Monday ramble: new thinking via new approach

From now on,
an essay will come to slowsonoma.com
each Monday

and an essay to WakeUp-Feldenkrais.blogspot.com
aka Brain Plasticity, Learning, Love and Vitality
on Wednesdays

and an essay
to Tai Chi / Yoga / Health / Weight Loss / Everything
on Fridays

sometimes
the "essay"
will be more a poem
sometimes
an "essay"

sometimes a bunch
of questions

hope you'll come by and visit

here's today's "essay"

THINKING IN A NEW
MODE

Most of us don’t think.

We have a bunch of words running in our heads, often rehearsals of something we plan to say ( and usually don’t.). Sometimes we replay old conversations and give ourselves better lines. Again, sadly, we often spend our mental chatter time complaining about someone, often the person we live with, and hopefully we don’t get around to dumping this load, but even if we don’t, what a waste of a mind.

And then sometimes we think radically true thoughts:
I am alive.
Or,
I have not been aware for the last couple of hours.
Or,
I didn’t need to say what I just said.
Or,
This isn’t working, what else can I try.
Or: This isn’t working, how can I slow down and observe what I’m doing to learn a more useful and effective and easy way to go about this.
Or,
(This close to the first one) I’m going to die someday. Is this really how I want to be using my time and energy and thinking and emotions?
And more.

Later, I’ll have a chapter full of possibly useful or life opening questions to mull in a day, or in a life.

For now, though, I have a proposal.

Let’s go about thinking in a way that the movement activities are actually encouraging and developing: thinking without words.

You’ve had the experience. Suddenly a thought, an answer, an insight just pops into your mind. It’s about something that’s been troubling or fascinating you, but you really haven’t been grinding away at the “issue.” You were doing “something else” when the newness of real thought popped into your mind.


So, today, let’s go about this.

Get a couple of sheets of paper. Look at the first blank page and allow your mind to be as still as possible.

Then, allow yourself to write down four or five words that you would really like to think about. Love. Fear. Freedom.

Many, many more.

Just single words and no more than five.

Write them down, and look at them and follow your breathing and do a little bit of a pelvic clock and have as few words as possible in your mind.


Then, circle one word.

Don’t think. Just pick.

Now, write that word on a new blank piece of paper. Look at it, again, sensing yourself, following your breathing and doing a little arching and folding of your back as you look.

Have an empty mind, as if silence is a vast field of quiet wisdom there just for you to dip into and mine.

Breathe.

Relax.

Don’t think.

Look at the word.

Look away into the distance.

Wiggle side to side.

Get up, walk around. Look at the word.

Turn over the page, forget the word, and go take a walk, again with the walk to be a time to be wordless. Walk and watch. Walk and breathe. Walk and notice your feet touching the ground. Walk and notice light coming in your eyes. Walk and notice sounds coming in your ear.

Come back to your paper. Look at the word once more and start to write for a couple of pages, without stopping, or “thinking,” or punctuating anyway other than what comes easily, about this word.

Let the words and images and ideas just pour out.

Do that until a couple of pages are full.

Take another walk.

Come back, do NOT yet read what you’ve already written, but check in with your intuition and see / feel/ guess if anymore words want to come out. If they do, spill them on out.

Then rest a bit. Or walk.

And then read what you’ve written, and decide if this “thinking” can lead somehow to some wonderful, even if ever so slight, shift or change or improvement in your life.