Class Notes, Handouts, and Related Resources
Winter 2011
Welcome!
Here are some links to things we talked about in class or things I thought of afterwards that further illustrate some of the key concepts we're exploring.
Getting Started
I highly recommend making practice a priority over reading about it. This is true regardless of the skill you are working on. I'd also encourage you to keep a low profile regarding your attentional skills training. We have a tendency to let everyone know when we start a fitness program or sign up for a tap dancing class or order a Rosetta Stone program to master a foreign language. However, studies repeatedly show that when it comes to goals which take consistent practice over time, "the mind mistakes the talking for the doing."
On top of that, it can make our struggle to establish a habit a bit too public. I'm a fan of the pregnancy announcement protocol — wait to tell your friends about what you've been up to after three months of consistent practice. Of course the people in your house are likely to notice when you are sitting quietly for a few minutes every day. That's different. But try to keep it on a need to know basis until you've got some momentum.
I've come to really enjoy anonymous mindfulness practice in general. It feels so subversive. It can really add a zing to waiting in line at the grocery store or in a doctor's office lobby. Nobody has to know that instead of trying to figure out a way to make this experience better or faster, I'm letting my attention feast on the sounds and sights around me or the sensations in my body.
As with anything I say, please don't take my word for it. Try it for yourself and see if you agree.
Handouts:
- What is Mindfulness?
- Noting and Labeling
- Cultivating Mindfulness: Beginning or Deepening a Personal Meditation Practice by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Check out "Opening to Our Lives," a great 2009 interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn on the Being podcast.
- My friend Stephanie Nash created this great little guide to exploring meditation posture options. "Is there an ideal body position for meditation? Most people think you can only be meditating if you're sitting cross-legged (probably in full lotus) with eyes closed, incense burning and maybe some music or chanting going on. Not so. You can meditate in 4 positions — sitting, standing, walking, lying down — basically all the positions our body is in during the course of our life."
(1) Find and Create Rest in the Body and Mind
- Handouts:
Notice Rest, Struggle Less
Notice Rest Daily Workout
If You Lived Here...an essay I wrote about our tendency to postpone happiness until the conditions improve. - Wikipedia entry on negativity bias and a Huffington Post article on the same topic by pscyhologist and meditator Rick Hanson
- Guided meditation on finding restfulness in the body by Shinzen Young
(2) Notice Hearing
- Handout: Hear Out Daily Workout
Scottish percussionist and composer Evelyn Glennie lost her hearing when she was a child. Check out Touch the Sound, a fascinating documentary about her music and her life. You can find it at the Upper Arlington Public Library, the Columbus Metropolitan library, Netflix, or you can watch it in ten-minute chunks on YouTube. You'll also want to hear her TED Talk, "Evelyn Glennie Shows How to Listen."- Quotes from Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle:
Silence is helpful, but you don't need it in order to find stillness. Even when there is noise, you can be aware of the stillness underneath the noise, of the space in which the noise arises. That is the inner space of pure awareness, consciousness itself. You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking. Becoming aware of awareness is the arising of inner stillness.
Any disturbing noise can be as helpful as silence. How? By dropping your inner resistance to the noise, by allowing it to be as it is, this acceptance also takes you into that realm of inner peace that is stillness. Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is — no matter what form it takes — you are still, you are at peace.
Pay attention to the gap — the gap between two thoughts, the brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and out-breath. When you pay attention to those gaps, awareness of "something" becomes — just awareness. The formless dimension of pure consciousness arises from within you and replaces identification with form.
- The Patience of Ordinary Things
by Pat Schneider, from Another River: New and Selected Poems
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
(3) A complete Experience of Listening: Hearing Out and In
Handouts: Hear Out and In and A Complete Experience of Listening.- The episode of Radiolab titled Musical Language (September 24, 2007) examines the line between language and music." It's truly fascinating and completely related to what we're exploring.
I also encourage you to listen to these episodes of Radiolab concerning listening, thinking, and music: Voices in Your Head and Pop Music.
- Speaking in Tones by Music Psychology professor Diana Deutsch from Scientific American Mind (July/August 2010) explores how "music and language are partners in the brain. Our sense of song helps us learn to talk, read, and even make friends."
- Largo (From Harpsichord Concerto in F Minor by J.S. Bach) performed by The Swingle Singers in 1969. This is the group that supplies the music between scenes and before commercials on Glee.
- Sustaining Language, Sustaining Memory — an Ojibwe Story, from Speaking of Faith, June 19, 2008: "Language is a carrier of human identity. It is a vehicle by which we understand and express our very sense of self. Novelist and translator David Treuer is helping to compile the first practical grammar of the Ojibwe language. He describes an unfolding experience of how language forms what makes us human. Some memories and realities, he has found, can only be carried forward in time by Ojibwe."
- Gluck Melodie, Renaud Capuçon violin (Isaac Stern's Guarneri del Gesù)
May you be free from internal and external harm.
May you have a calm, clear mind.
May you be physically healthy, strong, and vital.
May you experience peace, love, joy, wonder, and wisdom in this life just as it is.*