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.
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.
The Secret to your woes is not your body. It’s not the shape of your body. You may think it is, but you’re wrong.
It’s not your level of physical fitness. It’s not your athleticism, or lack thereof.
It’s not what kind of car you drive, or how much money you make, or what kinds of things you own.
The secret is your culture. It’s what you surround yourself with every day. It’s what gives deepest meaning and fulfillment, support and recognition, love and energy to your life.
That’s the secret.
Manipulation
I’ll use this word here, not in the commonly used negative connotation of the term, but in the various ways it’s defined by Merriam Webster:
1 : to treat or operate with or as if with the hands or by mechanical means especially in a skillful manner
2 a : to manage or utilize skillfully b : to control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means especially to one’s own advantage
3 : to change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one’s purpose
Everyone is always being manipulated.
Your culture is your biggest source of manipulation. From the second you are born, people are talking to you. When they do, they are imparting their ideas about the world onto you. You absorb those ideas, and, over time, begin to resemble them in small and not-so-small ways.
Beyond that immediate source of change is your community. Your community shapes what you see. Your family will live among, but more importantly, associate with, families with similar values to theirs.
Your friends, for the most part, will have a similar socio-economic status to yours. They will value similar things to those that you do. They will think similarly about the world – look through a similar cultural lens.
Another step out is the larger culture you live with – your society. The society you live within has its own guidelines, it’s own rules and agendas.
Everyone always has an agenda.
Society’s agenda may or may not be aligned with your own, or that of your community. You may find your complaints go unheard in society at large. You may alternately find that you have no complaints, because you’ve accepted “the way it is.”
Further, your own agenda may not be aligned with your own! This is the most difficult piece to figure out, and the place where many people experience the greatest suffering in their lives. You have deep, sometimes hidden, feelings, desires, and needs, but outwardly live in accordance with your culture. The degree of difference between your internal feelings, desires, and needs, and the way you’re living, is the precise degree to which you suffer in life.
Support
If your community and family support you, if they form a solid base, a safety net, a place of love, security, and comfort, you will live a long and happy life.
If not, you will struggle. You will seek that base, that comfort, in other things, and never find it. It can be anything – drugs, sex, work, religion, hobbies – anything that gives the appearance of those most-fundamental needs.
Ultimately, though, you will not feel what you were looking for, and you will leave, turn to another path – or drown yourself in the pursuit.
Physical Fitness
Physical fitness is meaningless without a purpose for that fitness. Many people go to the gym and workout day in and day out. They may get into excellent physical condition, simply to go sit at a computer, or drive a truck, or stand behind a counter.
Their fitness is purposeless, which is why it cannot be the ultimate fulfillment they seek. If they have community, if they have support, they workout from that base. If not, they seek that base in fitness activities, or see fitness as a “counterbalance” to the activities they are seeking their base in.
Physiology
People in Western culture generally live to be 75-85 years of age – regardless – or in spite of – of their level of physical fitness, their diets, or their communities.
However, the people who feel fulfilled, and who are functional late into life, will be the ones who were happiest. The ones who had deep congruence with their community, or who found it somewhere.
If your physiology is in a negative state due to stress/bad mood/no love/etc., it doesn’t matter how good your diet is. Your food won’t be digested well, first. What is processed will be used inefficiently. Waste excretion will be poor.
Until you get out of that bad physiological state, the energy that is consumed will largely be used to further that state. That’s how the body works.
Longevity
So what is the key to longevity? The book “The Blue Zones” says it’s several things:
Family – Family is put ahead of other concerns.
No Smoking – Centenarians do not typically smoke.
Plant-based diet – The majority of food consumed is derived from plants.
Constant moderate physical activity – Moderate physical activity is an inseparable part of life.
Social engagement – People of all ages are socially active and integrated into their communities.
Legumes – Legumes are commonly consumed.
But I would put community, or culture – living in a familiar, safe, supportive, caring community – first among them. Everything after that is gravy. Because, really, if you have that, it doesn’t matter how long you live…
Of course, there’s also something to be said for sheer grit
Check out Frank Forencich’s most recent entry on the Exuberant Animal blog.
In it, he describes the ways in which contact with dirt can positively affect (and effect) your mood and health.
As I said in my comment to his post – since we ARE dirt, dirt is good for us. As we used to say when we’d drop our ice cream cone on the playground back in the day – “God made dirt, so dirt don’t hurt.”
Yesterday I posted a review of the book “Anticancer,” in which the author talks about the Tibetan traditional medical approach to the body as “terrain.” That’s a perfect description.
Our terrain comes from our parents’ terrain to begin with (what Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners call our “original chi“), and then, once we’re off the breast, from the food we eat, the air we breathe, the fluids we drink, the thoughts we think (what the sociologist/philosopher Pierre Bourdieu called “habitus“), the movement we do (or don’t do), and the company we keep.
The larger terrain, our unique, individual habitat, at that point becomes our full “terrain.”
If any parts of our terrain are polluted, it comes into our terrain. If our air, food, water, thoughts, movement, or social lives are toxic, it leaches into us, and causes trouble.
Can you see your environment in these terms? Can you see yourself as continuous with your environment? With your:
It’s a good daily meditation, to look at your unique habitat, your full terrain, and to try to see how it’s affecting you on the smallest, middle, and largest scales.
Focus on honing in on these things. How pure is your air? If you work in an office, you might want to try to get outside for some deep breathing exercises.
What about your food? Try to buy organic foods, and eat foods that have been as little tampered with as possible – that is, in their natural state, not processed.
Drink water. Pure water. The author of anticancer also recommends green tea and red wine (one glass per day : ( ) for their antioxidant power.
Keep your thoughts free from anger and fear. If there’s something you’re angry about, or fearful of (worry is a form of fear), resolve it! Life is too short to hold those thoughts, and by doing so, you only make your life shorter!
Try to get good healthy movement into your life. Walking is fantastic. Try to go for a walk after dinner every night!
Make sure your social circle isn’t polluting your life. That’s all I’ll say about that one!
Try it out…let me know what you think!
It’s tempting to live in a world of black-and-white, yes/no, on/off. I’ve been a big user of this type of worldview over the course of my life, with varying results. It seems, for me, to be most common at the early stages of things. When I’m learning something new, or just starting a project. At that point, the only thing I can rely on is my past experience, and it is much easier to deal with the new thing in a binary, all-or-nothing fashion. It automatically excludes certain possibilities, and makes action easier.
Later, when doing that no-longer-new thing, the relationship has become more complex. Intricacies have been revealed that won’t allow for that dialectical approach.
This is true in any relationship I’ve had, hence “relationships” in the title. I mean personal relationships, relationships to my culture, myself, ideas, or activities.
I recently started reading the Yuan Dao again, which really highlights a concept central to “Eastern” philosophies – change. While the Tao Te Ching does the same, to me, it doesn’t expose an aspect of change necessary for change to happen a well as maybe the Yuan Dao (a commentary on and exposition of the concepts in the Tao) does – the constant underlying change.
There are two ways I look at this – First, there has to be a “ground” or framework from which something can change. There has to be a “normal” for you to notice “abnormal.” The second point, though, is that most of the distinction that we make between something in its original state, versus the “new” thing we end up dealing with is based on ideas of constancy we get from the way we use thought and/or language.
The trick, it seems to me, is that even the “constant” undergoes change. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, said “everything changes, and nothing remains still,” and “you cannot step into the same river twice” (because the river changes before you’ve stepped into it again).
Many Western approaches to his statements take the black/white approach – “oh, he only believed in change,” or “oh, there was nothing constant.” But if you read the rest of the fragments of his work, there is the concept of Logos, which seems to be the fount or wellspring of all things, and the “logic” of the process of change. I’ll mention this again in a second, as its something I think we need to start considering and teaching in our lives/practices/schools.
In the river example, by calling/naming it a river, we’ve created a static “thing” in our minds that we can refer back to. I think this is the “tool-making” process of language. By creating “things” out of processes, we create static entities that we can manipulate, that we can use or try to change the way we want to.
The reality is much different, however, because these “things” never truly transform into static entities. They continue to change every second, which may (or may not) cause us problems down the road, when we want that “thing” that we’ve defined in our mind to behave a certain way (the way it was defined when we “thinged” it), and it does not comply. The river changes course, constantly shifts, seeks its own path, and overflows its banks or bursts the dykes or dams we make to contain it. At the very least, the river’s flow wears down the things we put in its path, and we have to constantly do maintenance to our methods of control.
I think this happens sometimes for people as they age. They may have defined themselves based on the look of their face at the age of 28, or 18, or how fit they were then, or their athletic accomplishments (or failures). As they grow older, those things change, they fade, they become impossible or possible only in different ways.
By remaining attached to the earlier concept, the person causes themselves emotional pain and eventually they begin to suffer.
In our culture, now, when that happens, the response is often to continue to exert control. Get botox injections, take hormone replacement therapy, plastic surgery, etc.
In that approach, the lesson is lost. The meditation on change never occurs, except in a black and white mode, where change is the enemy to be destroyed.
Unfortunately, as with a couple of other things I’ve been talking about with friends recently (like the ability to create interest in yourself for certain things) we aren’t taught much about change in our schooling, or our culture generally speaking. Maybe it’s because it makes it more difficult to govern, our societies or our lives. Maybe the subject-matter is too deep (Heraclitus was called “the obscure”). But I wonder what would happen if we did begin to meditate on change more frequently, and the constant underlying change.
Not only that, but what would happen if we began to understand that our “constant”s could be malleable. That we could shift our understanding of some “thing” that we thought we understood…that we weren’t tied to the opinion or approach we first formed when we started something…
…that we could change.
This picture is so great, I have to share it. Borrowed from this Atlantic Monthly piece.
WHEEEEEEE!!!
I love the look of exuberance! The cast-aside cane! The intensity!
More toys for the “old”!!!!!!!!
I’ve put up some videos on YouTube about using a piece of rope to exercise with.
Please steal my ideas, and come up with your own!
I’ll produce more ideas about using “common” items to play with in your exercise programs in the near future…
ROPE 1 – ROPE! configurations
ROPE 2 – Partner ROPE!
ROPE 3 – Handle ROPE!
Frank Forencich, on the Exuberant Animal blog, asks “Have We Gone Mad?!”
He’s responding to an article in the New York Times that chronicles that author’s experience with flat feet and podiatrists.
Frank raises some good questions, I encourage you to head over there and check out his post.
I recently had the pleasure of hosting Barefoot Ted here in SF.
While we didn’t get to discuss this topic while he was here, I’ve been thinking about it since, and figured I’d share these thoughts, and see what everyone out in the web-world thinks…
I ordered some leather huaraches from Ted’s site, and was pondering my choice of leather over the Vibram rubber soles that he offers, and that I think he (and many others) prefer to the leather.
I was thinking more about the leather/rubber debate, and started to think about these things:
leather is a natural material, and is not much of an insulator…especially compared to
rubber, which is a powerful insulator.
(I’ll refrain from the “production” debate for these materials here)
our blood contains hemoglobin, which has at its center an atom of iron (in the heme)
iron responds to electromagnetic charges.
the earth is a giant electromagnet (its core is partly iron)
when we stand on the earth, we receive that electromagnetic flow through our blood (iron).
further…
“polarity therapy” in massage says that one side of the body is positively charged, and the other negatively charged
if that’s the case, when we move on two (bare) feet, we alternately contact the electromagnetic field of the earth with our oppositely-charged sides, creating a current through our body
when we run, that current is even more divided (a true “alternating current”), since we completely separate contact with one side for a period in a running-gait.
further still…
bone forms along lines of stress
that’s because bone is piezoelectric
that is, the lines of stress cause an electric charge to flow through bone
that electric flow is what directs the osteoblasts to break down the bone in places, and the osteoclasts to build in other places.
and…
though the “proof” is controversial, man-made electromagnetic fields are known to disturb natural bodily functions, for instance
high-tension power lines may be related to an increased risk in cancer
microwave ovens can have effects on people
the electrical impulse through natural stone walls has been linked by some to the presence of “ghosts” (as electromagnetic hallucinations)
etc.
final questions:
what happens when we insulate our bodies from the earth’s electromagnetic field
what happens when we don’t…
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