Taken from my journal 27th January 2017. I really enjoyed the class with Michelle Lilyanna. In some ways it was like being a child again. Being allowed to play and feel joy. Michelle has translated the work of James baratz on Joy for adults into workshops on joy for children. The class was an opportunity to try some of the activities Michelle usually does with children. Michelle had a really infectious positive energy about her that was so encouraging. This was a welcome relief. Michelle guided us through an exercise where we drew a self-portrait, in particular, we were asked to represent our emotions and mood with colour. The activity was intentionally fast paced so we would not have time to overthink it. I love art and I'm happy whenever I have the opportunity to do it in class. I especially like using pastels as it takes me back to when I was a child and would draw on the pavement in my garden. It was nice to see the joy in my picture. Working with children in mental health and having some training in art therapy, I know how much information can be gleaned from children's drawings. They can be like polaroids of what is happening at any given time. In one of the last activities of the day, we were asked to sit in a circle. We were each given a piece of string and were asked to tie a knot in it. Michelle asked us to think about something we were going to let go of and leave behind us in the session. She asked us think about where we felt this thing in our bodies and to hold the string up in that spot. One by one we passed around a pair of scissors and the person next to us cut the string while saying "You are released". I looked around the room and noticed we were all women that day. I held the string up to my head. I want to let go of thoughts that hold me back from feeling joy. As I sat in that circle of strong women, I felt a bond between us as we performed the ceremony. I felt joy to be surrounded by strong, independent and fearless women.
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"What's needed are eyes that focus with the soul. What's needed are spirits open to everything. What's needed are the belief that wonder is the glue of the universe and the desire to seek more of it. Be filled with wonder." (pg. 105) Reflections on Writing the Cauldron as Intersubjective Practice by Susan Walsh and Heesoon Bai1/17/2017 Kindly shared by Heesoon Bai from Developing a Spiritual Research Paradigm: Incorporating Sprirituality in Research in Social Sciences and Education. Susan Walsh and Heesoon Bai (Forthcoming) Taken from my notes from weekend one, January 13th and 14th 2017.
What resonated in the article for you and why? This article resonated for me because of the philosophy and research practices described in the piece. Firstly, I enjoyed reading more about The Four Immeasurables or Limitless Ones: Metta or Loving-kindness Karuna or Compassion Mudita or Empathic Joy Upekka or Equanimity I have been learning more and more about these values. I can see they are qualities I have been trying to embody working through my contemplative practices , including Mindfulness. So it was important for me to learn more about the original Buddhist teachings from which secular Mindfulness has been extracted. It was a nice reminder to see mindfulness or being aware, as one part of a way of being everyday. This is often forgotten when mindfulness is taught in a secular way. Secondly, I was very inspired by the practice referred to as "writing witness consciousness" (Walsh & Bai 2015). This is described as a "process developed over time whereby through writing and contemplation, we notice in non-reactive ways the content of our thoughts (our own and other's) and also their movement, shiftability and flow, their lack of solidity, and the spaces among them." I love reading the written reflections as they go back and forth between Heesoon and Susan. Seeing the different perspectives but also the echoes in their writing. The intention being to "write together in the service of learning to live well (together) in the world."(Bai 2015). This reminded me of the stream of consciousness method of writing I used to do my autobiography. I love the idea of doing this in collaboration with someone else. Such beautiful prose: "like an echo chamber, a space in which our words 'rebound(ed)' back and forth, a sounding space for deep and core-filled listening" "what arises in the intertext of our writing" "Through our collaborative, contemplative and artistic writing practice then, we consciously cultivate intersubjectivity- the capacity to know each other's subjectivity, and to mix and infuse our subjectivities with new insights and patterns of knowing and being." The cauldron serves as the metaphor of alchemy in the mingling and mixing of ideas, but it is also a symbol reminiscent of witches, ancient feminine and the womb. The approach is intended, I think to be incredibly feminine in outlook. In my experience women are incredibly collaborative and share stories and wisdom, looking for commonalities. As a woman who does not have children, I found it interesting to learn that in Buddhism "mother" is not gendered and identity shifts in relation to others. Rather it is seen in terms of "generativity" "creativity beyond self-ness." What a lovely notion.... My favourite part of the article: " The existential quality of intersubjective consciousness resides in the practice of co-creating, what we come to call "writing the cauldron" - a consciousness that dwells in a transformative liminal space into which we each pour, and together we mix and transform our words and images. By entering into this interpsychic cauldron that collects, joins, mixes and comingles words, images, thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions "we" participate in alchemical processes of transmitting hearts, minds and bodies. From this co-creation and participation, we invite larger and richer sense of ourselves, strengthened by loving-kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity and expanded and inclusive views of what 'reality' entails and we are better able to work with whatever arises in everyday being and knowing". In what way did the article link with your current understanding of contemplative education? Our class is the cauldron...... I was excited to read about the notion of alchemy, as this is a word I used in my What is Contemplation? assignment in Charles Scott's class. I used Alchemy as a word to describe the dialogue and intersubjectivity of contemplation. In this article, Heesoon and Susan refer to the "doing and knowing" of intersubjectivity as "one feedback loop, informing and forming each other". I have experienced this in the class with the back and forth of of ideas and how they influence one another. When I shared my Contemplation is Yellow painting with the class, so many people came to me with their responses to this piece. "My favourite sweater is that colour" "It makes me think of the sun in my favourite place, the south of France". "You have forever changed the way I look at yellow". "Now I see yellow everywhere". These responses inspired my next piece of art, also yellow. I tried to show the ripple effect by making five pieces, each spreading out from the original, each representing one of the responses above.I love that when someone sees the colour yellow in their everyday life, they will think of my piece Contemplation is Yellow and go "oh yeah" with a deep breathe. How will the article contribute to your own area of inquiry and/or your own contemplative journey? In the article, a quote by Thich Nhat Hahn is used to show the power of The Four Immeasurables, "if you practice them, they will grow in you everyday until they embrace the whole world...They are the four aspects of true love within ourselves and within everyone and everything" (pg. 169) This validates what I am trying to bring to my workplace through the peer led MBSR support groups. By continuing my own personal contemplative practices. I hope to embody these qualities and hope they will be contagious. As Joan says "Lead as you would like to led". In terms of my own personal inquiry, I was inspired by the article and have begun to consider how I might work with intersubjectivity in my own work. I wondered if I might use art as well as writing. A seed of an idea for my comprehensive exam was sown in Charles Scott's class. A small group of women in the class shared that art has become their contemplative practice throughout the course. We began a contemplative a reflective dialogue, sharing our ideas and images on a media application. We have discussed doing a collaborative art exhibit for our comprehensive exam. Wouldn't this show what the masters program has been trying to create; a multitude of diverse voices collaborating in contemplation and the art of becoming As I walked down the hall to my office I felt hot and flustered. My body a strange mix of heavy and light. I needed to take a break. I didn't know how I was going to go on for the rest of the day with the family like this. Too much sadness and pain. Inside my office, I shut the door, stood and closed my eyes. I scanned my thoughts, my emotions and my body.
Ugh this is so hard I heard my inner voice say. What do you need? I asked myself. I need to go outside. Space. Cold air. Snow. I bundled up in my snow boots and coat and walked out to the garden in front of my work building. So much snow! A fresh thick layer lay on the ground, untouched and glistening in the sun. I stood and closed my eyes again. Yes this is hard. Yes the child had so much sadness, hopelessness and disappointment about life for someone so young. Yes his family were also in so much pain and sadness. Child and parent and sibling intertwined in their suffering. When I scanned my body I felt the pain in my chest, a deep heartache. Remember, you are not alone. They are not alone. Other people feel this way too. I asked myself again. What do you need? What do you really need? This. I need to slow down and breathe. I need to remind myself there are still wonderful things in the world. The sun was bright behind my eyelids and and warm on my face. opened my eyes. The mountains were as visibly sturdy as ever. The sky, clear blue and vast. I heard the crunch of the snow under my feet. Go on! You know you want to! Do it! Don't worry what anyone else thinks. Very slowly, step by step I walked across the untouched snow. The child in me giggled at the naughtiness. I focused on the soles of my feet as I lifted, moved and placed each foot in front of the other. I felt the cold seep into my boots. The delectable crunch and squeak of the fresh snow beneath the soles of my feet. When I was full, I stopped. I turned around to go back inside. As I was entering the building a large group of youth, patients in the next building walked by. I could not help grinning from ear to ear at my childish mischief. Now I could go on. I could be present for them again. What resonated in the article for you and why?This article resonated with me because I work in healthcare. My husband and friends are also in healthcare. Healthcare is a business made up of service providers and customers. Customers at the point of the encounter make a critical assessment where they evaluate the service they receive. This is a determinant of their satisfaction and an assessment of the quality of the service they received (Parasuraman, Zeithamel & Berry 1985). A good service encounter requires the employee to: 1) regulate their emotions to be attentive and patient 2) understand customer expectations 3) adapt to the situation of the encounter 4) generate flexible and creative solutions Satisfaction is said to increase with improvement in this "soft side" of customer service, not just re-engineering workflow and the supply chain. In contrast to this, the service I work for utilises the industrial Toyota Model of LEAN when they want to evaluate and improve service. This article introduced me to the phrase "emotional labour". Emotional labour is described as act to induce or suppress one's feelings in order to sustain an outward countenance that is both empathetic and pleasing to the customer. It requires a co-ordination of mind and feeling. This takes effort! I recognise the toll of emotional labour has had upon me, my husband and my friends. There may be two ways of acting within the service role, surface acting and deep acting. In surface acting, the service provider feigns their emotion- they wear a smile. In deep acting, the service provider focuses on inner feelings, their smile invokes actual feelings and display. According to Hulsheger & Schewe (2011) surface actors are more likely to experience burnout and poor health as the effort to sustain the feigned emotion, when inner feelings are different is strenuous. I have experienced this and seen it in my colleagues. Mindfulness can promote deeper acting and in turn each of the aspects of good service. Emotional regulation Contemplative mindfulness promotes equanimity, a decoupling from automatic thought processes that allows a person to become more aware of self-centred thoughts. This in turn provides more mental space to have deeper empathy and understanding for the customer. Understanding customer expectations According to Langer (1997), mindfulness increases the capacity to question automatic patterns of thoughts and actions. This also allows a person to generate novel ways of thinking and to see a situation from multiple views. This makes them more likely to understand the viewpoint of the customer. Situational adaptability and flexibility How someone responds to individual requests is connected to customer satisfaction. If a service provider acts in a way that comes across as routinized or standardised, satisfaction is reduced. Mindlessness is rule and routine governed while mindful employees are more flexible. Creativity of solutions Positive emotions broaden cognitive potential and enhance creative thinking (Langer 1997) What questions did the article raise for me? How can managers implement this? Can mindfulness be enforced? What about what the employee wants? Does motivation to increase customer satisfaction (and revenue) go against the values of mindfulness? In what way did the article link with my current understanding of contemplative education? The article confirmed my personal experience after adopting a daily mindfulness practice. It also confirms and supports my observations from the peer led mindfulness based stress reduction group I co-facilitate in my workplace. How will the article contribute (if at all) to my own area of inquiry and/ or my contemplative journey? It may be helpful in the future to approach my manager with an article like this that frames these observations in business language. At the moment, we are providing the group in our lunch hour (ie. not paid). When we run the group largely depends on when we can find a time that doesn't have an impact on our clinical roles. Often this means that we don't have flexibility to offer the group at a time that suits staff who want to participate. We would like to approach managers to ask if we can use work hours to provide the group so that we may reach more people who are not able to make the group at that time. Wanga, E, Berthona, P, Pitt, L & McCarthy, I.P. (2016) Service, emotional labour and mindfulness. Business Horizons. Volume 59, Issue 6, November–December 2016, Pages 655–661
http://dx.doi.org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1016/j.bushor.2016.07.002 Taken from my journal 14th January 2017
The visit to the Buddhist temple of the Tung Lin Kok Yuen Canada Society was surprisingly emotional for me. Visiting the temple, I felt more reverence than on previous visits to other temples. Perhaps that comes from understanding more about Buddhism over the program and feeling a greater connection to it. Nevertheless, what happened in the Temple was unusual for me. During the tour of the temple, we were in the main hall when we came across the longevity hall. We were told this is where people would come to pray for long lives and health for their loved ones. All of a sudden, I thought about my Dad being sick and whether he might die and I started to cry. I couldn't stop crying. I tried to hide that I was crying, embarrassed, feeling like I couldn't get control of my emotions. I was particularly unhappy that a man was taking photos of us and filming me without my permission. I just wanted privacy in that moment. Needless to say, I still couldn't stop crying. A voice inside me said It's ok. Let it out. So I did. There was something cathartic about letting go and not resisting my feelings of deep sadness about my Dad being unwell and my fear that he might die. On New Year's Day I found out from my brother that my Dad had decided to stop chemotherapy. I had not yet been able to contact my Dad to ask him about what this meant for him. I was afraid. Clearly my emotions were so close to the surface, it just took a little scratch to release them. I cried throughout the meditation practice. I accepted that I couldn't stop. "My spiritual father once told me, "Nothing in the universe ever grew from the outside in. I like that. It keeps me grounded. It reminds me to be less concerned with outside answers and more focused on the questions inside. It's the quest for those answers that will lead me to the highest possible version of myself." (pg.23) Contemplative Pedagogy: Frequently Asked Questions. From Teaching Theology and Religion Volume 14(2) April 2011.
A conversation between: Tom Coburn, Naropa University and Brown University Fran Grace, University of Redlands Anne Carolyn Klein, Rice University Louis Komjathy, University of San Diego Harold Roth, Brown University Judith Simmer Brown, Naropa University Taken from my notes on January 13th and 14th 2017...... What resonated in the article for you and why? The contributors were asked what is the benefit of including meditation as part of an academic course. Anne Klein's response resonated with me; "The benefits are that the students right in the middle of what is most likely to be the most intensive intellectual training of their lives and certainly their lives to date, are getting to see there are different ways of knowing in addition to cognitive learning. They also learn in a way that they cannot forget, and they see that these many ways are of learning can be integrated. This in turn means that the types of identities they may have around being an "intellectual" or "smart" can be integrated with identities formed around presence, immediacy of attention, sensory experience, and so on." (pg.167) I certainly relate to this observation. Many ideas have come to me while meditating in and outside of class. I have noticed meditation and mindfulness are very helpful to reflect, formulate, demonstrate and develop ideas using arts based methods while being on this program. For example in Vicky Kelly's class I used creative writing, poetry, video recording and fibre arts to document my metissage of women in my family. My vision for the "What is contemplation?" assignment in Charles Scott's class, came to me while I was meditating in his class. I have come to value and appreciate the insights I have gained through these practices. I continue to feel more confident showing this side of myself to others, with less fear of judgement that these are not legitimate ways of knowing. The contributors were asked what are the dangers of proselytization in contemplative pedagogy and how are they are avoided? Fran Grace's response resonated with me. She stated the issue is more "the subtle dynamic of students projecting onto me the status of a 'guru'. The students sometimes tap into powerful inner experiences and they might view the professor as the psychic source of that momentum" (pg 170) Through the deep work I did in Vicky Kelly's class, I experienced a huge personal shift in the way I view my relationships with women in my family, especially my mother. I can see how these attachment dynamics can play out in the group, and towards the professor through the process of transference and projection. It is very hard not to attribute these significant personal breakthroughs to the qualities of the professor, when they have developed such presence from their own contemplative practices. In what ways did the article contribute to your own understanding of contemplative education? The article showed me that there are many common experiences of students who are studying contemplation, regardless of their chosen course. How will the article contribute to my own area of inquiry and/or my contemplative journey? This is a nice review article to go back to if one of the questions comes up. |
Helen Kennett-BaconOriginally from South Yorkshire in England, I've lived with my husband Neil in Kitsilano, Vancouver for 10 years. We are fur-parents to our French bulldog Dave, I am a Registered Psychiatric Nurse specialising in ADHD. Archives
April 2017
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