then eliminated her capacity to work, to travel, and eventually to do most of the things that had previously defined her life. Activity of any sort – even a brief visit with family members – depleted her so much that it would take her days to recover. Her life became confined almost entirely to her bed.

That’s how it is with chronic illness. One moment you’re going along living your life, the next moment something is wrong. At first you don’t think of it as a life-transforming occurrence. You assume that your life  will return soon enough to the way it was before. But instead you continue not getting better. The cognitive awareness that the course of your life has been altered occurs over months or years, as your symptoms persist or worsen and you spend more and more money going to doctors in search of a diagnosis that will explain what’s going on, in search of a treatment that will heal you.

Sometimes a diagnosis comes, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes a treatment exists, other times it doesn’t. Maybe you will get better, maybe you won’t. In far too many cases, you are compelled over time to accept, first, that you may never have a good understanding of what is wrong with you, and second, that your life is now defined by your illness. You try to figure out a way to hold this deep uncertainty. You struggle to know whether to fight or to accept the new limitations on your  life. You try not to let yourself hope too hard…but you also try not to let yourself abandon hope.

The central question of your life becomes: how do you hold all of this ambiguity and uncertainty and loss in mind, without going mad?

 

That is precisely the question that Toni Bernhard addresses in How to be Sick.

Bernhard has written this beautiful book (which in form and style resembles in many ways the work of other Buddhist authors like Pema Chodron and Thich Naht Hanh), with the wisdom and clarity that come from having faced unimaginable difficulties with a powerful intellect and a humble spirit. The result is that she is able to articulate deep truths with an elegant lucidity.

The book opens with a brief recounting of the story of how Bernhard became, and then remained ill, after contracting a chronic-fatigue type illness which remains largely undefined and untreatable. Powerful though this story is, it isn’t the primary focus of the book. Rather, it’s the backdrop against which Bernhard illustrates the Buddhist techniques and principles which she has learned to use to transform her experience of illness.

This is an eminently graceful book, at once simple and profound, which will be extremely valuable to anyone who suffers with chronic illness. But to be clear: although the techniques which Bernhard describes here are based in Buddhist teachings, you don’t in any way need to be a practicing Buddhist to make use of them. Like all Buddhist principles, they are essentially psychological in nature. In fact, they are the same sorts of techniques that I use of in my psychotherapy practice to help people cope with difficult situations that are out of their control.

If I could distill the message of the book down to a single sentence it would be this: though we must inevitably suffer through the physical ills and limitations of our bodies, we don’t need to add mental suffering on top of our physical pain. In fact, we have the power to define for ourselves what attitude we take toward our own experience. Even as our bodies suffer, we can find mental liberation.

This powerful concept extends far beyond the experience of illness. The techniques Bernhard describes here are useful for any number of ordinary situations. How do we react when we’re stuck in a traffic jam? What do we tell ourselves when we succumb to temptation and over-eat or drink too much? How do we think about ourselves when we experience anger toward someone we love?

The techniques in How to be Sick can be usefully applied to any of these situations. But they have special relevance to the experience of chronic illness.

To give just one example from the many in the book, Berhnard describes a simple practice aimed at helping us dis-identify with our illness. She relates the story of a teacher named Munindra-ji who was travelling to visit a sacred Buddhist site in India. Stuck for hours in a hot train station without food or bathrooms, his students became worried about him. But when asked if he was all right, he replied: “There is heat here, but I am not hot. There is hunger here, but I am not hungry. There is irritation here, but I am not irritated.”

The simple beauty of this statement is piercing and poignant. So much suffering arises out of our rigid identification with our physical state. We believe (usually without realizing that we are doing so) that we are our body.

Bernhard takes this simple practice and applies it to her experience of illness. She tries saying to herself: “There is sickness here, but I am not sick.”

With those words, our state of mind can start to change. From those words, a series of questions emerge.

“Who am I?” Bernhard asks herself. “What is Toni Bernhard? Is Toni Bernhard a solid physical and mental entity with an inherent self-existence or is Toni Bernhard a label attached to an ever-changing constellation of qualities?”

Asking this question opens up space in our minds to challenge the seemingly obvious bond between our physical experience and our definition of self. That this association can be challenged is a truly radical concept.

 

That phrase – “there is sickness here, but I am not sick” – is one that I have been saying to myself often since reading this book. Because, as readers of this blog will understand, I have been drawn to this book as the result of my own struggle with chronic illness.

For me it began several years ago with some subtle shifts in my strength and energy, which evolved into a puzzling and frightening set of symptoms which I spent two years trying unsuccessfully to get diagnosed. This past summer, just as I gave up hope of getting an answer and resigned myself to accepting that I might never know what was wrong with me, I received a diagnosis of Lyme Disease.

That diagnosis gave me some answers while simultaneously giving me a new set of ambiguities and uncertainties to struggle with. Though I undoubtedly have it, the very existence of chronic Lyme disease is hotly debated by medical professionals. This makes it difficult at times to simply relax into a definition of my condition. Further, the treatments for chronic Lyme are both controversial and inconsistently effective. To put it simply: no one really knows with certainty what treatment will work for each infected individual. And to put it personally: six months of treatment hasn’t had the slightest impact on my own health.

How do I hold this complex reality in mind? How do I think about my identity as I navigate the series of losses that this disease has imposed upon me?

As it happened, during the period that I was searching for a diagnosis I was also writing a book, The Next Ten Minutes, which contains a series of techniques for weaving mindfulness practices into the habitual routines of everyday life. Much like Toni Bernhard, I was living my life at the intersection of mindfulness and chronic illness.

It was only logical that I should try to find ways to use my own mindfulness practices to cope with my experience of illness and uncertainty. But as my readers will be aware, I am at best an inconsistent Buddhist. I believe deeply in the psychological power of Buddhist practices. I teach them to my clients all the time. I try to incorporate them regularly into my life, but more often than not I am irregular and unsystematic in my practice.

Clearly I needed something more than my own advice. I needed a better guide.

When I saw the title of Bernhard’s book I understood that she was precisely the guide I needed at this point in my life. I knew this with certainty even before I knew what was actually inside her book,

I believe that words have great power. I believe that holding certain simple phrases in mind can significantly affect our experience. In writing my own book, I hoped that the words The Next Ten Minutes would have this sort of power. The words How to be Sick absolutely work in this way. You cannot hold that phrase in mind without challenging your assumptions about illness. It’s a phrase which deftly tricks us into a self-reflective stance toward those assumptions. They are words which communicate the essential truth within Bernhard’s book: we have the freedom and power to transform the way we think about our experience.

In helping me see this, Toni Bernhard has given me a gift. I sincerely hope that you will be able to experience her gift as well.

Share

Beyond the Book #4 – Move As If You Were Underwater

 No Responses »
Dec 312010
 

This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of  the ideas behind the exercise “Move As If You Were Underwater.”

Introduction: slow feels good

Readers of The Next Ten Minutes will be aware that while I am a great advocate for mindfulness meditation, I often struggle to maintain a consistent meditation practice myself. One of the things that I find most difficult about getting myself to meditate regularly is that meditation requires me to slow down from my usual pace. Like most people, I tend to associate motion with productivity. When I’m busy doing things, especially if I’m busily doing several things at once, I feel, well…important.  Moving slowly works against the way we’ve been conditioned to behave. Which is precisely why it’s such a valuable practice. The exercise Move As If You Were Underwater is designed to provide you with a way to experiment with life in the slow lane. Because once you surrender to it, slow feels good. Slow allows you to move through your life with the fluidity and grace of a Tai Chi master.


Life under water

Similarly to the way that the exercise Go Into Another Room sensitized you to the pressure of air against your body, this exercise asks you to imagine the feel of water pressing against your skin. That pressure forces you to move more slowly than you feel you should be able to. You can probably remember the experience of being a child in a swimming pool and trying to reproduce the activity of running underwater, how the pressure of the water transformed that  familiar movement and made you acutely aware of the mechanics of an activity you ordinarily did without thinking about it.


Like most of the exercises in the book, this one aims to reawaken your awareness of automatic behaviors by forcing yourself into an observational mode as you examine the mechanics of your behavior. Or, as Dan Siegel calls it, YODA:  “You Observe and Decouple Automaticity.” “Automaticity” is a way to describe our capacity to behave without conscious awareness of our behaviors. Automaticity is obviously very valuable in many ways. Evolutionarily, the development of the sort of procedural memory that allows us to act without thinking was essential for survival. Because it’s obviously not adaptive to be thinking about the mechanics of running while you’re in the act of trying to out-run a sabre-toothed tiger.

But there is an invisible loss that happens when we transform a learned activity into an automatic behavior. What we lose is the present moment…our mindful awareness of what is actually happening, inside our mind and body and also in the world around us.

In my experience, regaining access to the present moment often requires us to play some sort of cognitive trick on ourselves. Because our minds are extremely well-adapted to do what they do, we have to find ways to bypass that automaticity. Forcing yourself to slow down is one such trick.

Ommmmmmmmm….

Using a mantras can be an important technique in the service of slowing yourself down. Mantras have long served this purpose in many spiritual traditions. And in my view anything can be a mantra so long as it’s used to draw our focus intentional toward a single conscious object. The focus of the mantra doesn’t have to be spiritual (although the outcome of using it may well turn out to be).


In the exercise I encourage you to repeat a simple word or phrase as a way to continually re-direct your attention back to your slow-motion activity. So, if you’re peeling potatoes in slow motion you might simply repeat to yourself: peeling, peeling, peeling. Inevitably your mind will wander. When you notice it has wandered all you need to do is to gently draw your attention back to that mantra, the same way you would bring your focus back to your breath in mindfulness meditation.

Slow food, slow driving

Next time you sit down to dinner with family or friends, take a moment to listen to the sounds emanating from the table. Does it sound something like this?


Slurping and chewing noises are a sure indicator that food is being consumed fast and unconsciously. If, like me, you find yourself distressed at the ways in which we have collectively lost touch with the experience of eating, the slow food movement is the antidote. More than just advocating that we slow down and appreciate our food, slow food proponents advocate that we become more deeply conscious of where our food is coming from and how it is created. In other words, slow is more than just an absence of speed, it’s a way of thinking – deeply and expansively.


You might also try a technique which I learned from cookbook author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, who writes in The Chinese Kitchen about how her father told her “that we must eat our food first with our eyes, then with our minds, then with our noses, and finally with our mouths.” When I notice myself eating too quickly (as I am prone to do), I try to bring myself back to this simple ritual. Before I take a bite I force myself to slow down and experience the food visually. Then I contemplate the food with my mind: what are the many pathways by which it found its way to my plate? Next I draw my attention to my sense of smell, letting myself “taste” the food with my nose. Finally, slowly, I take a bite. And, having gone through these preliminary steps, the experience of eating is transformed.

Another way to transform our everyday experience into slow-motion is through the technique of “hyper-miling.” This practice – driving in a slow and excruciatingly deliberate manner in order to maximize your car’s gas mileage – was born out of a response to high gas prices. But I think of it less as a money-saving technique than as a form of meditation.


In my personal experiments with hyper-miling, I’ve found that one of the most difficult aspects of the practice are the expectations of others. If you’re going to intentionally drive slowly, you have to directly face the irritation of others on the road. How you hold this awareness can vary. You can cloak yourself in righteous indignation; you can be apologetic.; you can try to block out awareness of everyone else. But no matter what you do, you’re still going to be getting in other people’s way. It’s a bit like sitting down to meditate in the middle of a crowded sidewalk. Which forces you to contemplate the interesting but uncomfortable idea that an act of meditation to be obnoxious can also be a public nuisance.

Underwater music

Tempted though I am to use the SpongeBob song as a theme song for the exercise, in the end I have to go with “Son of a Mermaid.” Not because I’m a great fan of the song itself, but because the guy actually performs it underwater.


As always, I welcome suggestions for other pieces of music which capture the essence of the exercise.

Further reading

I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:

As always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.

 

Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Memorize a Data Sequence – here.

 

Share

Light a Candle: a solstice exercise

 No Responses »
Dec 222010
 

Note: I wrote this new exercise especially for the solstice.  It was first posted on the Beyond Words Trend Watch blog, which you can find here.

The universal element in all our winter holidays is the absence of natural light. On a very primitive level, we’re all a little bit afraid of the dark and that’s why, as the days become shorter and shorter, we string lights around our homes and light candles. We’re holding off against the growing darkness, both symbolically and literally. But in addition to danger, darkness holds a deep and beautiful creative energy. In this exercise (which should be done after sunset or before sunrise), I invite you to immerse yourself in both the lush beauty of darkness and the fragile miracle of light.

What You’ll Need

  • A room
  • A candle
  • Matches

How to Do It

1. See the light. Start by choosing a room in which you feel safe, one in which you have control over the light switches. Now, before you do anything else, simply sit quietly in the room and observe the light that’s already there. Notice the lights themselves – are they overhead or lamps, fluorescent or standard bulbs? Notice everything you can about each source of light. What color is it? Is it constant or does it fluctuate in intensity? Try to identify every other source of light in the room, even those that are masked by brighter lights. Check the electronic devices – they’re always good for some luminescence. How about the windows? Are street lights or passing cars inserting light into the room?

2. Go over to the dark side. In preparation for this step, make sure you know where your candle and matches are. Identify a safe place where you can light the candle once it’s dark. Then, one by one, eliminate as many sources of light as you can. Sometimes this will simply mean flipping a switch. Other times it will mean turning off or even unplugging appliances. Sometimes it will require you to block out lights that you can’t turn off, by covering them up or pulling the curtains or shades. Note: you’re allowed to back-track a little as you perform this step, turning a lamp back on in order to locate the cord for the appliance that’s still lit up.

3. Curse the darkness. Why? Because it’s fun! Also, because it will help connect viscerally to your primal fear of the dark. Imagine the darkness as an evil force that is trying to swallow you up. Imagine it’s sheltering dragons and other malicious beasts. Once you’ve summoned up as much fear as you can, start cursing the darkness. Think of your voice as a source of light that can penetrate the darkness as you call it the worse names that you can think of.

4. See in the dark. That last step didn’t really work, did it? No matter how much you rage against the dying of the light, the darkness holds steady. So try a different approach. Take a few minutes to simply observe yourself as you sit in the darkness. Observe your thoughts, emotions and perceptions as you sit without trying to fight the darkness at all. What do you notice your mind doing? Is it active or calm, fearful or confident? Then see if you can stop attributing any intention to the darkness and simply notice it. Look into it. Stare into it. Try to see the darkness itself, as if it were a palpable substance. Does your experience of darkness change as you do this? Do you notice your eyes starting to adjust, to be able to make out more detail in the room? Is it possible to notice that change as it happens?

5. Light a candle. Because, as they say, it’s better than cursing the darkness. Locate your candle and matches. Even if your eyes have adjusted so that you can make these objects out, try to do it without looking, as if you were in perfect darkness. Magnify your sense of touch as you push the match against the strike pad, creating the friction that creates the flame. Look at the lit match for a moment before you light the candle. Notice how staring into it actually magnifies the darkness around it. Finally, light the candle. Set it in front of you. For a moment don’t focus on the quality of the light itself. Just take a few deep breaths and notice the way your body feels. What has changed? Then, with soft eyes, let yourself see the light. Notice what your mind wants to do. Does it like to stare straight into the light? Or does it want to use the emanation of the light to look around the room? Do you feel the impulse to jump up and turn more lights back on? Or possibly to blow out the candle and return to darkness? Take a few moments just to notice these impulse and then, when you’re ready, act on whichever one is the most appealing.

Inner darkness

There’s good reason that we’re hard-wired to be anxious about darkness. Darkness steals away our ability to identify danger before it reaches us. In darkness, we have an inherent disadvantage against all those nocturnal creatures whose vision has adapted to the night (and also against humans who are wearing night-vision goggles). Darkness is associated with almost every negative human quality – aggression, ignorance, perversity, etc. To Sigmund Freud, darkness was associated the primal urges that lurked in the unconscious. To Carl Jung, darkness meant the “shadow,” that part of ourselves that we rejected and split off from awareness. Freud was the first to articulate the ways in which we develop defenses against the awareness of this darkness within us. To both Jung and Freud, mental health required some degree of re-integration of these “dark” urges into our conscious minds by acknowledging rather than denying our aggressive impulses. In Jung’s view, owning your shadow is an essential part of becoming a more evolved human being. For Freud, the most profound creativity arose out of the sublimation of primitive, “dark” energy into higher order actions. The issue is not that our inner darkness is a positive thing. It’s that we all inevitably have a dark side, and when we deny it we’re telling ourselves several unsustainable lies. The first is that we are without aggression and hostility. The second is that we are not strong enough to experience dark feelings without acting them out. The irony is that those who most deny the reality of their inner darkness are precisely those who are most likely to act out on those urges. (Which is why variations on the story of the preacher who gets caught with his pants down are so very common.) The truth is that our darkest impulses are bound up with our most vital energy. And allowing ourselves to experience that darkness in a mature way can free up that energy for our use and give us access to our richest creativity.

Variations:

Close your eyes. It’s a funny thing about closing our eyes…there’s so much light happening on the backs of our eyelids. I have no idea what neurological or anatomical features give rise to this internal light show, but whatever the reason it gives us an opportunity to do this a variation on exercise no matter where we are. When you first close your eyes, the experience seems to be one of darkness. But as you settle in you can become aware of the host of visual sensations which arise within your own mind and body. Try using these sensations of light and color as an object of meditation. Take ten minutes or so to focus on the light that you are seeing. Notice everything you can about it. Then (and this is the best part), open your eyes and see if you can catch the imprint of those sensations on the world you see before you.

Just sit in the dark. Surely you know the old joke: How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Never mind, I’ll just sit in the dark. We’ve all got an inner martyr. Bring yours into the open by doing this exercise while enacting the spirit of this joke. Give yourself access to a candle, but don’t light it. Fail to light it resentfully. Magnify your feelings of powerlessness and suffering. Imagine what life looks like to those who those who not only don’t acknowledge their own inner darkness, but also refuse to give themselves access to their inner light. When you start to feel your suffering at its most intense, try to shift your perspective so that you are observing rather the martyr rather than in habiting him or her. What would it take to hold this suffering person with compassion?

Further listening: three great songs about darkness and light

Absolutely the best song ever written about a nightlight


Spiritual darkness, spiritual light

 

Melting into the dark

Share

Beyond the Book #3 – Go Into Another Room

 No Responses »
Dec 012010
 

This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the each of the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of  the ideas behind the exercise “Go Into Another Room.”


Introduction: acoustics and mindfulness

The exercise Go Into Another Room combines mindfulness practice with a simple psychotherapeutic technique with the goal of bringing us into a present moment awareness of the space we are currently inhabiting.

The mindfulness aspect of the exercise involves focusing our awareness on the spatial and acoustic aspects of the physical rooms we inhabit. The therapeutic technique involves mindfully making a very small change in our behavior and using the experience of change as leverage for a larger shift in our state of mind. I talk about the therapeutic technique in several different parts of the book, so in this post I’ll be exploring our experience of acoustic space and the ways in which acoustic awareness can be a vehicle for greater mindfulness. Because I believe that sound is a particularly effective vehicle with which to access mindfulness.  Like the breath, it’s always there. Even in the quietest room there is sound. Even in the absence of external noise, our own bodies create sound. And focusing our attention on the qualities of the sounds around us brings us into a fuller awareness of the present moment.

Acoustic literacy

I am nothing of an acoustician. I don’t begin to be able to comprehend the mathematics and physics that regulate the way sound behaves in different physical spaces. Nonetheless, hearing is by far my dominant sense and as a result I find that I have an intense intuitive awareness of the acoustic properties of physical spaces.

It’s not an intentional awareness and often it’s not even conscious. I find that it’s a difficult experience to put into words. Part of what makes it difficult is that I’m talking not about the experience of sound itself, but rather about an awareness of the behavior of sound within a given space. The sound of a hand clap in an empty room, to give a simple example, is very different than a hand clap in a fully furnished room. The sound of a footstep is different in a bathroom and in a gymnasium. Even if the original source of the sound is identical, the behavior of that sound in different rooms transforms our experience of it.

The reason for this is reverberation. When sound waves move out from their source, they eventually make contact with the surfaces around them. When they bounce off of those surfaces we hear, in addition to the initial sound, its reflection.

Different surfaces behave differently when sounds hit them. Some tend to absorb sound, some reflect them back. Surfaces at different distances reflect the sound at different time intervals. Different materials absorb or reflect particular frequencies of sound. As I say, the mathematical formulas describing the acoustic behavior of different spaces is extremely complex and beyond my understanding. But those who do understand it have created software which can model many different spaces, as in the examples below, which I created by taking a single sound source then running it through different settings on the reverb plug-in on my computer.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In this example I’ve taken a simple drum beat and repeated it eight times. The difference should be fairly clear even on the worst speakers. The first version is “dry” – no additional reverb has been applied. In the second reverb is applied to create the effect of hearing the sound from a great distance. The third replicates the acoustics of a kitchen. The fourth is a large room. The fifth is a tunnel, the sixth a cathedral, the seventh and exhibition hall and the eighth mimics a martial arts stadium. (For those who are interested, I did this using two of the reverb plug-ins that come with Cubase 5 – Reverence and RoomWorks. I didn’t do anything fancy with the settings, just used the presets that come with these programs.)

Echoic, Anechoic

As I say, my understanding of what’s happening here is primarily intuitive. My ears pick up on these differences and I respond to them. We all perform some version of this extraordinarily complex process. Sort of like bats using echolocation, our minds are constantly making subtle assessments of the relationship between the sources of sounds and the reflections those sounds are creating.

As Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter in the introduction to their wonderful book Spaces Speak, Are You Listening, the ability to sense spatial attributes is not unique to bats and dolphins. It’s hard-wired into our brains. “For example,” they write, “when blindfolded, nearly all of us can approach a wall without touching it just by attending to the way the wall changes the frequency balance of the background noise.” We’re not ordinarily conscious of doing this. But if I blindfolded you and teleported you to the inside of a cathedral, you’d know instantly what sort of space you were in. And if I then teleported you into a bathroom, you’d automatically feel the difference.

Personally, I find that I’m very sensitive to these differences. There are rooms that I can barely stand to be in because of their acoustic properties. And there are other spaces that I completely love. One of the rooms I like the most acoustically

is the music studio that I have created in the basement of my house. It’s a narrow room and before I began using it for music it was acoustically unpleasant…boomy and tight. I treated the walls with a great deal of acoustical foam, which absorbs much of the sound in the room before it reverberates off of the walls (particularly lower, bass frequencies). The effect is a room that, when you walk into it, feels soft and hushed, gently contained. The acoustical treatment has shaped the behavior of sound within the room in a way that makes it much more pleasant. At least to me.

This can be taken to extremes. Blesser and Salter describe the effects of “anechoic chambers,” rooms which have been specially designed so that all surfaces absorb rather than reflect sound waves. “From an aural perspective,” they write, “an ideal anechoic chamber is completely silent and entirely ‘spaceless.’” They describe the sensations of pressure, discomfort, disorientation, even nausea that are created by the absence of sonic reverberation. “The combination of sound isolation and absorption reduces background sound to a level that no longer masks the sound of a listener’s breathing heart or flowing blood.”  Indeed, when John Cage entered the Harvard anechoic chamber in 1948 he reported that rather than hearing silence he heard two distinct sounds which he was told were the sounds of his nervous system and his circulatory system. There is no such thing, he concluded, as perfect silence.


 

I am Standing in a Room

The theme song for this exercise is not a song at all. It is a classic piece of sound art by Alvin Lucier called I am Standing in a Room. (It’s a piece which I’ve listed, along with other minimalist classics, in the “further listening” at the end of the exercise Repeat Yourself.) In this piece, Lucier takes a simple piece of audio (a spoken paragraph) and plays it in a room then re-records the sound as it sounds in the room. He repeats this process over and over until the original sound is transformed by the reverberant properties of the room itself. It’s an extraordinary exploration of the sonic and acoustic principles I’ve been discussing in this post.  An illustration of the technique can be found in the video below. If you’d like to get the entire mesmerizing and surprisingly poignant 45 minute piece, you can find it here.


 

As always, I welcome suggestions for other pieces of music which capture the essence of the exercise.

Further reading

I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:

As always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.

Further, further reading

More detailed reading on spatial acoustics, borrowed from Blesser and Salter’s website:

 

Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Move As If You Were Underwater – here.

Share

This is my brain on solitude

 1 Response »
Jun 282010
 


Last week I spent four days alone in the woods.

This is something I used to do when I was younger and I’ve rediscovered in recent years how powerfully important this deep experience of solitude is to me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why that is.

Here’s what I do.

I pick an general area of reasonably accessible wilderness, or near-wilderness. Then I hike in five miles or so. I don’t hold a highly specific destination in mind, just a general area. I hike until I reach the edge of exhaustion, when I know that I can keep going, but I really don’t want to. Then I start looking for a campsite.

By beginning to look for a campsite at precisely the point at which my stamina begins to fray I knowingly introduce an element of anxiety and uncertainty into my experience: I’m alone, I’m exhausted, I don’t know exactly where I am or where I’m going to sleep…and there’s no one but me around to figure it out.

It might sound paradoxical, but this small experience of anxiety is one of the most important, and most defining features of the trip. It is a tension that defines my entire experience in the woods, as I walk the line between exposure and security.

In choosing a camp site I have two essential criteria. One is practical, the other personal: I have to be near water, and I need to be in a place where I know that I am not going to see any other people while I’m camped there. It’s not hard to find a spot near water; a lot of trails track river drainages. And for that matter, finding a place where I’ll be left alone isn’t too hard either…the vast majority of forest land is empty of people, who mostly stick to the trails and established campgrounds.  But acquiring this solitude is a bit more complicated than it sounds. Because while I don’t want anyone to stumble upon my campsite, it would be irresponsible to hide myself so well that I couldn’t be discovered if I truly needed to be. If something genuinely bad should happen to me – if I should get mauled by a bear, say – I want to make myself “findable.” Visible from the air and not deviating from the general area that I’ve told people I’m going to be.

The result is a strange sort of solitude. Because there’s nothing enforcing it. There are no barriers keeping people out. Anyone could walk right through my camp. No one will, but anyone could. This adds another level of subtle tension to the experience.

On this trip I hiked up the Monture Creek drainage, about an hour’s drive from my home in Missoula. The trail is a major corridor into the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area (“The Bob,” as people around here call it), and it is heavily used by mule pack trains led by guides and outfitters who are hauling in supplies for their clients. I started out at around noon on a Wednesday, in the middle of an on-and-off  rainstorm that had been ongoing for several days. I didn’t see another soul during the four-hour hike, but there was no question as to who had been using the trail, which was pretty much an endless mule-trodden mud trough.

By the time I was ready to stop and set up camp, I had gotten in maybe five miles or so, past the bridge over Wedge Creek and just up to another small unnamed creek. The trail ran more or less parallel to Monture Creek, but the creek itself was only occasionally visible as I hiked. I knew it was there, but it was out of sight. So the time had come to perform the maneuver technically known as “bush-whacking.” I headed off the trail and through the woods down toward the creek, to locate a suitable camp site.

This , for me, is probably the most stressful part of the whole experience. The minute I step off the trail I feel sort of like an outlaw. This particular section of forest was a mass of live and fallen trees which made finding my way difficult. (It’s an experience that always makes me recall the agnozing descriptions of  breaking trail in the journals of Lewis & Clark.) When you’re dead tired and carrying a heavy load on your back, it’s easy lose your balance and I know that inevitably I’ll fall a few times before I finally find a suitable campsite.

By definition, I am exhausted by the time I finally start setting up camp. And in this case I was also soaking wet – in spite of the rain gear that I was wearing. Setting up camp in the rain is a uniquely challenging experience. There’s urgency about it, because you know that everything that gets wet in the process will stay wet for as long as it keeps raining, and for all you know that might be for the entire rest of the trip. I also find myself struggling with my own unrealistic expectations. Having located a campsite, I want it to feel the same way that it does when I arrive home after a long car trip…easy and relaxing. But of course, there’s no home there yet. I have to create it.

Once the tent is up, once my backpack has been emptied into it, its contents sorted out, once I’ve located a spot to hang my food away from bears and set up the apparatus to do it, once I’ve filtered a short-term supply of water from the creek, once I’ve inflated my sleeping pad and pulled out my sleeping bag, …then I finally strip out of my wet clothes and climb into the tent and finally collapse.

From this point on, the demands on me become much more simple. I need to rig up my small camp stove and organize my gear inside the tent. I change into some dry clothes and I put some water on the stove to boil. I lay back and, at last, let myself relax.

The next twenty-four hours are primarily spent recovering from the effort it took to arrive. With no expectations on me, I eat and read and I sleep. I do which ever thing calls to me most at the moment.

That seems like a simple sentence, but it describes a truly dramatic shift from my usual experience. I stop trying to cognitively guide and structure my experience. I begin letting go of what Dan Siegel refers to as “top-down processing” – that way of organizing our experience that we have all developed which allows us to move efficiently through the world by rapidly overlaying a map of our mental expectations over our present moment experience. This is an important way in which we enable ourselves to function effectively in the world….but it comes at the cost of a genuine awareness of our authentic present-moment sensations and experience.

It’s amazing how hard it is to let go of this top-down processing  in everyday life, but how easy it is once I have finally gotten myself into a state of true solitude.  It is amazing to discover, over and over again, how much the presence of other people can distract me from my authentic experience. Because it is only in knowing that I do not and will not have to have an interaction with another human being that I am able to relax this deeply into my truest self.

For the first day I rarely leave the tent, and rarely want to. After that, I feel less tired and I notice that I am taking fewer naps. I take a little time to explore, to fish in the creek, or simply to wander aimlessly. I spend more time reading, allowing myself to immerse completely in the world of the book that I have brought. In this case, the book was David Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, a philosophical exploration and argument regarding the biological basis for the experience of consciousness. Which proved to be the perfect subject matter for a trip on which I was naturally spending much of my time observing the activity of my own mind.

In the days that follow I move between these simple routines, guided only by my “bottom-up” awareness of my own experience. I don’t necessarily recognize that this is what happens, until a simple but extraordinary thing happens, a few days into the trip: I find myself staring out into the woods. Not spacing out, but not paying “attention” either. Not trying to figure anything out, and not not trying to figure anything out. Just staring, openly, without expectations, without anything having to mean anything. It’s a bit disorienting when I first catch myself doing it. Part of me tries to break in, to force myself to do something with my attention. But there is nothing to do with it. It just is.

It is an exquisite sensation

I don’t know whether other people seek solitude in this particularly aggressive manner. Those who do are probably not likely to talk much about it. I just know that it is a need that is deeply woven into my personality. I am a profoundly, constitutionally introverted person. That is to say that while relationships are vitally important to me, there is a way that engaging in them drains energy from me. The way I restore myself is through solitude. So freeing myself in this explicit manner from any expectation of human contact is both liberating and energizing. It allows me to relax in a way that I can rarely if ever achieve otherwise. It allows me to be myself.

Before I set out on this trip I had been warned that the bears were out along Monture Creek. I had bear spray with me, but I hadn’t see any sign of them until the return trip. In the mud along the trail as I hiked out their powerful prints were clearly visible. I descended cautiously, happy to feel the intimidating presence of bears without having ever making contact.

When I finally emerged and got back into cell phone range, I checked my voice mail which contained bad news, deeply sad and difficult news: my wife’s father was dying. I had been unreachable while bad things had happened, and she had moved forward, dealing with them without me.

So I moved back into the world, to face things for myself.

This is the condition of my soul.

In the safety of solitude, I risk disconnection. In the stillness of isolation, I risk becoming an exile. I am forever struggling to find a middle ground.

Share

The Minutes-to-Mindfulness Top Ten

 No Responses »
Jun 142010
 

 

“The mindful state, even if just a hint of it is created by a few moments of silent breath awareness…seems to create a receptive presence of mind.”  Dan Siegel, The Mindful Brain


As an advocate of what I like to call “casual mindulness,” I am naturally drawn to meditation techniques which can done very briefly and without any long-term commitment. I am especially drawn to techniques which emphasize acceptance of human flaws and frailty as part of the practice. My own book, The Next Ten Minutes, embodies this spirit by using a series of everyday activities and experiences as the foundation for developing greater mindfulness in our day-to-day lives. In this book I have tried to identify ways in which the gaps and pauses within an ordinary day can be used to foster greater mindfulness. And I am always on the lookout for like-minded practitioners.

The idea behind casual mindfulness is simple: anything which temporarily shifts our state of mind into an attitude of greater mindfulness is valuable. It doesn’t matter how small or how simple the technique…if it produces even the slightest positive change in your state of mind, it’s useful. I think that many people are put off by the idea of mindfulness as an intensive spiritual discipline, which can make meditation practice feel like an impossible burden to take on. It can seem that the only way to achieve the benefits of meditation in one’s life is to fully commit oneself to the long-term practice of a set of complex and abstruse principles. As a result, becoming mindful starts to feel like joining a new religion, or going back to school.

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s anything wrong with such disciplined practice. In fact, I am in awe of people who can maintain such practices. They totally rule. I am simply not one of them. And I suspect that you may not be either.

My inability to sustain a truly disciplined meditation practice used to really discourage me, until I figured out that mindfulness is one area of life where casual, even half-hearted practice is actually beneficial. In most areas in life, this isn’t the case. For instance, banging out a few random notes on a keyboard isn’t going to improve your ability to play piano. And doodling in the margins of an algebra textbook isn’t going to improve your math skills.

But pausing to take a single focused breath – even if you don’t give it any more thought than that – is going to create a small but significant shift in your state of mind.

You could read that last sentence and feel a sense of futility. Or you could recognize how profound the present-moment value of that gesture really is. In this moment, you can change your mind.

This is why I believe that in certain ways casual approaches to mindfulness can be as powerful as more disciplined practices. Because they are accessible to anyone, at any moment. I’ve found that one of the best ways to identify such techniques is to look for meditation instructions which contain the word “minute” in their description. The creators of these techniques (and I of course am now among their number), are inherently optimistic about the power of mindfulness even in extremely low doses. It is in the spirit of celebrating casual mindfulness that I created the Minutes-to-Mindfulness Countdown which follows. (Note: this list was first posted on my Facebook page, The League of Half-Assed Meditators. Check out that page to see the runners-up for each ranking. Book descriptions from Amazon.)


The Next Ten Minutes: 51 Absurdly Simple Ways to Seize the Moment

It’s me!


The desire to discover meaning in our lives is a powerful motivator for many people. Some turn to psychotherapy and counseling for help, some turn to spiritual teachings, and many turn to both. The Next Ten Minutes is the guide to help us discover the seeds of transformation and meaning in even the most ordinary routines.The Next Ten Minutes consists of a collection of exercises originally created for use in the Dr. Peterson’s successful counseling practice. Rather than taking readers out of the everyday, Dr. Peterson invites them to move more deeply into the familiar tasks of ordinary life, such as turning simple breathing, eating, physical love, or throwing out the trash into meditative exercises that can transform your day. Based on both Buddhist philosophy and proven psychology techniques, these succinct and accessible meditations also offer simple and effective methods for therapeutic counseling and personal growth. The power to seize the day is but a few simple steps away.



Coming in at number NINE…this delightfully insane meditation clock!





8 Minute Meditation: Quiet Your Mind, Change Your Life

A nice de-obfuscation of meditation techniques.

 

 

In recent years, mainstream Americans have begun to come around to meditation in a big way-and scientific studies are suggesting that the physical and mental benefits are solid and real. But to many, it remains something mystical and inaccessible…and spiritually-oriented tomes on the market don’t do much to make it easier. As interest in meditation continues to grow, this book offers a simple, no-nonsense program to help beginners experience reduced stress and increased focus in only eight minutes a day. Designed by meditation expert and bestselling author Victor Davich, this program teaches the basic principles of meditation while clearing up the misconceptions and myths that too often get in the way.



7 Minutes of Magi: Recharge Your Body Each Day with Qi Gong

It’s not exactly meditation, but it’s definitely meditative enough to belong on this list.


A blend of Eastern movements rooted in qi gong and Western fitness, 7 Minutes of Magic offers the perfect total workout to dramatically change your energy and fitness levels each day. In the morning, the seven-minute sequence wakes up the body with flowing movements and stretches designed to charge the muscles with energy and help focus the mind for the rest of the day. While in the evening, the exercises clear stress and calm the mind for sound sleep. In addition, Holden provides breathing techniques, nutritional tips, and advice on simple lifestyle changes throughout the day to increase vitality. Complete with more than 125 step-by-step, black-and white photographs, variations for more targeted workouts, and additional routines for more relaxed weekends, with 7 Minutes of Magic readers will start feeling their best today.



 

At number six, it’s Florian! Who suggests: “Let’s just sit silently and BE.”




Flip the Switch: 40 anytime, anywhere meditations in 5 minutes or less

I love the way this shoehorns meditation into the small moments of everyday life.

In this hurried world, when is there a chance to stop everything and meditate? Flip the Switch offers 50 surprisingly easy answers. It’s not necessary to be in a special quiet room or twisted pretzel-like into the lotus position to meditate – countless opportunities for quick meditations abound. Flip the Switch points out the time gaps that come throughout the day (idling at a red light, waiting for a computer to restart, standing in line at the grocery store) and teaches specially designed meditations that fit each of these situations. As healthy as they are convenient, the book’s “spot meditations” achieve many of the same positive changes as one long meditation session and can actually offer even greater overall benefits since the healthy transformations occur over and over throughout the day. The book offers quick, easy answers for reducing stress, improving health, clarifying thoughts, releasing creativity, deepening emotions, and boosting sensory pleasures.

 



Four-Minute Centering Meditation: Preparing to Listen to Your Patient

by Rebecca Shafir

www.mindfulcommunication.com

 

Step one:

Sit comfortably, feet flat on the floor, hands open on your lap. Feel your body against the chair. Gently close your eyes and breathe deeply. Watch and feel your breath moving in and out .

Step two:

Consider the mystery of what is about to occur – the fact that each of you- you and your patient – is a unique being and that your interaction, to the extent that it’s genuine, will be unprecedented.

Step three:

Become aware that each moment is brimming with possibilities, that by listening mindfully, you may be able to heal; by foregoing judgment, you may be able to see more deeply; by letting yourself be touched, you may convey to the patient that you care.

Step four:

Let your mind become quiet. Again, become aware of your breath. Feel your feet on the floor, your body against the chair. Breathe. Slowly open your eyes.




The Three Minute Meditator: Reduce Stress, Control Fear, Diminish Anger, in Almost No Time at All

There are quite a few three-minute resources out there. I like this one.


Meditation produces a mental state known as mindfulness, characterized by clarity, insight, and serenity, no matter what’s going on in the outside world. Unfortunately, many people feel they’re too busy to sit down for a relaxed meal, much less set aside time to meditate. The Three Minute Meditator was written for those harried souls who crave the benefits of mindfulness but who feel they just don’t have the time. It offers an easy-to-follow seven-step program that can be put into practice immediately and by anyone. Written in plain, jargon-free English, this simple plan shows that meditation doesn’t need to be arcane, difficult, or painful, that it won’t take time away from anything else, and that it can be learned and practiced in quick spurts throughout the day. Also included are special sections on how to apply mindfulness techniques to physical pain, relationships, aging, parenting, and other issues.


 

At number two: this guy meditating



Interestingly, the books available at number two all seem to have a Christian focus. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just not what this list is about. (Although it does make me curious what it is about the number “two” that draws this particular focus.) The number two mindfulness meditation video contains no instructions…. It’s nothing more than a video of this guy meditating…for two minutes. I love it for several reasons. First, because we naturally define meditation as an interior experience, we never actually sit and watch someone else do it. I imagine that some people might argue that attending to the “exterior” experience of meditation is distracting from the task at hand. But from the half-assed meditator’s perspective, it simply adds another layer to the experience. The other reason I love this video is because of this guy himself. “Mindfulness” is just not the word that comes to mind when you first look at him. But check out his smile as he opens his eyes at the end of the video. He’s a great embodiment of the universality of the practice.



The One-Minute Meditator: Relieving Stress and Finding Meaning in Everyday Life

This is how simple meditation can be.



In an age when everyone is pressed for time and completely stressed out to boot, finding inner peace in just one minute is the type of self-help concept that should quickly find an eager audience. In their new guide on how to meditate in short periods, authors David Nichol and Bill Birchard contend that because the true measure of life is how we feel and act minute to minute, “you can take any minute in life and turn it into a minute of better living. As some Japanese meditators say, you can steal moments from the day.”

In this hurried world, when is there a chance to stop everything and meditate? Flip the Switch offers 50 surprisingly easy answers. It’s not necessary to be in a special quiet room or twisted pretzel-like into the lotus position to meditate – countless opportunities for quick meditations abound. Flip the Switch points out the time gaps that come throughout the day (idling at a red light, waiting for a computer to restart, standing in line at the grocery store) and teaches specially designed meditations that fit each of these situations. As healthy as they are convenient, the book’s “spot meditations” achieve many of the same positive changes as one long meditation session and can actually offer even greater overall benefits since the healthy transformations occur over and over throughout the day. The book offers quick, easy answers for reducing stress, improving health, clarifying thoughts, releasing creativity, deepening emotions, and boosting sensory pleasures.

Pr

Share

On jazz improvisation and mindfulness

 No Responses »
May 072010
 


A friend of mine who is learning to play jazz guitar recently asked me (as a jazz pianist) to help him make sense the art of improvisation. It’s a subject that I feel I understand quite deeply, but which I have never really tried to articulate in words. When he posed this question I was in the process of preparing a post for this space which, among other things, will examine some of the complexities of evaluating jazz composition and performance. As I considered his request, it occurred to me that a discussion of improvisation would be a nice way to get introduce the post which will follow.

The query came in two parts. First:

Suppose you — or another good jazz pianist — walked into a song they never heard before, just as the first solo began. Would this pianist be able to take a solo, knowing only what the first solo sounded like and the chord changes? Or would it be important to know the original melody?

And second:

If you or another good pianist sat in with a house band, and they struck up a tune you knew, but had never played, would your solo be

— entirely invented?

— comprised of riffs you have done many times before, but perhaps combined in innovative ways?

— mainly drawn from other solos of sequences you had practiced extensively?

I guess the heart of this question has to do with how much you are making up a new tune on the spot, and how much you are working with tools and building blocks that are familiar.

In order to address these questions, I need to start with a few general principles. A jazz compositions is usually written in the form of a “fake sheet” or a “lead sheet,” which is essentially an outline of the song containing the melody and the harmonic structure (the chord changes), as in this sample chart of Kern and Hammerstein’s “Why Do I Love You.”

In a typical jazz performance, the ensemble (or individual) would play the melody one or two times through, then individuals would take turns improvising solos over the chord changes, while the rhythm section (typically comprised of piano, bass and guitar) laid down the rhythm and harmony. So on one level, everything in a jazz performance except the melody is improvised…within (to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the style of the performers) the harmonic structure of the song. For instance, the specific voicings that a pianist uses to play a given chord when he’s “comping” behind a solo are infinitely variable. But while this accompaniment is “improvised,” it bears little relationship to an improvised solo. And this brings us to the heart of the question: what is it that a jazz musician is doing when he or she improvises a solo?

That question always takes me back to my memory of learning to improvise for the first time. It’s a uniquely complex experience. Performing an improvised solo is radically different than performing a traditional composition (i.e., one in which the notes that the musician plays are all written out). You might liken the experience of performing a piece of classical music (although the comparison is probably a bit unfair), to the task of a skilled orator delivering a pre-written speech. But with improvising, the music has to come from within you, in the present moment. It’s the equivalent of standing before an audience and reciting a poem which you are making up as you speak.

You’re not completely without guidance, of course. There’s the song’s harmonic structure which (again, to a greater or lesser degree) constrains the notes you choose to play. That’s why typically a person begins learning to improvise by simply noodling around on the notes that go with a particular chord. This is something that anyone with basic understanding of their instrument can do. In fact I have my nine-year old son do it sometimes during his piano practice. Using whatever scale he has been practicing, I’ll start playing some chords that go nicely with the notes of that scale. “Just use those notes,” I tell him. “Play them in any order or in any rhythm you want, skipping around, pausing, whatever you want to try. See what sounds good to you.”

After he gets over his initial hesitation, he usually discovers a riff or two that he likes. Then he starts playing those over and over again.

But it’s almost impossible to talk about this without listening to an example. So let’s take one of the easiest jazz forms to comprehend: a 12-bar blues progression. Even if you aren’t a musician and don’t know how to make sense of the harmonic structure of this progression (I – IV – I – V – IV – I), your ear will recognize the pattern, which forms the basis for countless familiar songs. Here, for purposes of illustration, is a classic recording of Duke Ellington’s C-Jam Blues.





The melody consists an extremely simple eight-note phrase which is repeated three times over the 12-bar progression. It’s played one time through by Duke on the piano, then once by the band, after which members of the orchestra take a series of solos over the song’s chord structure. (Actually you might notice that each solo begins with four bars of unaccompanied soloing, before the 12-bar structure of the song repeats). On the fifth solo (Barney Bigard on clarinet), the orchestra begins playing an accompaniment for the solo, which swells into a variation of the main melody for the final cycle through the changes.

The task while listening to this, for someone who’s trying to learn how to improvise, is to figure out what the soloists are doing as they improvise. And the most important thing here, I think, is that they are creating their solos based on the harmonic structure of the song. That’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen this particular piece. In general, the solos you hear here are in keeping with the style and the time. They’re “inside” the chord changes (i.e., they’re not atonal) and they tend toward a more melodic style. Nonetheless, these guys aren’t simply repeating their scales and arpeggios. There are a lot of “blue” notes – notes that aren’t exactly part of the harmonic structure at that moment but that sound wrong in a satisfying way (listen for instance to the note that Rex Stewart lands on and plays twice at 1:04-05). So the question remains: what are they actually doing? What’s the intention that drives the notes they choose to play?

There are several ways to conceptualizes this. One is to think of the soloists creating their own melody over the chord structure. Some musicians are particularly melodic improvisers – Keith Jarrett often plays that way on the piano. (See the three clips below for examples of each of the styles I will describe here.) On the other end of the spectrum is what I would call more “structural” improvising, in which, rather than creating something that sounds melodic, the performer is creating interesting musical patterns using the harmonic structure of the song. That’s the direction Charlie Parker moved in with the development of be-bop. You can often hear the shreds of melodic lines within his solos, but the overall impression those phrases leave (to my ear at least) is not especially melodic – he’s creating extended linear structures, often using little more than scales related to chords of the song (although he does it so fast that it’s hard to take it in). Taking it a step further, John Coltrane (especially in his later years) was extremely “structural” in how he improvised, but in a more abstract sort of way that could depart further and further from the song’s underlying harmonic structure.

So, to make sense of improvisation, you have to try to put yourself into the mind of the great improvisers. A way of listening that I have found that helps me to do this is to listen to a solo as if I were playing it myself. When there’s a pause in the solo, I ask myself what I would play next. Then I listen to what is actually played. I ask myself: what was the state of mind of the performer that led him in that direction rather than in mine?

This is to say that learning to improvise requires a bit of cognitive reverse-engineering. In fact, one of the things that helped me most when I was learning to improvise was analyzing the improvisation of musicians I admired. My high school jazz band teacher made transcribing solos a regular assignment. It’s a fascinating exercise which is not unlike what I experienced later in my professional life as a psychotherapist when I learned to analyze videotapes of parent-child interactions. You take an experience which is the essence of present moment spontaneity and pin it down in time and analyze it. It is always extraordinary to me to realize how much complexity is contained within a single moment of a jazz performance.

So, getting around to my friend’s first question: what would happen if I walked into a song just as the solos began? For me, that question depends largely upon whether or not there was a fake sheet that I could look at. If there were, then I’d be fine. The original melody would actually be completely irrelevant to me. All I’d need to know would be the key changes. But if I didn’t have a chart and the key changes were complex, I’d be in trouble. While I’m sure that other musicians wouldn’t have so much of a problem with this, I learned my lesson the hard way years ago when I tried to sit in at an open jam session in New York. My turn to play came and the group started in on some song that I didn’t know and couldn’t quickly pick up. After a few moments I was tapped on the shoulder and someone who knew the song stepped in.

That was harsh. But the important thing is that it’s a matter of knowing the chord changes. If I had known them, I would have been okay.

My friend’s second question goes to the deeper nature of improvisation itself, which is in many ways a function of the style and personality of the individual musician. When I was younger I spent hours and hours practicing scales and arpeggios so that my fingers would be able to fluidly play those patterns. What that meant was that even if I weren’t feeling particularly inspired, I could play a passable solo on most any song just using the patterns that I had trained my fingers to play.

Not that I was interested in doing this. Looking back, I can see that I was interested in jazz as a sort of means to an end. Although I didn’t always have the concept of “mindfulness” back then, I believe that playing music has always been essentially a form of mindfulness meditation for me. Usually when I play I am simultaneously performing and observed my own attentional state as I play. Because of this, over time I came to understand more deeply the distinction I outlined earlier, between what I call melodic and structural improvisation. There’s a fundamental difference of awareness and intention between the two.

It’s possible to create a solo based on the melodic pattern you hear in your mind…to use a sort of “melodic intention” as your guide. That’s what I hear for instance when I listen to Keith Jarrett improvise (although I have no idea whether he himself would describe it in these terms). On the other hand, It’s also possible to direct your creative intention in a more abstract and structural manner, to focus your mental state on the creation of sonic patterns within the harmonic structure of the song. That becomes more of a mathematical exercise, which can have a beauty all it’s own. And that’s what I hear in Coltrane’s playing.

There are undoubtedly other ways to conceptualize improvisation, but this is how my mind breaks it down. And what’s important here is that I’m talking not so much about musical technique but rather about a musician’s state of mind with regard to improvisation. The fact is, it’s very difficult to improvise without mindfulness. It’s an activity which forces your brain into a heightened state of awareness of the present moment. That’s why it’s so difficult to describe in words: it’s a subjective aesthetic experience. There’s no easy way to measure or quantify or even to describe such a thing.

I believe that this is why there is often an edge of emotional struggle in both the music and the lives of great jazz musicians. Because while this sort of mindfulness creates the potential for deep joy, it also requires a performer to open to the truth of whatever fears and anxiety and grief he or she may hold within them. When you make yourself fully mindful of yourself in the present moment, you don’t get to pick which aspects of your experience you get to be mindful of…it’s all there.

That said, I do think that certain jazz musicians manage to play it safe. I won’t name names. But to my mind, no matter how technically accomplished such performers are, listening to them is an aggravating experience. All I can hear is the missed opportunity. What I love about playing jazz is the sense of infinite possibility I experience every single time I start to play a solo. There is, every time, a vivid and heightened sensation of delight and terror…the awareness that I have the opportunity to create something utterly new. As a listener, therefore, I’m drawn to performers who exhibit novelty and complexity, to the quality of deep and authentic self-revelation in the moment of performance. I love the raw and powerful present-moment energy that band leaders like Charles Mingus and Miles Davis were able to draw from their musicians. I love the weird power of Sun Ra and Carla Bley. And lately I’ve been particularly mesmerized by pianist Vijay Iyer. His compositions and solos are so clearly structured, yet so densely complex that often I can barely figure out what he’s doing.



It’s utterly exhilarating to open yourself to something that is goes beyond your capacity for comprehension.

Share

How my mind works, part 1: thinking in sound

 5 Responses »
Mar 292010
 

What do you see when you look at your own mind?

What do you hear?

I have long been an avid student of the workings of my own mind. I find that I can’t help myself. Even when I want to (and I do have such moments), I simply can’t shut off the part of my mind that is constantly observing itself.

While some might dismiss such activity as solipsistic, I am convinced that the self-awareness such attention creates is the foundation for good mental health and for healthy relationships.

That’s certainly what the research on attachment tells us. The attachment literature calls the capacity of the mind to reflect on its own activity “self-reflective functioning,” and research has demonstrated that this capacity is critical if parents are to raise securely-attached children. It is also an essential component in building and sustaining healthy intimate relationships in adulthood.

Buddhists have known this for a long time, of course. In the Buddhist tradition this capacity has been cultivated through mindfulness meditation, in which the mind is trained to watch itself in action. Generally the way this works is like this. You sit and focus your attention on your breath, trying to bring full awareness to this simple experiential cycle: in, out, in out. What inevitably happens is that after a few seconds your mind wanders off…worrying about something you need to do or about things you’ve already done. The future, the past…anything but the present moment. A common instruction when this happens is to give your brain’s activity a name (“worrying,” “planning,” etc.) and then to gently and non-judgmentally bring your attention back to your breath. You do this again and again and again and over time your capacity to observe your own mind grows stronger and stronger. In the process, you have a million opportunities to study the peculiarities of your own particular mind.

Now this is where I’ve begun to get confused.

What most people seem to describe when they meditate is a mental process which, however non-linear, seems to be defined by a single strand of thought. Attention to the breath may be interrupted by a worried thought, which in turn leads to another thought, and then another. The result might be a confusing series of thoughts, but it seems to remain serial: one thought at a time.

What I’m finding as I move deeper into my own meditation practice is something different. When I listen to the activity of my own mind (and I use the word “listen” purposefully), what I hear is a soup of sounds, words and half-thoughts, out of which arises whatever coherent linear thoughts I happen to have. I have no idea whether this is a normal experience in meditation or a peculiarity of my own mind.

I know that people experience all sorts of rich, complex and subtle awarenesses during meditation. And it is obviously quite difficult to compare one person’s subjective experience to another’s, much less to create an experiential taxonomy of those experiences. In many ways, it’s not important. I know that my task is simply to observe my mental experience – whatever form it happens to take – with openness and acceptance.

Still, I find myself a little bothered by the workings of my mind. Because I experience this aural soup of thoughts and half-thoughts as a sort of clutter, white noise which at times makes it very difficult to focus on any one particular thing. I can’t help but wonder if it’s related to what some people with AD/HD describe: an inability to effectively filter out incoming stimuli (although in my case much of the stimuli seems to be internally-generated).

While I find this experience very difficult to describe to others, one thing I know for certain is that I experience this murky mental stew quite literally as sound. In fact, I believe that I may be able to replicate a version of the experience in sound and I am currently at work on a musical piece which attempts to do just that (watch for it soon on this site).

This brings me to Temple Grandin. Recently I read her wonderful book, Thinking in Pictures, in which she describes her particular experience of autism as one in which she experiences her thoughts as visual images. It was startling to me how much I identified with her experience, even though I myself am a consummately non-visual person. I cannot retain visual information to save my life. But I’ve begun to wonder whether I think in sound. The more I study my own mind, the more likely this seems. I “hear” my thoughts. In studying Chinese, I struggle mightily to learn the characters, but the tonality of speech echoes easily in my mind. And when I recall past conversations, what comes into my mind are the rhythms and tones of speech…the words fill themselves in on that sonic framework.

In some ways this is a good thing, in other ways it’s a drawback. I have, for instance, always been frustrated by the fact that I am such a slow reader. Recently I started attending to my experience while reading and I realized something: I cannot read without hearing the words I’m reading in my mind. As a result, I can’t read any faster than I could say the words aloud.

I’m fond of my mind. But sometimes it tries my patience.

Share
© 2011 The Next Ten Minutes Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha