emergingconsciousness-blog

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2017, A Stoic is Born

I’ve long suspected that my blood runs a little Vulcan green; I often feel alien to this world and have always valued stoicism :). Nevertheless, my experience over this past year has revealed to me just how central to my moral schema the values of stoicism are. To be clear I think emotions, particularly fear and love, can be very useful, but unfettered by reason one moves chaotically through life swinging from one extreme view to the next.

I began 2017 in a state of anxiety. With a newly minted President Trump, the looming dystopia felt all but guaranteed. Yet over the course of the year, I have been happily surprised to see how well our institutions have withstood a kleptocrat such as he. The potential for nuclear war with North Korea and the loss of our position as a world leader are both still new realities that we must contend with, but day-to-day life remains largely the same.

For me, the most prominent change that has taken place over this past year has been in my world view. I had previously held a somewhat utopian vision of humanity's status in the evolutionary process. I viewed our species as highly cognitive talking apes that were rapidly advancing past our more primal instincts.  But watching wave after wave of outrage flash through the internet without any sign of self-awareness has painted humanity in a far less flattering light. Retrospectively, my proud vision of our species may have been naïve. Especially considering our young age and the limited time we have had with the linguistic technologies of reading and writing.

All in all, 2017 has been a year of disturbing emotional indulgence. For many the current political situation has become a new obsession, resulting in the unchecked immersion in anger and sadness. For others this manifested in the blind embrace of a sexual counter revolution which dangerously conflates sexual misteps with overt acts of abuse. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this movement has been the automatic attribution of veracity to these public accusations.  For yet others this indulgence has fueled the spreading of memes and news without any serious consideration to their value or authenticity. The common thread in all of these situations is the seeming lack of careful thought and an absence of collective self-awareness. In general, people seem to have adopted a reactionary existence this past year. The tragic irony here is that for so many on the Left, they have become the same sort of fanatical partisans as those they hold in contempt and disgust on the Right.

I realize how preachy this post is and I accept that. This needed to be said. There are kernels of truth and substance in many of these outrage driven movements and they are becoming poisoned by the fury to which they are attached. My hope for 2018 is that we will all make the choice to slow things down, to stop simply reacting, and instead to assume a more measured mode of communicating.

(Photo by me)

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Heat Seeking Mammal: The Meditative Side of Touch

Developing a regular practice of meditation has long been a desire of mine. Yet, I continually fail at this. As a graduate student and as a developing powerlifter my hours are pretty full, but there is no doubt that I could easily squeeze a regular 5 min meditation into my schedule. For the time being I have accepted my inability to implement this practice. I have not given up on this goal, but I realize that I am momentarily lacking the discipline for it. Nevertheless, I will keep trying.

 Outside of dedicated meditative practice, I do my best to practice mindful living. With this I have achieved greater success. For most people I would imagine this isn’t especially easy and for me it often takes an active internal mantra to bring my awareness back to my bodily sensations and into the present moment. Speaking generously, I probably spend a collective 15 minutes a day successfully holding myself in this state – typically in intervals on the order of seconds to minutes. In the immediate as well as in the larger scope of my experience these moments of mindfulness exert a great calming effect. They help to stabilize me as I attempt to progress through the demands of the day.

 This practice is not something new to me. As far back as I can remember I have been acutely aware of the passage of time and of the finite nature of our mortal existence. Even as pre-adolescent, I remember pondering this existential reality – albeit in a far more primitive form than I do today. My solution to these thoughts as a child was a in some ways a form of mindfulness. I imagined that if I encoded the sensations of the moment as maximally as possible, I would carry these salient memories throughout my life thereby somehow defeating the limitations mortal existence. At minimum, doing so helped relieve the immediately stress of feeling trapped by the finite nature of existing within linear time.

 Interestingly, I remember these thoughts arising in seemingly mundane moments; often occurring in times of solitude. An acute memory of one such mundane moment happened one crisp autumn afternoon. I was jumping on a trampoline in our backyard as the sun was setting. I remember recognizing that this was a simple moment that I wanted to hold with me and so I pulled my awareness out of the thickets of my mind to focus on my bodily sensations. I felt the freshness of the cool air moving along my skin as I slowly rose and fell in the air. I remember staring into the sun through the browning leaves of the season, closing my eyes and watching the negative image fade from behind my eyelids. I remember the lightness I felt floating in mid-air before gravity pulled me back down. The clarity of this memory will hopefully remain with me till I die. (As an aside to this post, memory as an aspect of mindfulness is not something I have seen discussed significantly. Though I am poorly read on the subject, so this may well be addressed. As I see it, in addition to the immediate calming effect that living mindfully has, the long term effect of encoding rich sensory memories would seem to me to deepend our future conscious experience. But I digress.)

 In my adult life these moments of pure clarity of sensation have been far and few between. But recently I have stumbled into an unforced meditation-like practice. Over the last few weeks my husband and I seem to have unintentionally developed a new morning ritual. We don’t fall asleep embracing, nor do we wake up that way, but lately, in the early morning we nuzzle up against each other, tucking our heads together, quietly embracing as we float in and out of consciousness we. In a certain way this ritual has become a form of meditation for me. There is something exceptionally unique about sharing the emergence into waking consciousness with someone else. Rising into consciousness together we are able to share a moment of connectedness while our minds free of the clutter that wakefulness brings with it. In these moments all around us is still. I don’t feel the urgency of the day’s demands pressing down on me. It is almost an egoless state. All I feel in these moments is the warmth and rhythm of breath of the creature with which I am intertwined.

 I am not prone to anxiety, but with the combined stress of my academic career and the increasing awareness of what seems to be failing liberalism, I have been experience a heaviness I think must be anxiety. This morning ritual has been a saving grace for me. I don’t know how long it will last. Life might get in the way, but for he time being I am grateful for these moments. And while traditionally I think of meditation as a solitary practice, I am beginning to reconsider this idea.  I am also beginning to embrace the possibility that moments like these may serve as a form of meditation if we tune into them. That being said, there really is no substitution for the dedicated discipline of meditation, but for someone like myself who is struggling to begin serious meditative practice I embrace this “naturally occurring” meditation.

(Photo taken by me: Sunrise)

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Letters from my Mother

I grew up in a complicated home. My father was an abusive spouse and a largely absent father who was an emotionally abusive parent when present. Two years after I was born, my family emigrated to the US. We moved around for a few years and finally settled in NY, but my father maintained a position back in MA, the first state we had arrived in. From this point on, he would spend weekdays in MA and travel down for the weekends, thus giving my mother and the family a reprieve from his company. Perhaps it was this distance or perhaps it was the result of being transplanted from the socially restrictive culture of apartheid South Africa to a more openly liberal society that lead the dissolution of my parents’ union. Thus I spent my formative years being raised by a mother struggling to keep things afloat. I am the youngest of six, so between juggling parenting responsibilities, trying to survive an abusive partner, struggling to make ends meet, and attempting to assimilate to a new culture, my mother had a pretty full plate. Amazingly, despite all these challenges, my mother managed to execute her parental role with surprising grace. She imparted in me a sense of self-worth and a sense of dignity for all humanity that made it impossible for me not to eventually question, challenge, and finally shirk the yoke of the intensely religious culture I was raised in. She wasn’t a saint and surely made mistakes as a parent, but looking back, she truly was and is a remarkable parent.

One of the most admirable tools she employed in her efforts to guide us through conflicts and misbehavior was letter-writing. On occasions where we crossed a critical behavioral line or where a conflict arose between us, we would be sure to find a carefully composed hand written letter laying on our pillows the following day. These letters were written in this beautiful cursive with such a delicate touch that the pens path was barely discernable to the touch. Growing up reading standard print, getting through this beautiful script took a fair amount of effort and focus. In these letters she would explain, in detail, how she felt about our behavior, what she expected of us, and what she was intending to do as a parent.

Looking back, I see now that she wasn’t always in the right and that her guidance was at times flawed, but this parenting method was a profoundly effective tool.  It allowed me to absorb her thoughts slowly and without the need to defend against the criticism in the immediate. It was often quite painful to read through these letters and to face the full extent of her criticism. But being delivered in written form, it spared me the humiliation of facing the shame of her criticisms in her presence. And perhaps most importantly it afforded me with an opportunity to embrace her thoughts with greater honesty than if it were delivered face-to-face.Putting aside the actual content of these letters, this parenting strategy alone conveyed so much. First her taking the time to carefully lay out her thoughts conveyed the clear message that she took me seriously as a person and that she believed in my intellectual ability to consider her criticism. It also told me that she cared deeply and that her intent was not to hurt, but rather to guide and support me. I think in many ways these letters and this tactic encouraged my developing metacognitive skills that carried me safely through the numerous traumas of my childhood and young adulthood.  I am so grateful for having been given this experience with conflict resolution.

Yet, I now live in an age were communication, even in literary form, is instantaneous. I have grown so accustom to having instantaneous access to the people in my life, that I rarely ever employ this letter-writing method of conflict resolution. Over the seven years of my relationship with my husband, I have used this tool only a handful of times. But, today, when speaking with a friend who is struggling to sort through a conflict in her relationship, I was reminded of this tool. For me, the process of writing (in my case, typing) out my thoughts with the dedicated intent of conflict resolution provides an opportunity for careful analysis of ones own cognitive and behavioral patterns that may have contributed to the conflict. It also allows one time to consider how these thoughts and behaviors may play into complex relationship dynamics. In the past I have only employed this strategy when a severe conflict has taken place, but it is one that I think we all should more readily use.  I am not suggesting that every little tiff result in a flood of prose, but that rather on select occasions where tension, distress and hurt feelings span well beyond the point of conflict initiation (on the order of days), sitting down in quiet reflectiveness and composing a letter might be the best strategy.

With these thoughts of letter-writing fresh in my mind, I thought this a good time to start this blog. We are living through complicated times and it seems like we are on the precipice of a major shift in the construct of liberal democracies. This has elicited an intensity of emotion and ideological fervor that seems to be fueling conflict all around us. Thus it is my intent and hope to use this blog explore my impressions of these conflicts in a constructive manner, providing for me a sort of release to better guide my confrontational impulses. 

(Photo: Ice Crystals: taken and edited by me 2014)