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