Brian McLaren describes how contemplative practices allow us to “mind our mind,” making space for thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations without getting caught up in them.
When you learn to mind your mind, you begin by allowing your thoughts and feelings to shout or cry, to throw a tantrum and have a meltdown. It’s fruitless and ultimately quite harmful to perpetually beat down those feelings. So for some period of time, you let your inner committees express their distress and negotiate, firing up the subway for a frantic rush hour.
And then, at some point, you have to get off the train and exit the subway station and find a quiet place. Perhaps you’ll meet with a circle of trust, processing with some friends what you’re struggling with. Perhaps you’ll find some solitude to practice private contemplation.
One of the most time-tested approaches to private contemplation could be called the focus/release method…. I might focus on a single, simple word. I might focus on a phrase or mantra…. Sometimes, when simple breath, heartbeat, words or phrases aren’t working, I might listen to music, dance, cook, or simply walk mindfully and focus on what I see around me…. I may go running, practice yoga, or play a game, so I have to shift my focus from inner turmoil to physical endurance and prowess.
McLaren names the freedom and creativity that arises from contemplative practice:
Contemplation liberates me from being a perpetual prisoner of my trains of thoughts and feelings; it helps me realize that I am not my thoughts and feelings. It helps me see that these inner reactions and negotiations happen to me and within me without my consent, like digestion, like sleep, like fatigue or laughter.
In the stillness, new insights, comfort, and ways of being often arise. If stepping off the train is letting go, and if dwelling in the stillness is letting be, receiving these gifts is letting come. When these new gifts come, I experience a kind of liberation, a setting free. All of my best creative work seems to flow from this deep place of restful, receptive awareness beneath my mental subway system….
What we experience in the letting-come phase some people describe as intuition. Many would call it the gentle voice of God speaking within them. Seasoned contemplatives like Thomas Merton describe letting go, letting be, letting come, and setting free as discovering the true self. Others call it becoming the best self. I tend to think of it as becoming the integrated, unitive, or connected self….
This connected self seeks to bring together smaller competing parts into larger harmonious wholes. It seeks to integrate the known and the unknown. It wants to help the parts of [me] to live intentionally in relation to each other and to the reality outside of me. It seeks harmony and interdependence among parts, not domination, manipulation, exclusion, and oppression. It holds the both/and of part and whole.
| Hey CO Few, Andrew Lang here, This past week, I facilitated my nonprofit’s annual training for local educators: a 3-day intensive on how to build relevant, hands-on projects so students feel seen and are engaged in real-world problem solving while at school.It’s one of my favorite events each year because we work on really hard stuff: developing curriculum kids actually care about, integrating anti-racist teaching practices into our lesson planning, co-creating our classrooms with students rather than simply for them, or, in some case, for ourselves.It’s beautiful – but it’s also absolutely exhausting. And you can probably guess:Many teachers for whom this is new struggle with shifting from thinking about potential changes to actually making them.It can be scary to try new things; challenging to do the self-examination needed to think in new ways; emotionally draining to work those muscles of creativity; absolutely paralyzing to face the possibility of public failure. (Plus the event is in the middle of a teacher’s summer break, so…there’s that.) For some, the gathering each year is like a breath of fresh air amidst a stale stream of district-led events; for others, just getting there and getting started was crushingly difficult.We all have something like this in our lives – where getting started, no matter how much we want to, is the hardest step. So here’s a framework I like to use as a gut-check when I’m considering starting something new: (I think I heard this first in a podcast with James Clear.)Is this a hat, a haircut, or a tattoo? Most decisions are like hats: things we can easily try on and see how they fit; and if they don’t, we can just move onto another one; they are easily reversible and try-again-able. Some are more like haircuts: a bit more of a commitment and sacrifice, but still changeable and short-term-ish; if it doesn’t work great or feel right, we’ll think about it for awhile – others might let us know – but we’ll be okay. And then there are the tattoos: the big, permanent-for-the-most-part decisions; the long-haul commitments; the decisions that come with real, embodied sacrifice.I realized on the second day of our event that the teachers who were struggling most were mistaking hats and haircuts for tattoos: every small change felt like a mountain that had to be moved.Sound relatable?Especially when it comes to making changes in our personal lives or taking a deeper step into activism, it’s easy to conflate hats with haircuts…and sometimes even tattoos.The decision to call a representative, attend a local Indivisible meeting, speak up against harmful policies or behavior at work: for many of us, if we’ve never done anything like this before, it can feel huge, difficult, and emotionally exhausting just to consider taking action.But, the truth is – most of these decisions are hats and haircuts: doable actions that are flexible, changeable, and require very little real commitment of us. So an invitation:This week, try on a few hats and maybe even get a haircut. Choose to take action, no matter how small, and pay attention to its impact and how it feels in your body. Then, when you find something you can do sustainably to meaningfully impact an issue you care about, go and get yourself that big back tattoo. |
