Web Camel Transport 48

Facing Our Beliefs Eye to Eye: Courageous Happiness

Saturday, May 27, 2017

A decade and a half ago concerned parents from New Jersey called me to request that I see their daughter of 20, a student at a college local to my therapy practice. They were worried about her because she was now dating a man twenty-three years her senior. Most importantly, they described him as a demonic character exploiting their daughter and threatening to derail her college education.

When a high school student, their daughter Sara had met a local official who was often stationed at the school, giving student workshops and often intervening in student conflicts as well as advising the student body about resources for alcohol and drug abuse. Sara herself had chatted with Ben, but according to her there had not been so much as a hint of any potential future personal relationship while she was still in high school.

After Sara graduated, she was working in a coffee shop Ben frequented and over the next month or two they got to know each other better and began dating. Sara went off to college as planned but during her vacations and summers off, and with an occasional visit with her while she was in college, the relationship deepened. Sara’s parents found out about the relationship and demanded to speak with Ben. Ben agreed to meet with Sara’s parents, but not to stop seeing Sara; not unless Sara wanted to end their relationship. Sara’s parents consulted with their parish priest, and other close friends, and threatened to remove financial support for Sara’s college education if she refused to stop seeing Ben.

I met with Sara four or five times, and then met with her and Ben. While I could sympathize with Sara’s parents, because of the vast difference in age and experience between the couple, I also came to know Sara as a strikingly mature person who had no intention of letting her relationship stand in the way of completing her education and pursuing her career goals. Honestly, she said, she didn’t know whether her relationship with Ben would last, but she did not want to terminate it because of her parents’ irrational condemnation of Ben. She neither felt exploited nor derailed. She respected Ben and felt that she had chosen to move forward in exploring this relationship of her own accord.

Even though Sara’s parents initiated contact with me, once Sara became my client, the therapy session confidentiality belonged to her. I asked her if she would like to invite her parents into our session for a family therapy meeting. And I also invited her parents to meet with Sara, me and Ben. Sara’s parents refused all group meetings.

Sara’s parents believed Ben was evil, exploitative, and destructive. They had taken steps to see that his employment in their small hometown was terminated by accusing him of sexual harassment. They determined to stick by their story, and keeping Ben, as well as Ben and Sara, at a distance, they did not have to consider any points of view that competed with their own. In their story, evil Ben had stolen their daughter and threatened to ruin her life. As I came to understand Sara, this was her love story.

When we cut people off emotionally, we can continue to demonize them. Letting ourselves face someone “up close and personal” tends to give the “evil” person a human face. We all for the possibility of feeling empathy for that person. Perhaps we might even understand their point of view. But if we do allow ourselves to truly understand someone else’ point of view what then? It may mean softening our sense of rightness or the superiority of our perspective. It may even mean giving up our own agenda or now seeing our own story as flawed.

There are certainly circumstances where someone may feel that their own well-being depends upon “divorcing” themselves from a certain relationship—with a significant other, a friend, a parent, a child, and so forth. At the very least, this is a loss of the relationship one hoped to have. It is sad when this seems the only way to get any kind of resolution on problematic relating. But in the case of Sara’s parents, they did not want to challenge their belief about Ben’s intentions toward their daughter, nor their belief that no one should have a relationship with such a considerable difference in age. To them, the unusual was tantamount to the unthinkable.

This small example of one family crisis is exemplary of ways in which, by insulating ourselves, by closing all the curtains in our rooms, we can shore up our beliefs and keep a variety of other narratives from shaking us up. When we feel very comfortable with our beliefs, and with the connections and communities with which we bond around those beliefs, it can feel very frightening to consider other perspectives on the nature of being human, on how we might live together in this world of strangers as well as familiars.

By their very nature, beliefs are often not scientifically evidentiary. But we consider our experiences in life evidentiary. The problem is that when I hold to a certain belief, I view my experiences through the lens of that belief, filtering in experiences that buttress my belief rather than contradict or point to exceptions. This is similar, in its filtering process, to how a pregnant woman sees “so many” other pregnant women. “Wow, these days there are more than the average number of pregnant women. They’re everywhere,” she thinks. Or, you buy a new pair of brand named sneakers and see them as ever more popular than you thought. If I believe that some group of people are criminal, then every news item that is exemplary seems like more evidence to support my view, whereas other news stories that extol members of this group go unnoticed by me, or relegated to a rarity. In this way, I bolster my preconception.

Sometimes only a real crisis in my life will produce enough power to make me question a belief. As an example, though today parents would be far less taken by surprise to find their adolescent children questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity, in past generations some parents had to face their fear and rejection of the non-normative in their worldviews or religious contexts. For parents and their children whose relationships survived such challenges, parents had to reflect upon and rethink their views, their priorities, and their capacities for overarching guiding principles. If a parent believed homosexuality to be “wrong,” rather than a biological, emotional, social or political opportunity, then love and kindness may have had to become overarching beliefs, as an example.

Beliefs mostly involve taking things on faith. Faith bonds us to the thoughts we call beliefs because we cannot scientifically prove them. Beliefs get linked to a sense of rightness in our minds which fosters our adherence to them. Sometimes we cling to our beliefs as to a life raft and when powerful experiences shake us to the core and cause us to question our long-held beliefs we may feel cut adrift and disoriented. Occasionally, in my therapy practice, clients question their religious faith when starting a long healing process after the untimely, or unanticipated death of a child. “How can there be a benevolent God if my child was taken?”

Many people return to their long-held beliefs, after a period of time, during which a fitting narrative develops. For some, the notion that an afterlife is better than this planetary life helps; or there is the promise of rejoining one’s loved ones. Or “God has a reason or a plan,” or “only gives you what you can handle.” Or the death transforms one’s mission in life, in honor of their late child, and to help others in a similar situation come to grips.

The more beliefs get bonded to notions of rightness, the less flexible our thinking; the less able we find ourselves to consider alternate beliefs or perspectives. This may cause exclusivity behaviors on one hand—we who share the same belief are insiders and others are outsiders—or on the other hand we may take on a missionary role, becoming zealous about persuading others to believe what we believe. This gets more apparent the more a sense of rightness turns into a sense of truth. Not only is it right to believe what I believe, but what I believe is the truth, and if you believe something different, then you believe a falsehood. As a self-appointed ‘knower’ of true beliefs, it is my mission to persuade you to the rightness and truth of my beliefs.

From rightness and truth comes ‘the good.’ We are right to believe the truth, and therefore we are good. Others who believe wrongheadedly, follow falsity and are bad. At the extreme end of this linked chain of notions—my beliefs are right, true, and good—sits extremism. Because we get inculcated into many of our beliefs from early childhood, they feel self-evident because our development has been shaped around those beliefs. They become part of who we are, and the social community with which we identify. Beliefs—those powerful ideas that inform us over a long time–function as organizing principles for our identities and for the ways in which we relate to other people. And when we feel we must do something with our extremely polarizing notions, then friction with others–who think, feel, and act according to a different set of beliefs, whether religious, or in terms of political governance, or concerning our interpersonal freedoms and obligations–can amount to battle.

It is everyone’s prerogative to believe whatever thoughts one wants to believe. However, it does not presuppose that we are entitled to use whatever means we want in order to achieve the outcome of converting others to our beliefs. The means-to-ends constitute our behaviors and actions in the world—the way we treat others within and beyond our borders.

Like Russian nesting dolls, some beliefs exist within other sets of values, and sometimes those beliefs and values create ambiguity if not extreme ambivalence. If, for example, one believes in treating all human beings with love and kindness, then that may seem antagonistic to aggressive persuasiveness or a lack of mercy. Human society is full of laws and etiquette which recognize the need to mitigate our strong emotions and even our powerful beliefs in order that the behavioral expressions of those emotions and beliefs do not threaten chaos.

Some people will willingly die to defend what they believe, and some people will die by the hand of those who believe that their beliefs are preeminent and must be perpetuated, even globalized. There are many complex situations that a country like the United States faces when contemplating whether, aside from protecting our own borders against hostile attacks, we must protect innocent people in other countries from regimes different from our own, or overthrow those regimes. It is a question of values and beliefs to define to what extent we have global responsibilities, and what agendas our interventions will support—economic, political, etc.

It is a challenging awakening to expand our circles of awareness such that we might view our own beliefs and values systems within the larger context of multiple belief systems. And to consider which human beliefs and values have the most universal power to bridge other differences. Tolerance of others who subscribe to beliefs different from our own comes with understanding that complex social, economic, cultural, and geographic structures embed those beliefs.

Camel Saddle: What are your top five beliefs? The ones that guide you in your life and relationships? How well/poorly do you deal with others who espouse religious, political or social beliefs that are very different from your own? Are you able to listen and understand? Do you try to argue others from their positions? What beliefs have you ever had to question in your own life? Have you ever pivoted from a deeply entrenched position or belief to another? And if so, in light of what information, circumstance or outcome were you so inspired?

Web Camel Transport 47

Beginner’s Mind Revisited

Friday, May 12, 2017

Looking back, I chose a beginner’s way with clay when I had multiple small children at home and worked a couple of nights a week. Unusual for me, because I mostly opt for classes, conferences, instructional books, and informal teachers when I want to learn something new, I decided to let the clay teach me. Almost every day, sitting at, or standing by the clay table, I discovered the differences in clay’s malleability based on its water content and the temperature in the room. The clay showed me how thinly or thickly it could bend or support, what details might impress it, and what shapes emerged from my contact with it. I learned that by extending my hand with ceramic tools I could develop more details in the skin of the clay, giving its texture a more tooled look. I hand sculpted fan bowls, fountains with figures embedded in them that emerged and submerged, as if from the bedrock of life. I made free form bowls and urns, and other shapes that had utility or just played.

Lots of things didn’t work: would tear or break apart completely, collapse or crack, shrink too much, or even explode while firing. Some pieces simply looked awful or I abandoned. But in the longer run, I began to acquire some facility which I had not possessed at the beginning of my acquaintance with clays. Each type had its own personality as well as its optimal expressions as hand built objects. As a complete novice, I would greet the clay that awaited me in its moist plastic bag with interest and curiosity, never knowing what the process of discovery would yield—a masterpiece in the making or a total disaster, or something in between. But I recall the way in which, seamlessly, one idea, interacting with the clay, would yield another and another, as if carrying me along on an exciting journey.

During the hours that I moved my hands in clay, I felt refreshed, honed, concentrated, joyful, excited. The rest of my responsibilities, worries, and schedule receded. At the end of each session I felt strangely accomplished. In discovering an aesthetic object “hiding” in a lump of clay, I also discovered and fabricated myself. It did not matter if anyone else saw or admired these pieces, because the process itself provided so many rewards.

Perhaps those couple of years of clay-making provided me with pure self-indulgence. Although I sold a few pieces and exhibited a couple of them, I certainly didn’t make the kind of money one would have to make to legitimize such an enterprise. I did not become either a sculptor or a potter. But a curiosity and fearlessness when engaging with something new stayed with me. And a trust in the abilities of all things, living and inorganic, to reveal something about themselves to those who remain open and curious.

In a Psychology Today online article from November 8, 2008, Jay Winner, MD, considers the popular notion of ‘beginner’s mind.’ He writes, “Shoshin (初心) is a concept in Zen Buddhism meaning beginner’s mind. It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would. . .It’s an old Zen term made popular by Shunryu Suzuki. In his book he says, ‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.’”

Both my experience, long ago, with clay, and my contemporary experiences, watching my two year old granddaughter explore piano keys and tricycle pedals for the first time, or play outside with a small square bucket of water, extended my thoughts about beginner’s mind.

With a larger bucket of water, Lili played with two differently shaped plastic cups and small rocks that fill my driveway. Every way in which a cup can turn—upside down, right side up, side angled—and enter water, with and without rocks, and for water to be poured from cup to cup to bucket to step to driveway, and to be recaptured or emptied (“More wahwer Gwama!”) enthralled her for a long time.

Over and over she repeated the variety of obtainable results, with slight alterations in how she manipulated water, cups, bucket, rocks. More amazingly, she had been sick with a cold and very cranky all morning, but her beginner’s fascination virtually eliminated her symptoms. Her eyes no longer hurt and her nose stopped running as fluently.

Lili opened my eyes to the realization that, as beginners, we don’t know what we don’t know, which removes a huge barrier to operating on an ambition or problem. We don’t see failure as an option. By persisting in our exploration, we often achieve some alternative results to just plain failure. I realized that the qualities of beginners go way beyond open and engaged awareness. Novices share an openness to new experience, awakened minds and senses, curiosity, fully operationalized capabilities unhampered by anticipatory worries, an experimental outlook, and potential which is activated. Beginners are pioneers and discoverers, connecting proactively with interpersonal, natural, material and other environments or contexts. As beginners, we make connections between ourselves and our world that enjoin us, creating new entities. Beginners are not only open and curious. Beginners act. Beginners operate on the world, and the connection between actor and that which is acted upon, co-creates new possibilities and new results.

How might we recreate the exciting experiences of beginner’s mind?

Thinking about a baby, whose mind is still pre-verbal, we see the desire to ‘speak’ of an object with hands and mouth. The first discovery of every baby’s world: Is it edible? Babies’ first naming involves discerning in what way an object may be taken into the body. The stomach? The eyes, the ears? Babies activate themselves to connect with ‘objects’ in the environment, both people and things, because forming relationships is fundamental to survival.

Around two years old, the intimate pleasure of knowing someone or something, of making it familiar (making it part of the family) announces itself verbally. ‘This is mama,’ ‘this is an apple,’ this is an owl, hoo, hoo!’ So beginner minds not only possess traits of openness and non-judgment, but are also powerfully potentiated. It is efficient for a mind gathering more and more information about the world to relegate what already has a name to a less active corner of consciousness.

The difficulty for us, later in our lives, if we do not want to sit saturated in boredom, glued to the TV, requires us to re-pleasure or to newly savor the familiar. Neither the novel nor the familiar are good or bad. We love both, the coziness of those people and places we know so well, and the stimulation of our senses with fresh vistas and new conversations.

As young children, our curiosity and ambition propelled our lips and tongues to tap or slither along our palettes and little teeth to taste the power of language; of words that bridged our eyes and noses to the rose in the garden, to the ocean, to the orange hat.

Try, now, to say a common word one hundred times. Watch it dance back into sounds. Taste it again as music, those consonants and vowels that bonded for the first time when we learned the word. To see and hear and experience things in their namelessness, to get lost in them and find our way out again. . . that is the dance the child, the poet, the artist does. To re-experience without presumption.

We are shape makers, translating whatever essences things have into identifiable or stranger sounds, sights, words, concepts. We make shapes with our mouths, our hands, and our imaginations. As beginners, we do not stand idly by in passivity. The leafing trees flirt with our senses and sensibilities and we flirt back with a refreshed mood, a line for a poem, a desire to share our delight with another person.

Our beginner’s minds are open, activated and operational, at work on the world in a second moment of brilliance. The first moment of brilliance, like an eye opening, receives the rose, the breeze, the wave, the roar. In this moment, a relationship is forged. The essences of a rose or a breeze can never be known as they really are, but we can be with them. Even nonverbal apprehension by sight or scent filters the essence of the as-yet-unnamed rose through our humanness, and more specifically through human embodiment. Whether we name, define, or classify a rose, or mindfully enliven our senses with its perfume and softness—leaving monkey chatter to its quiet corner in the back of the mind—our bodies—senses, feelings, conceptual minds—have consumed it. We have eaten and breathed in and touched to our hearts its gifts. We feel moved, awakened, aware, inspired, refreshed.

A phrase much quoted, by French novelist Marcel Proust, aptly describes this phenomenon of beginner’s mind: “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.”

As beginners we tend to feel optimistic because we don’t know how much work is involved, we don’t have familiarity with the barriers to success; our expectations and standards may remain high for a while. New teachers expect a lot of their students and sometimes impact their classes by getting better results. New therapists bring zest and enthusiasm to their work with clients, young engineers believe their inventiveness can overcome knotty problems.

As we progress from eager and naïve beginnings to greater and greater mastery, we may take some things for granted, seeing with old eyes instead of with new eyes. But there exist ever new-within-the-old possibilities, which only a master’s eye can detect. These “new” elements constitute the nuances or variations on a theme that only those who know the theme intimately can detect as slight differences, unexpected outcomes, exceptions to rules, all the delicate filigree that only a master hand or mind can generate.

Camel Saddle: What are the most refreshing, fresh-eyed experiences you count on when everything seems stale or stressful? What can you challenge yourself to view from an open perspective, as if for the first time—your significant other? Your work? Your surroundings?