11-22-18

Meditation Notes 3

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 3

In our last class on care and healing, we looked at how one uses the format of identifying context, the facts and details of any situation, and then working with the relationships we have to that particular context at a particular time. In this regard, relationships refer to our feelings generated by the emotions we have and which are often hidden in our subconscious. Thinking about context grounds us in our own lives and keeps us in touch with our inner spaces and how we perceive the world around us. The details of mundane life are a stream but we don't often perceive them that way. There seem to be individual periods of punctuation and interruption and disjointed connections. We seem to be more aware of the stream-like characteristics of our emotional lives and can perceive them as moving from one to the next. That said, we have more control over our inner lives, the meditative spaces, and can make choices about the possibilities that curiosity and inquiry open to us. This class focuses on what happens once we consciously enter the stream of our emotional lives with the intent to direct our attention to one thought at a time. The relationship we have identified as important to us assists in this effort of attention. The thread of attention here will be on resourcing, finding a source of meaning that can serve us as we settle into the meditative space. Poetry can be one source (not the source) for this step in meditation. It needs to be said that “resource” is a verb as well as a noun and, in the context of this course, represents a process of change.

Poetry needs no defense. It is able to stand on its own as a formation of mind and language. Its reputation for being arcane or difficult or irrelevant precedes it. But, like the outlier, the coyote, the nerd, the misfit, the holy fool, it has its own integrity, take it or leave it. I have chosen to take it in and place it into the class on meditation because of what it offers my experience with exploration of the mind. I offer it to all of you, thinking that it might take on some useful purpose as you explore your own versions of meditation. Once again, I emphasize that poetry is not one thing, rigid and fixed, just as any poem or meditation session is not just one concept or experience. If you can accept the idea that we are changing all the time in body, mind, and spirit (the wholeness axis), then perhaps you can see how poems change in relation to the changing contexts of our lives. If we take time and give poems a chance to speak to us, they will sound one way today and a different way tomorrow. That happens because the context of our lives changes from day to day and so we engage the poem as changing beings.

What I hope to do in this discourse is to show how I think poetry belongs to our considerations and explorations of meditation. It is not the only doorway to meditation (and may be, in fact, a stand-alone meditation in itself; if not in reading it, but also in writing it) but it can serve us in that capacity as well as any other. With the domain of self care always in mind, I would like to refer to some of those initial considerations (Class 1) when writing about the potential of poetry to stabilize our minds and open up space for meditation. In addition, I want to explore how the factors that seem to be important in meditation are also present in poems ( i.e, CONTEXT, RELATIONSHIPS, INTERACTION), just as they are present in encounters we have in our mundane life and I include here those occasions when we can replace reactivity with responsivity. The poems I have included in each class seem to me to be related in some way to the thread (theme) of that class, but you may read them differently. That leads us into experimentation with interpretation, always a good and healthy thing in lifelong learning.

It is worth emphasizing as often as I can that what each of these classes does is to tease out a thread from the whole fabric of the wholeness axis and from the fabric of meditation when, in fact, the intention is not to unravel but to make sure each thread tightens down the warp and woof of the entire project. It is by looking at the threads and seeing their contributions that we are able to integrate all of them into the whole. We do this with our lives and scientists do it with their experiments. By experimentation with pieces and threads, we come to some concept of how our lives are changing and progressing and we grow in appreciation and gratitude. By this method, we are able to make choices and change our minds.

I don't believe that there is any such thing as a “minor” poet. There are poets that make it big on the world scene for any number of reasons, and there are those that don't. But all of them begin with the same blank piece of paper and begin to choose words from similar cultural lexicons in different languages. In this, they begin as we would, were we to attempt a poem. What differs, of course, is the CONTEXTS of their different lives, the RELATIONSHIPS they have to their lives and their work, and the INTERACTIVE choices they make when they write. We read them on one day with our own contexts, relationships, and interactions and then on another day with a different set of factors, with different eyes and ears.

The CONTEXT of poetry includes, most obviously, language—words with meanings that are often straightforward and sometimes ambiguous. How they aggregate to create a narrative is a process that neuroscientists believe begins non-linguistically in parts of the brain dedicated to sorting and selecting representations or patterns in mental maps. Once narrative coalesces, the words become symbols and allow us to distance ourselves from experience long enough to perceive patterns in a complex universe. When we communicate those patterns to others, we open a gateway to understanding and sharing. This is the basic ground of communication and the ground of poetry as well. Perception of poetry as communication is segmented in the brain where a “top-down,” executive left brain deals with language as defined words and a “bottom-up” right brain takes a dominant role in interpreting words with ambiguous meaning. In addition, imagery evoked by poetry seems to activate areas of the right hemisphere dedicated to the visuospatial processes of the brain. The poet may be freeing us from the onerous entrapment of fixed meaning (left brain influence) and inducing an integrated state that contributes to the wholeness axis and emotional regulation in the resilient zone. A few moments of breath awareness or poetry reflection can create a state in our minds of receptive awareness to what arises. It is this pause or step back that rescues us from reactivity and fosters responsivity. These pauses are available to us at all times but poetry can also be a vehicle that transports us into mindful awareness and meditation.

It seems that the effectiveness of a poem's message depends on our state of intentionality to receive. But poems can also activate a state of receptive awareness. It is believed they do this by stimulating a sensory immediacy that is the ground of experience and that is the basis for integrating the wholeness axis in meditation. Poems enable observation with some clarity, as they imply relationships without didactic descriptions. Poems, because of the immediacy of their personally rendered imagery and sensations for the poet (and maybe in the same ways or different ways for us) can create entirely new ways of conceptualizing the world. In this way, poems bring forth new ways of knowing our own worlds. Words create worlds.

In Class 2 I mentioned how important it seems to be able to name and label feelings as a way of healing the pain gap, the split that divides the person we aspire to be and the person we truly are. In naming and labeling feelings, we are supporting emotional balance and approaching resilience. The role of self-talk is important in how we do this, as it makes us the subject of our own lives instead of being the object. The dialogue is with ourselves and, by this means, we open up creative inquiry. Neuroscience has shown that exercising the ability to use words to describe internal states of being, such as feelings, makes us more resilient in adapting to stress and trauma.

So, that is some of the landscape, the context, of poetry. What can we make of RELATIONSHIPS and INTERACTIONS? I believe we can discern context and relationships within any poem, but poetry in general also offers us a way to be in relationship with it. My relationship to poetry has to do with what it offers me as a resource. Resourcing is an important part of wholeness axis stabilization and follows on after grounding. It has been shown that resourcing as a conscious effort is very effective in contributing to how we respond to traumas, large and small. But the meditative space is reserved not only for dealing with traumas, as its contents are infinitely potential and include anything that is possible to experience. The list of resources is as vast as there are people who can name elements of their lives that give them meaning and joy. In this way, naming something that represents safety, peace, joy, and personal meaning is contrasted with that resource's play against the trauma that may occupy the meditative space at any given time. We dwell for a time on trauma here only to demonstrate how resourcing in meditation can address some of the most difficult aspects of our inner and outer lives.

Resourcing does not ask for the trauma to be rehearsed or repeated or relived. Retraumatization is a real phenomenon, as most of us can attest because of our experiences with the cycles of rumination that loop in our minds. Instead, we characterize the trauma in terms that describe how it feels to us: How big is it? Is it heavy? Does it have a color? Or a temperature? Where in the body does it sit? Our resourcing has supplied us with other imagery and sensations that bring us calm and joy. Perhaps it is the image of a spiritual leader, a place in nature, a pleasant childhood memory, a loved one, an icon, a poem. In dealing specifically with the trauma, resourcing enables us to be in control of the oscillation or toggling between the characterized trauma and the resource. This can take any time that seems comfortable. With each visit to the trauma, it is good to ask how it has changed in character—Is it as heavy? Is it still as hot? Has it moved from its original location? In this way, the resource is a safety net below the abyss of trauma. Now, obviously, there are big traumas (you get to decide which is big and which is little, not someone else) that require the help of a professional, but for many of the smaller traumas that bedevil all of us, this technique can prove useful in stabilizing and regulating back into the resilient zone. Pausing, breathing, noticing posture, grounding all flow into mindful awareness and support the parasympathetic nervous system as it calms the body. Resourcing can be the next step in our efforts to deal with those traumas and stresses that require more than momentary mindfulness.

Perhaps the rhythm of the poem, the imagery, the alliteration, the overall flow help us access the doorway to meditation. Again, it is just one way of gaining this access and can be effective for those who are receptive to it and work with it. It isn't for everyone, but it is available. It might be worth a try to pick a poem and let its beauty and energy become a resource. Let yourself develop a relationship and history with the poem and the poet behind it. Read it aloud several days in a row; notice how your relationship with it changes, how it might generate questions about its meaning or how it contributes to your daily toil. Poetry may be beautifully pointless or pointlessly beautiful, but either way it is a representation of the flow of consciousness of which we can partake. It can contribute to our efforts at self care.

The thread of this class is not so much poetry as it is the helpfulness of having another entry point to meditation and to use poetry or any other resource as a way of doing that. The emphasis is on using elements of beauty, peace, and joy as counterpoints to the darker and negative stresses and traumas that are a part of our lives and, thus, part of the meditative space we inhabit.

This points to Class 4 where we will explore how one can make space and time for meditation.