Twelve things:
The first is a confession about poor posture. I’ve been meditating on park benches. They are the rolling wooden type, a valley for your butt and a hill for your thighs. Each one is slightly misshapen – unique. To sit upright means your sitz bones push against a wooden outburst and it’s painful. So I sit with poor posture when I meditate on park benches, and I’m self-critical about this because I know that posture does, in fact, impact the outcome. I meditate in the park a lot. Have you heard of that litmus test for self-criticism where you consider whether you would criticize anyone else for the same thing you’re criticizing yourself for? This does not pass the litmus test.
The second is that at the park’s entrance I look around at the benches, trying to find a feeling of being drawn to one particular bench, or of being averse to others. If I can find such a feeling, I do what it says. Intuition training. Different benches prevail at different times. Sun and shade, who’s sitting where, what I would watch. Averse, always, to one bench with a conspicuous gap between two of its planks.
The third is that there is a new experience recently, a warm sensation in the chest both bounding forward and staying put. It feels like “the urge to think, coming from a place of love”.
The fourth is that I’ve been reading Rumi. Well, reading oversells it; I’ve been listening to an audiobook. And “listening” is a verb whose binary nature (you’re doing the verb or you’re not) elides the reality that the act it describes has degrees — like “bounding”. The act of “staying” is binary.
The fifth is that I listened (cf. #4) to a podcast with a spiritual man who, breaking up with nonduality after ten years, says true nature has many faces, not one. Good thing Brooklyn is non-monogamous, now.
The sixth is that after digging around my ribcage with a foam roller, I was light on my feet in a conversation. I stumbled into such lightness for the first time recently, and I’ve been trying to become light again through mind methods for several weeks, without much success. A little foam rolling did it. The conversation in question happened at the park, sitting at a table (usually not in the running for meditating).
The seventh is that I found out about an eye trick for open awareness meditation. When I tried it I felt like I’d been sipping a laced drink. Scene of the crime was – you guessed it – the park. Mind is tied intimately to body; eyes, posture, fascia. The winds carry the thoughts. Yet the same traditions that teach about mind and body contend that mind persists beyond body in some form. Hmm! (There’s more to learn.)
The eighth is that my forearm, wrist, and hand tendons are acting up, I think from holding dumbbells too often. Previously I could do this trick where I would trace the tension (probably) through fascia to other parts of my body, then physically or mentally release the tension in the remote location. Unfortunately, I’m out of practice.
The ninth is that many people around me are on emotional journeys. Letting sample bias be what it may be, is this a phenomenon of the mid 20s/30s (age) or a phenomenon of the early 20s (era)?
The tenth is a new categorization of motivations. I’ve defined them by somatic feeling and accompanying mental posture or activity.
(1) Felt in the heart – love.
(2) Felt brightly in the head – intellectual curiosity or conceptual configuring.
(3) Felt as a clutching in the body and the face, like a cousin of holding my breath – attachment of some kind, social craving, “cool”.
(4) Felt like Pixar light spilling out giddily from my belly, my heart, my eyes – play.
(5) Felt like the synesthetic expansion of soil – being an animal.
Which bench should I sit at? Should I meditate with proper posture? Remember, foam roll! Body controls mind, but mind goes beyond body? Why the park? Why the “Why the park?”
The eleventh is that I used to mistake (1)-(3) being present together as beauty. And, I’m not sure yet how to square #3 (heart-thought) with #10 (heart-love, head-thought).
The twelfth is that I’ve recently started learning about biofeedback. The basic setup of biofeedback is that a real-time measurement of some aspect of your biology is used to control something you can detect with your senses. For example, your brain’s electrical activity could control the size of something on a screen, like a circle. The programmer programs the circle to get bigger if your brain activity does something “good”, and then you – the user – are asked to make the circle get bigger. In order to do this, you will need to figure out how to do that “good” thing with your brain and keep doing it. You might use this to help you meditate, for example.
Twelfth, cont’d. Armchair philosophy, though not from the chest (see #3 above) says: to get people to adopt a new activity en masse, you need some behavioral continuity between the new activity and something else people are already used to doing. When the desired new behavior is familiar, people will be more likely to do it because the learning curve is comparatively less steep and it’s already socially acceptable. Consider FaceTiming: it was new to video chat from a phone, but familiar to chat with audio from a phone, and to chat with video from a computer. Biofeedback systems do not meet this criteria because with biofeedback, you’re imploring the user to do something (“control the size of this circle by relaxing”) that doesn’t have a behavioral analog. There’s also the related issue of needing a new physical object, like an EEG. I want to say biofeedback is aesthetically inelegant and call it a day. Too many pieces cobbled together in strange ways. Unfortunately, biofeedback works…
Twelfth cont’d, cont’d. To illustrate how biofeedback can be implemented in a way that’s familiar and doesn’t need a new physical object, consider partner dance and sex. There’s a quality of mind and body referred to as “easfulness”, which looks and feels like being easeful (...duh). It’s something you can sense in others (through sight, touch, moving with them, listening to them), and feel in yourself. As an empirical fact of human interaction, as you become more easeful, your counterpart does too (and vice versa, via a mutual feedback loop). Therefore, if you pay attention to the easefulness of your partner and intend to do what you gotta do for their actions to become more easeful, partner dance and sex can both become biofeedback activities. Your partner is both the sensor (like an EEG) and the sensory stimulus for feedback (like the circle whose size is controlled by the EEG). At this point the mechanic has transitioned from something technological to a somatic exercise, a dance instruction, an advice column in Cosmopolitan. Same conceptual framework, different packaging. (3) or #3?