August 2, 2016 – Mindfulness, simplified…

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Right after sending off last week’s post, Joe, Bo (our puppy dog) and I went on a hike, and the thing that I couldn’t remember, came back to me! A victory of memory recall! Yay! The source of the “wisdom of not knowing”, was a TED talk by Ellen Langer, a social psychologist who is known for her decades-long work on mindfulness. She’s been talking about it for longer than most, and in a way that is simpler, than I’d ever heard described before. My understanding of practicing mindfulness, as Buddhists talk about it, is: sitting in meditation, being present to our minds, our thoughts and practicing letting them go. Ellen Langer describes mindfulness, in contrast to mindlessness – mindfulness is simply “actively noticing new things.” This sounds to me like being awake and aware versus being on auto-pilot. Ellen Langer says we form a point of view, based on our experiences and then we get fixed there. This fixation has us make assumptions and see things from only one perspective – the one based upon our life-so-far. But if we learn to become open, curious, not stuck in our own way of thinking, life is a wide open field of possibility.

Her work, as she talks about it in her videos online, is fascinating. She has learned, that how we think, changes our reality in all kinds of ways – relationships, what becomes possible for our lives, even the state of our physical bodies and our health. I am a naturally inquisitive person, and I realize how this has impacted my capacity to live a life of transformation. My dear friend Stephanie has come to join me in Tahoe for a few days, and as dear girlfriends do, we’ve been talking for hours – about our stories, our lives, our histories. Yesterday I reflected, as we talked on the person I was in my 20’s. Other than my family, there is hardly anything about my life, how I operate, how I see the world, how I see myself and what I hold possible, that is the same as then. “What if….” is a state of being for me. And as I evolve, my curiosity seems to be growing ever larger.

This isn’t to say, that I’m open and curious and in the field of possibility, all the time! Like everyone, I forget thousands of times a day. But, it’s my experience, and thus has become my commitment, that keeping this kind of information coming in on a regular basis, sets me up to return to mindfulness more easily – and progressively more frequently. Interactions – especially with people I am close to – are always a place to practice. Here’s how she says we can shift things: if I realize that someone’s behavior makes sense from their perspective – their world view, (which they may be mindlessly stuck in), it changes my view that they are – from my world view – misbehaving. This then opens me, to see, that there is always the other side of the coin. If I see someone as rigid, I have one experience of them, but if I shift to seeing them as principled and reliable, it’s a whole other. Change a word or two, and we get vastly different effects.

It’s quite evident that our world has become more contentious, more filled with conflict – violence even, than I can ever remember it. We are in an epidemic of edginess and testiness, and just being done with the state of things. This is happening, of course, in all the big ways that make the news, but I’m seeing it also in more local and even personal ways. The festival I did in June, has been a pretty crappy art show for many years, in fact, it was even worse in the midst of the recession, but it was this year that conversation took off like wildfire on the local Nextdoor websites, about how shamefully it reflects upon the Town of San Anselmo, and how something must be done about it. Just on this vacation, someone left a really nasty note, about how we parked our car and a guy gave my husband stink eye, at seeing our dog at the beach. I’ve been watching people around me, including me – reaching the end of our ropes – saying, “I won’t take that from you anymore!” In the midst of this, I’ve decided to take on attempting to not react, not to judge – or at least to not to act upon my judgement. Preventing judgement seems just about impossible to me – most of the time! It is my intention to up my game on remaining open hearted.

Yesterday, Steff and I were flat on our bellies on our towels at the beach, when Steff asked me what I was going to write about today. A word popped into my head: allowing. Allowing? If we are at the end of our rope, doesn’t it seem that “allowing” is just what we are no longer willing to do? As I started to talk it out with Steff, I started to see how, allowing as a necessary step in being able to really see and even possibly receive, what is happening for someone else – or even in the larger world. Combining “I’m done” with “allowing”, or maybe following “I’m done” with the capacity to allow what is – is a paradox, that feels what’s called for. It ends the tug of war and lands me in that field of possibility, that invites what’s next to emerge. Creative change becomes then possible.

As always, the next question that comes up in my head is: how does this relate to making art, painting, being creative? There’s no shortage of pre-conceived notions in artists – especially when we just start out or are returning to making art. We may have experiences of making art in our past – what has been said to us, or about our art – that forms a world-view, from which we come to our art making. We can practice allowing, being aware and curious – being mindful about ourselves and our perspective. From here, we have more freedom and permission to jump in – plus, it just might open us to something completely new and unexpected.

Ellen Langer offered the idea of noticing something new about our people in our lives every day, as a way to keep our relationships vital. It occurs to me in this moment to ask, what if I do that about my own art making? What is new about my creative impulses, that I can allow to come into my awareness today? I have no idea! Here I am back to the wisdom of “not knowing.” There is a gift, at being at the end of our rope. It is the catalyst for what’s next – which is what propels us along in our evolution – not just each of us individually, but all of humanity. In my life, it is just what has brought me closer and closer to painting my true love, and the capacity to be whole-hearted. I never want to know all there is to know about what I do; I want my last breath to be filled with curiosity.

Thank you for reading – it’s always a gift to me.

With my love,

Cara