I like to think that I talk a good game, but I am interested in a couple of things that are a little kumbaya. Reiki is one of them; I went for a treatment a couple of weeks ago, and it lived up to my expectations - it's the kind of thing that I can't imagine not working (this because I think people are spiritual ding an sich).
Another is mindfulness; which I'd read about in the past. I'm a sucker for a kit, so when I saw this at the bookstore, I pounced on it. CD's! Sound therapy! Mind training cards! And best of all - Jon Kabat-Zinn*!
J K-Z is a pioneer of mindfulness, and I've bought and not read (there should be a word for that) one of his books in the past - Wherever You Are, There You Are or something - and I have to say I'm a fan. The first of the 2 CD's, which I listened to while falling asleep last night, walks you through breathwork exercises (that were really good!) and then J K-Z comes on to present mindfulness exercises: and he sounds like a Mafia tough guy. That's what I wanted to say. Also that I truly did experience little split-seconds of states of altered consciousness, and that there's this one presumably unintentionally funny part where J K-Z is telling you to focus on your breathing and bring your mind back to your breathing when it's being distracted by thought, and then he goes through this whole long description of something that is nothing but distracting, telling us to approach our breathing (there should also be a punctuation mark that indicates that something is being quoted roughly - maybe ~") like we were creeping up on a small animal, in a forest, sitting on a tree stump, in a little clearing of light**..."~
*if - when - I have a cocktail party based on psychological theories, a Kabat-Zinn will be a glass of Zinfandel and a line of coke.
**for D. Kaufer
About Me
- Lore & Ipsum
- I'm interested in language, grammar, cooking, rhetoric, discourse, design, taxonomies, food, conversation & interaction analysis, girl things, cognitive science, finding a job, and large bodies of water.
5 comments:
Dr. Andrew Weil looks like a really friendly banjo player.
I am having a hard time picturing you getting into this sort of stuff mainly because you and I have laughed so much about a certain acquaintance of mine
I've tried stuff like this and it usually lasts about ten days. Hope you have better luck at it than I did.
I do occasionally listen to this thing (album?) that is meant as some sort of mind focus music it's based on "the 37 harmonics of Hector Luiz Espinosa" (I don't have a tilde, but that's approximate). Surprisingly it does work and I can be very productive when listening to it.
I find that what helps focus my mind is listening to the sort of instrumental music I do anyway. Which is often super-skronky free jazz. This is useful, for instance: when you're looking for an escape valve for a quick hour's grading, and your friend's spouse tells you that the basement of the local Starbucks is great because it's always deserted, except when you get there although the basement is three-quarters empty, the one-quarter consists in part of the 101st Shouty Child Brigade.* It helps if your plan was already just to crank this** on your headphones and go.
What this basically means, is I'm never completely focused, but getting to listen to the music I want to can keep me sort of half focused, and the other half aurally pleased, and that's as productive as I get.
*Which is apparently a point of contention in the neighborhood, the divide between the parents and the not. The not resent the invasion of their bars and the like by small loud people, and the parents both resent the idea that they shouldn't be out in public and also resent being resented, because, like, they're as hip as you are and you're going to be just like them in five years.
**Actually that album is super-kumbayah, which is not that rare in free jazz -- there is John Coltrane's Om, which consists of some spooky mystical recitation at the beginning and then twenty-five minutes of BROAAARP SCREE -- but Mr. Cherry even sounds kumbayah. While still being totally free jazz. Basically, he was so cool that he could do all sorts of mystical-hippie-world music stuff without being uncool in the way that that stuff was uncool, because he was just that cool.
[ptphf: The noise one makes after being screwed over twice by word verification and having to switch browsers.]
Well, I think I must be,if not your most Kumbaya friend, then pretty close to it. I call the kumbaya stuff by a different name, though: "lavender mist". As in: "All those stupid lavender mist people make the rest of us look bad." or "That movie 'the secret' is just a bunch of lavender mist." --amanda
small clearings of light, baby! time to pull out the bingo board... (do you remember the bingo board, l&i?) the DK phrase this semester is 'rhetorical scrabble.'
our mutual friend A. was teaching a class on tibetan meditation recently, and though i am not making it a part of my daily life or anything, what i liked was the way it involved imagining things like light coming out of us and into the world - rather than just dwelling on 'om' or whatnot. i get rather frustrated with the 'just don't think' approach, so i thought it was cool that this tradition uses images. i like images.
Hey I am very proud of my new neologism. Come look!
Post a Comment