Post by Doug G. on Jun 18, 2005 20:26:30 GMT -5
Steve,
Having been a student of Lifewriting for several years now, and having followed the discussions in the older Yahoo lists as well as the more recent ones at the new board and your Blog, I think I can safely say that I’m fairly conversant in the details of the system. But there is one area I’ve always found a bit mysterious to me, and only sketchily covered, so my suggestion for your new system would be a request for a bit more clarity and discussion on the topic of meditation, dream journaling, and the other activities used as ‘the aquarium filter of the soul’.
At one point you spoke of your efforts in the martial arts when learning some new physical movement, about how you’re the kind of guy who needs the whole thing slowed down, decomposed into it’s elemental parts, and very slowly drummed into your head through repetition and explanation (hope I’m fairly paraphrasing here). Well, being a fellow who is probably over-strong in the intellectualization area (i.e. always needing an explicit, well-described framework in my head to wrap new ideas around before they work well for me), I would say that I’m the same way when it comes to talk of meditation or other activities that are intended to circumvent just that left-brained over-rationalizing bit of my personality. In other words, when I’ve tried to sit down for an hour of heartbeat meditation, I usually end up being fairly analytical about it, and am never quite sure if I’m doing it right, and actually progressing in the fashion you intend. As a result, I usually find myself frustrated at the whole activity, and end up finding reasons for not quickly trying it again. Unlike a good exercise period, or a visible progress of 1000 words in a story I’ve written, I have trouble seeing what I’ve accomplished after a meditation session.
Perhaps it is counterproductive to try and wrap a rational layer around an activity intended specifically to circumvent the rational mind, but I for one would find it helpful to hear more about the mechanics of the process, where we’re supposed to ‘put’ our heads. I think we’re supposed to be allowing the chatter of the ‘monkey-mind’ to be suppressed, but are we to be striving for our minds to be completely blank as a successful meditation? Should we be trying to focus on some specific element of our desired development process? To me, such a focus seems more like giving carte-blanche to the chatter to hang around. Are we tying to achieve some sort of a waking dream-state in which we have coherent thoughts or a dream-like storyline? What, in other words, constitutes a productive or positive achievement in any given meditation period? What are we striving for in this effort?
And to make the discussion a little broader, you have often cited both the meditation process, and the keeping of a dream diary as tools to help begin to address one’s (for want of a better term) mental and psychic life injuries. And while you do describe the process of the heartbeat meditation (or at least, the external side of it), I’m less clear on how one is to apply either of these tools to do the actual work of improving one’s subconscious health. Is it merely the pursuit of the activity itself that makes the contribution to the repairs? Once I’ve got months of dream diaries, should I be looking at them with some sort of analytical lens to glean some sort of meta-message from my subconscious? If one (or one’s Lifewriting partners) suspects some sort of long term psychic damage from childhood, how does one make this the focus on one’s efforts to repair, or at least establish the need for repair, of such a suspected clot of mental detritus? Indeed, how would one tell if this suspicion is real, or perhaps a red herring hiding some other, better hidden damage? And at what point, if any, should someone start thinking about calling in professional help, or do you think most problems can be addressed with these self-administered tools?
I realize that this question begins to edge, perhaps, dangerously close to the realm of medical advice, and I certainly understand that anything you say specifically isn’t intended as such, and I appreciate any need to stay on the right side of that line. However, I think that the next revision of the system would be improved by a more thorough discussion of the detailed use of these tools, even it it is just to say ‘you’re being too intellectual about it, just do it, and the improvement will come’.
Having been a student of Lifewriting for several years now, and having followed the discussions in the older Yahoo lists as well as the more recent ones at the new board and your Blog, I think I can safely say that I’m fairly conversant in the details of the system. But there is one area I’ve always found a bit mysterious to me, and only sketchily covered, so my suggestion for your new system would be a request for a bit more clarity and discussion on the topic of meditation, dream journaling, and the other activities used as ‘the aquarium filter of the soul’.
At one point you spoke of your efforts in the martial arts when learning some new physical movement, about how you’re the kind of guy who needs the whole thing slowed down, decomposed into it’s elemental parts, and very slowly drummed into your head through repetition and explanation (hope I’m fairly paraphrasing here). Well, being a fellow who is probably over-strong in the intellectualization area (i.e. always needing an explicit, well-described framework in my head to wrap new ideas around before they work well for me), I would say that I’m the same way when it comes to talk of meditation or other activities that are intended to circumvent just that left-brained over-rationalizing bit of my personality. In other words, when I’ve tried to sit down for an hour of heartbeat meditation, I usually end up being fairly analytical about it, and am never quite sure if I’m doing it right, and actually progressing in the fashion you intend. As a result, I usually find myself frustrated at the whole activity, and end up finding reasons for not quickly trying it again. Unlike a good exercise period, or a visible progress of 1000 words in a story I’ve written, I have trouble seeing what I’ve accomplished after a meditation session.
Perhaps it is counterproductive to try and wrap a rational layer around an activity intended specifically to circumvent the rational mind, but I for one would find it helpful to hear more about the mechanics of the process, where we’re supposed to ‘put’ our heads. I think we’re supposed to be allowing the chatter of the ‘monkey-mind’ to be suppressed, but are we to be striving for our minds to be completely blank as a successful meditation? Should we be trying to focus on some specific element of our desired development process? To me, such a focus seems more like giving carte-blanche to the chatter to hang around. Are we tying to achieve some sort of a waking dream-state in which we have coherent thoughts or a dream-like storyline? What, in other words, constitutes a productive or positive achievement in any given meditation period? What are we striving for in this effort?
And to make the discussion a little broader, you have often cited both the meditation process, and the keeping of a dream diary as tools to help begin to address one’s (for want of a better term) mental and psychic life injuries. And while you do describe the process of the heartbeat meditation (or at least, the external side of it), I’m less clear on how one is to apply either of these tools to do the actual work of improving one’s subconscious health. Is it merely the pursuit of the activity itself that makes the contribution to the repairs? Once I’ve got months of dream diaries, should I be looking at them with some sort of analytical lens to glean some sort of meta-message from my subconscious? If one (or one’s Lifewriting partners) suspects some sort of long term psychic damage from childhood, how does one make this the focus on one’s efforts to repair, or at least establish the need for repair, of such a suspected clot of mental detritus? Indeed, how would one tell if this suspicion is real, or perhaps a red herring hiding some other, better hidden damage? And at what point, if any, should someone start thinking about calling in professional help, or do you think most problems can be addressed with these self-administered tools?
I realize that this question begins to edge, perhaps, dangerously close to the realm of medical advice, and I certainly understand that anything you say specifically isn’t intended as such, and I appreciate any need to stay on the right side of that line. However, I think that the next revision of the system would be improved by a more thorough discussion of the detailed use of these tools, even it it is just to say ‘you’re being too intellectual about it, just do it, and the improvement will come’.
