L.I.F.T.

There are several tendencies and assumptions we have in our culture, here in the United States. Here are a few:

Being a specialist is better than being generalist
You have to have certain credentials in order to do certain things
Only experts are allowed to have opinions about things
People who publish things or appear in media (film, tv, etc.) are experts
Boys are X way and girls are Y way

What all of these things have in common is this – we recognize certain differences between oppositions that we’ve created in our minds and then we cling tenaciously to those differences.

Once we’ve done that, we do what’s called “meaning making” – we create the reasons why the differences we’ve decided upon are right (correct).

We do it after the fact. Rarely are we allowed to come to our own decision about something. As a matter of fact, once you’re old enough to read and understand the words in this blog post, you have enough prejudices about the precise definitions and meanings of different things, words and relationships, that, unless you’re consciously trying to be open (or doing some kind of drug), you are automatically using meanings that were given to you from the day you were born by your parents and culture.

A person’s “qualifications” (usually seen, in our culture, in their resume or “curriculum vitae”) simply list the types of things they did before they started to do what they’re doing now.

That is, a resume or CV is relatively meaningless by itself. When the person began doing what they’re doing now, they were in the same position as any beginner.

This is not to say that you can just start doing something and be as proficient as someone who has been doing it for 10 years. That doesn’t make any sense.

What I am saying here is that everyone starts from where they’re at, at the moment at which they start.

What I’m saying here is – no matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back.

What I’m saying here is – whatever it is that you want to do in life – START NOW.

For this post, I’m going to keep it simple. If you read the post on training crying patterns, you already know what I’m recommending here…if not, go read the crying post!

Once you’ve done that, watch this for inspiration:

Among the emotions to play with is Sadness.

Specifically, we can play with the overt expression of sadness – crying.

When I worked at Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare in Boston, MA, my boss and I came up with a crying competition. We would come in to work every morning armed with a new “cry.”

We did the “man” cry. We did the “baby” cry, the “little kid who cries so hard they don’t make any sound” cry, the “silent tear” cry so common in movies.

By the end of the year, I think we had accumulated about 15 unique cries.

We thought it was hilarious, and there it ended. I didn’t think of it again till recently, when posting about playing with smack-talk and/or competitiveness in order to explore affective states and performance.

At my friend Steven Stanfield’s birthday party this past weekend, we resurrected this old game. We must have had over 20 cries by the end of the weekend.

But why, you may ask? What’s the point?

Well, part of the point is to explore your capacity for make-believe.

Part of it is to feel deep within your body the effect that different types of facial expression, breathing, and emoting have on you.

Part of it may be to experience the somatic-psychic connection…that is, how bodily behavior can trigger psychological states or memories. Trying your different cries, do memories pop up unexpectedly? They likely will, since there’s no separation between your body and mind.

So, there it is…the suggestion. Play with crying. You’ll notice when you do that different types of crying (with their accompanying breathing patterns) elicit different feelings in the body.

Imagination is the capacity to make stuff up. You can do it right now. I guarantee that you are. Just by reading these words, you’re creating relationships in your mind to try to understand what I’m saying and judge its usefulness to you. (Visualization is a little different – it’s the act of using imagination to “see” something in your mind’s eye).

We’ve known for a long long time that imagination is a powerful, and seldom-used, tool in living.

From the paper “Think of Capable Others and You Can Make It! Self-Efficacy Mediates the Effect of Stereotype Activation on Behavior”

Previous research has shown that activating a stereotype can influence subsequent behavior in a stereotype-consistent way. The present research investigates the role of self-efficacy beliefs in this effect. Specifically, we demonstrate that being primed with the stereotype of professors increases knowledge confidence compared to being primed with a less educated profession (Experiments 1 and 2), and that these higher self-efficacy beliefs result in higher performance at a general knowledge test (Experiment 2). These findings are corroborated in Experiment 3 that shows that participants primed with the stereotype of athletes show higher persistence in a physical exercise than participants primed with a stereotype less associated with persistence. Again, behavior was mediated by self-efficacy beliefs. The findings are in line with the active-self account (Wheeler & Petty, 2001; Wheeler, DeMarree, & Petty, 2007) that proposes that priming with a stereotype influences a person’s behavior through altered self-representations.

What do dat mean? It means that whatever you imagine, see, or visualize, will influence how you behave.

Story-telling
We are all constantly telling a story to ourselves. Choose your story. Make one up that makes you a super-hero. We did it as kids, and that story led us on all of our best adventures.

You can do it again. Get your pencil and paper.

You can have any qualities you want. You can do anything. Write it down. Draw a picture of it. Tattoo it on your arm. Look at it every day. Feel yourself become Superhero-You more and more every day, every second. Let every breath take you closer. Only move toward things that fulfill that image. Seek them out. Do them. And only move away from things that do not.

Do it now.

Here’s a game for you to try out.

Go to work everyday at a job that you have nothing in common with.

Come home to a relationship that you have nothing in common with.

Associate with entertainment that takes you outside of yourself. I mean, work at having nothing in common with yourself.

And then try to get fit.

Good luck.

An article in the most recent New Yorker entitled “State of Play,” gives a brief outline of the history of playgrounds in New York City, along with an overview of some of the playgrounds coming soon to a borough near you.

And it’s total crap.

Here’s the original Seward Park Playground:

And here’s David Rockwell’s upcoming Imagination Playground:

Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of big blocks, and movable pieces. But the idea that imagination is contingent on those things is a perversion of thought, a disservice to imagination, and a marketing pitch.

What happened to playgrounds like the one the Bar-barians use? They’ve all disappeared in favor of molded-plastic “safe-houses.”

Don’t tell me it doesn’t take imagination to come up with some of those moves…

What about the outdoors? What about the playground of the woods? When I was a kid, it was my favorite place to play, hands down:

If the argument for these new-fangled playgrounds is that they’re more conducive to healthy imaginations, because they offer “movable objects,” and “diverse variegated shapes,” how do they stack up (pardon the pun) against nature – where there are sticks, stones, branches, leaves, dirt, water…and [gasp] other living creatures!!!

Not only that, but what about the fact that being in nature reduces stress hormones, improves mood, and increases the amount of physical activity you do?

It’s also nice and cool in the woods on a hot summer day. Ever notice that?

Oh oh! I’ve got another one! How about the fact that nature isn’t made of plastic? It’s totally biodegradable people! It’s GREEN! Get with the green revolution!

I’m making a serious effort to stay as positive as possible here.

Instead of planting some trees, grasses, and native plants, New York City has hired some architects to create safe playgrounds that will look like hell in 30 years after the sun beats down on them and degrades their plastic parts…or those parts get stolen or vandalized.

What are we afraid of? That, if we don’t “produce” something, it has no value? Or that, if we stop “producing” “things” we won’t be able to “make money?”

Don’t you see the fallacy in that? You’re just creating value anyway. I mean, actively making it up! Money is make-believe. We agree on the value of it. We agree that one thing is worth another. We agree to “follow the rules” of this game.

Now that’s what I call using your imagination!

However, we seem to be stuck in the game. We’ve mistaken the game for reality.

The reality is that the oil spill in the Gulf comes from this money-game we’ve decided to play.

The reality is that the plastic playgrounds of the future are made out of petroleum products.

The reality is that we have a choice. We can choose to plant park-grounds made of things that recycle the carbon we keep pumping out. We can choose to make places that are soft as grass…or we can choose to make places that are soft as “pebbled rubber.”

You choose.

Just don’t blame your choice on [your lack of] Imagination.

Here’s a good history of playgrounds in New York City.

The Barefoot Sensei has posted a new rhyme on his blog.

Check it out!

Frank Forencich of Exuberant Animal points out an issue with the way we approach ourselves in the world in a recent blog post.

His complaint is that we (as individuals, and culturally) separate ourselves from our habitats to such a degree that we’ve lost touch with reality.

I couldn’t agree more.

However, I wonder how to go about changing this. And in this post, I ask for your feedback.

Below is my response to Frank’s blog post. Please let me know your thoughts on how to do this – how to get people reconnected with their habitat, with the land that gives them life, in a visceral way.

The oil spill in the Gulf is at least in part a result of our society’s (societies’) addictive use of oil…we can’t separate the drillers from the people for whom they are drilling.

People are so distracted from anything real (habitat)…what will bring them back to awareness? How does one engender awareness?

Science is a process of thought that relies on separating things. It takes dynamic systems and “analyzes” them – breaks them down into “constituent parts” – which is a fallacy. Once you’ve killed and dissected a dog, where is the dog? It isn’t there anymore…a bunch of “parts” are.

We extend this tendency (or habit, whatever it is) into philosophical, religious, economic, and political thinking…

That is, it always comes down to – “This piece is wrong/bad, we must fix it.”

Thus, from the get-go, we’re off on the wrong foot. If we interfered, and that’s what “broke” it, how can we “fix” it by interfering again?

Better to stop doing.

David Byrne’s recent TED Talk is definitely worth watching.

In it, he describes the way the architecture of playing-halls or venues (or listening/reproduction devices) shapes the way music is written and performed.

It’s a fascinating and humorous journey through time, and I highly recommend it.

Byrne also talks about birds, and how context, generally, shapes the way animals behave. Birds of the same species have different songs depending on the acoustic qualities of their environment.

What struck me towards the end of his talk, though, was a possible metaphor to the music and architecture relationship Byrne describes.

Specifically, I wonder if our lives aren’t something like a song, and the culture we live in the “architecture” of that song. Depending upon the larger sociocultural atmosphere, and our own family or “nuclear” dynamics, our song will express varying things in varying ways.

Each of those ways are uniquely human.

But, in the spirit of this blog, a piece Byrne misses, I think, is the possibility of experimenting with different spaces to see what types of music we make in those. We could start such a project by making already-known types of music in locations not associated with them, and then modify the music so it fits the location.

For instance, we could hold a rock show in a cathedral. Then experiment with our music-making until we reached some sort of balance.

Alternately, we could just go into a place and start making music, and see what sounds best.

In this same way, we can experiment with the song of our lives. How do we sing/live in a certain atmosphere, climate, or social setting? Does that setting allow our voice the greatest timbre, the greatest range and most expression?

What if we take our life into a different milieu?

The question I’m asking is – where is the setting in which you (or I, or any one individual) can most express themselves, now.

It will change, for sure. But for right now, where is it? And if we aren’t there, why not?

We don’t have to do anything in particular in order to play (be in the play-state), other than to release certain inhibitions we have about ourselves, others, and “rules.”

To do that, it may be beneficial to practice identifying the other states we assume throughout the day. For most of us, these other states will be characterized by certain “selves.”

For instance, I’ve already discussed The Victim. There are also the roles of “the persecutor,” “protector/rescuer,” “coach,” “challenger,” “cynic,” “skeptic.” And above those there may be others, like the “controller,” the “buddha/enlightened one,” etc.

For more information on this, check out the book (or videos) TED –

We each have our own unique cast of characters. And, though they’ll often assume similar roles, our cast is unlike any other cast. Each role may be played by a different person, depending on our own personal history.

As we go through the day, and experience emotions of different sorts, different characters come in to play.

In order to witness these folks, it is necessary to learn to notice shifts in our energy state – in our emotional or attentional state – as they occur.

When we feel “high,” who is in charge? When we feel “stressed,” who is in charge? When we are in love, who is in charge? When we are angry, who is it? If we feel like we’ve failed at something, who is the voice, the character, that comes up to the front of the stage of our mind?

This process requires awareness and attention, which requires slowing down.

It’s just like learning any new skill. Think about the first time you played a new game of some sort. You had to slow down to learn the technique. You may have “frozen” certain parts of your body or movements in order to work on the technique in pieces. In motor learning it’s called “freeing and freezing degrees of freedom.” You may have moved very clumsily at first, and felt awkward.*

That’s normal.

Now aware of this – that learning requires slowing down, and that awkward and clumsy is normal at first – we can begin to play with these selves when they arise.

Here’s a scenario:

I’ve failed at a big task. The “persecutor” self steps forth and begins his monologue about worthlessness, about me being crappy at this thing, about me not being good enough.

But something has changed. I’m aware that it’s the Persecutor talking. And I say to myself, perhaps, something like, “That’s interesting.”

He begins to get anxious. He looks around for help. He tries to find things to distract me…where did I leave my car keys? What time is it?…so he can continue his act.

But I stay aware, calm, slow, breathing, watching him.

Then I observe. Simply observe.

And then, only then, is choice possible.

*on a side note, this process, of freezing our degrees of freedom, happens when we are “psychologically” stressed as well.