An Optimal Experience

    

         When I see works that come close to my heart, that I think are really fine, I have the strangest reaction, sort of like being hit in the stomach.…What comes to you after looking at it calmly, after you’ve really digested every nuance and every little thread, is the total impact. When you encounter a very great work of art, you just know it and it thrills you in all your senses, not just visually, but sensually and intellectually.

            --  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience 

          The idea that we're all engaged in reinventing ourselves and creating new stories (you could also just call it  your personal mythology if you don't like the word story) is a given these days. How could it be otherwise as every day we wake up to find that the world as we knew it yesterday, is no longer?  Your developing story reflects your current state of consciousness leavened and shaped by ancestral lineage and beliefs about an erstwhile younger version of yourself.  Not just a kind of  mentally constructed envisioning of the future, this new narrative is something much more earthy, integrated and sensual. One way you'll know it is through the actual daily writing it down as you are living it. And as you begin to notice, become aware, wake up and inhabit this  story, you'll find new meaning emerging from what you see, hear, smell, taste, feel, think. From meaning comes story. And from story comes meaning.

Spiritual Transcendence

          When I started writing again after a long hiatus, I decided to focus on acknowledging a daily optimal experience with Beauty as the integrating theme. What I discovered is this: Every day, by deliberately finding and focusing on the beautiful in any given experience, I am able to consciously move my self to a new level of peace and joy, something I would define as an optimal experience. Now maybe some of you wouldn't use this terminology but for me this combined result of absorption of the senses, concentrated focus of mind and controlled exertion of body feels like what might justifiably be called spiritual transcendence. I know that moments like this are routinely a part of the heightened creative experience characterizing the lives of the great masters of art, music and literature, but most of us only experience moments like this in more limited ways. Still, when such a moment occurs it's almost always remembered as one of the most intense, pleasurable and memorable experiences of our lives. I live in the state of Arizona where the natural beauty abounding can literally take your breath away.

 Beholding Beauty

             I see this beauty every night on my evening walk through the desert. True, beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder and the desert is not everyone's idea of beauty but for those whose senses are simpatico, nature's charms are incomparable. I am reminded of John Loring, design director emeritus for New York City's world renowned jeweler Tiffany & Co. (www.tiffany.com). Loring grew up on a ranch in Cave Creek, Arizona and has said he couldn't help but be inspired by seeing beauty like this. He said much of the inspiration for his designs came from the shapes, textures, smells, sounds and tastes of nature he'd experienced during his boyhood years. (http://sagedillon.wordpress.com/writing-samples/silver-tea/). Nature here in Arizona is a very great work of art indeed, from those odd and appealing desert sentinels called saguaro cactus, the soul stirring, socko sunsets, the charming and friendly hummingbird population, the magnificent Grand Canyon and the magnetic red rocks of Sedona...it's not hard to awaken here to Beauty. It's everywhere.

A Conscious Awareness

      The truth is that as thinking, feeling, moving beings we all have the capacity to learn how to create such moments of optimal experience for ourselves. Maybe we need only to come to conscious awareness of such moments, recognizing and honoring them for what they are and finding within ourselves the courage to create each day anew, believing it is awash with possibilities for the sacred experience of integration and transcendence. Here's one way to start:

Write for 15 minutes, taking five minutes for each of these writing experiences:

1)    Describe a moment when you encountered something through your senses so artistically beautiful and touching that it brought you close to tears with its near-perfection. Nature? Art? Music? Write this in all its sensual glory!

2)    Create a short tribute to an inspirational person you admired in your life (a real person or fictional character) who first gave you a sense of what optimal experience is, the possibility of integrating body/mind/spirit so that life might be experienced on a higher, more creative and fulfilling plane of existence.

3)    Recall and write about a piece of writing (could be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essay) that was so viscerally powerful that, after you’d finished reading it,  your life was changed forever in a positive way

The Body Never Lies

Consciousness is always in rapid change....
It is the continuous readjustment of self and the world in experience.
                                          -- John Dewey, Art as Experience,  1934


          My artist friend Kris was raving a couple of weeks ago about The Five Senses, a wonderfully provocative show now through May 4, 2014 at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (www.smoca.org).  I took my visiting NYC daughter and grandson to see what all the fuss was about. Delightful! It's much  more than just a viewing experience, it's a fun and engaging romp through the realms of sight, smell, sound, touch and taste. Not only that, it's also a dynamic demonstration of how we really can learn to experience mindfulness and expanded awareness by abandoning ordinary cognition and listening to the wisdom of the body.

 See, Smell, Hear, Taste, Touch
           We entered the exhibit excited by the promise of encountering a cascade of sensation courtesy of an inextricable aggregate of biology, physics, neurology and chemistry. Stepping first into Soul City, a colorful pyramid of 6,000 oranges, we activated taste, sight, smell and touch. Everyone got an orange to take home. Next we sidled over to the fabulously sensual and smelly charms of an aromatic hanging spice tree. Our noses thanked us. Then we sat on benches as we opened our eager ears to a swelling symphony of very loud, very inspiring choral music. Moving to the next room, we stood for a few moments, lost among a swirling forest of electric fans synchronized to reflect the experience of Thoreau at Walden Pond (trust me, you would be impressed with this.) Finally, we fell into welcome enchantment as we made our way into an eerie twilight chamber filled with damp, misty air. Taken together these odd and intriguing sensualities created an exhibit that places the visitor starkly in the center of a world awash in the aliveness of visceral sensation. If you're somebody who's composing a new narrative based on the truth of mindfulness and expanded consciousness, this exhibit might be your gift from the gods. Awake and alive, your body as a sensing device will never lie to you. Rather, it will completely enliven you and empower you if you are ready to hear, see, smell, taste and touch the truth of life.

Writing Without Teachers
         I was reminded of the time I put together a writing group using material from Peter Elbow's classic primer Writing Without Teachers. Participants were supposed to look inward to access their five senses in order to respond imaginatively and creatively to questions like what colors and what shapes did you see in the piece? If  the piece was a musical instrument which one would it be and how would it sound? If it were an animal how would it look and how would it act? How did it taste to you -- sour, tart, salty, sweet? And texture? On your skin would it have been hot, cold, soft, scratchy, silky? How about smell...was it strong, musty, spicy, sweet...what? This was all great fun and the group of creative, lively, intelligent women did pretty well with sharing authentic bodily responses even though it was a little awkward at first.

Or Not
             As the weeks went by and the initial intriguing novelty wore off, so did a certain comfort level with the process. Maybe I was pushing too hard, the way I used to push myself when I was hot on the trail of a truth, dropping ever deeper to get to the guts of it, to the raw, visceral, sensuality that an authentic writing process demands. Didn't work with these gals. The whole thing fell apart and I finally just walked away with a terse goodbye. The group chose a no pressure coffee and conversation format and I admit I had mild regrets that they hadn't wanted to stick it out, even if it was a little uncomfortable encountering the raw and the real of the inner world. Unveiling an unlived life can be a pretty rude awakening if you're not prepared for it. And who really knowingly invites this kind of awareness, fraught as it is? Surprisingly, many do. When I taught in Santa Fe, dedicated writers fully expected and wholly embraced the rigors of such an experiment. But that was then, we were all younger and maybe more ready and able to take this inner journey. Timing is everything, right?


Congratulations
         The truth is our students (and our children!) are our very best teachers after all. Don't ignore feelings, look at what is happening with the body, and accept that chaos is a necessary part of becoming conscious as you wake up by attending to the five senses. Just look out and get ready. Thumb the nose at terror, hysteria, retreat, blaming or defensiveness; instead, give yourself a congratulatory slap on the back with accompanying cries of  hooray, hosanna and hallelujah. Long into the night.Wisdom's Edge? Look no further, you're there.

Healthy Aging & Yoga

    
           Sometimes reliable, considered, first hand information is hard to come by, especially with the proliferation of hype about yoga out there. When I began writing this blog my intent and promise was to share with you some of the life changing teachers I've encountered  as I write my own new story about (that phrase again!) 'aging gracefully.'
            One of these teachers is Tim McCall, M.D. ( www.drmccall.com) whose book Yoga As Medicine has offered inspiration for a number of yoga workshops I've taught. McCall writes a periodic, free, electronic newsletter and I'm re-posting his most recent one for you. I find his (writer's) voice trustworthy and accounts of his healing experience with yoga and a willingness to share information commendable as he pushes boundaries in his quest for health and well being.

 

Rebuilding Immunity with Yoga and Ayurveda

Hi Everybody,

Greetings from Kerala, India, the birthplace of Ayurveda. I'm back to continue my studies of this ancient holistic medical system -- an amazing complement to yoga therapy -- and to get treatments myself. One consequence of all the teaching and traveling I do is that it's tiring and tends to run down my immunity. Correcting the latter is the main thing this year's treatments are designed to do.

 

In Ayurveda, the loss of resistance to illness -- from colds to more serious maladies -- correlates with the concept of Ojas depletion. Ojas [pronounced OH jus] is the healing side of Kapha, the dosha associated with the "water element." Besides healthy immune function, Ojas is associated with stability and groundedness, love and contentment. All the work I've been doing drives up my Pitta, associated with fire in Ayurvedic thinking. All the traveling and talking that goes with teaching increases Vata, associated with wind, or the air element. An excess of heat and wind, as in nature, tends to dry things up, thus depleting the nectar-like Ojas.

So now I'm resting, doing restorative yoga, gentle pranayama and meditation, getting daily oil massages, and eating beautiful vegetarian food, lovingly prepared by the family whose home I'm staying in. It's in the middle of lush countryside, surrounded by coconut palms, banana, papaya and jack fruit trees, and full of the sounds of birds and goats and other animals. Love, rest, time in nature, oil massages, and sattvic food all help restore Ojas, and my Ayurvedic doctor, Chandukutty Vaidyar has other tricks up his sleeve, which I'll be experiencing in the weeks to come. In addition, there's no internet access here without a 45 minute bus ride into town, which is a good thing as frittering away time in cyberspace is another way many of us lose precious Ojas.

 

​ Most of the herbs and oils that Chandukutty employs are homemade, made in the old-fashioned ways. Here, a number of freshly picked herbs are being dried in the sun by Krishna Dasan, my Ayurvedic therapist, who was first taught these techniques by Chandukutty as a teenager, and is extrarodinary at what he does. I'm already really feeling the results, and even better, they say the benefits continue to accrue for two to three months after you complete the treatments.   

***

Before I left for India, I was happy to take part in the Medical Yoga Symposium at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, along with Dr. Dean Ornish, Harvard Medical School's Dr. Sat Bir Khalsa, and a handful of the country's leading yoga researchers and therapists. The event sold out early and was enthusiastically received and, most importantly, is a testament to the growing acceptance of yoga and yoga therapy in governmental and health care settings. If you'd like to read more about the event, I recently wrote about it for the Yoga For Healthy Aging blog.

Dean Ornish's fabulous keynote detailed his work investigating the benefits of a yoga-based program for people with heart disease, which Medicare and some private insurers will now pay for. More recently, he's been studying the same kind of yogic lifestyle intervention on men with prostate cancer, again with very encouraging results. I wrote more on his work in the blog post cited above, as well as in an article for Yoga Journal called Straight to the Heart.
 

I recently did a long interview with Integral Yoga Magazine on yoga therapy that you may be interested in. In addition, you can check out a blog post I did on Keeping Yoga Safe for People with High Blood Pressure. It's also still possible to purchase the recording of the full teleseminar I recently led on Yoga U on working with students with high blood pressure.

When I'm finished with my Ayurvedic treatments in early March, I'll be heading to England where I'll teach Yoga as Medicine (YAM) Level 1 at TriYoga in London. In June, for the first time, I'll be teaching in my hometown of Milwaukee (YAM Level 1), and in July I'll be heading to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to teach both YAM Level 1 and the Level 2 YAM course on Yoga Therapy for the Nervous System. Look for more YAM Seminars in Boston, Austin, Rochester and Copenhagen in the months ahead, and in Summit, New Jersey in early 2015.

I hope to see you all sometime soon …Namaste,  Timothy