BrickhouseBodymind.com is a mind body fitness blog, encouraging personal transformation and bringing about total fitness through informative articles on integral lifestyle issues such as stress relief, sexuality and relationships, and transformative practices like strength training, meditation and yoga. The website is designed to help you train your body, sharpen your mind, and unleash your spirit, making total fitness a reality for everyone.
This is a lengthy response to a comment from one of my readers, Duff. His comment was to my recent post about creating a new vocabulary of enlightenment, and my response simply became too long to post as another comment. Here is the original comment:
Flow is certainly related to enlightenment, but I’m not sure that it is equivalent to it. Flow as defined by MC Flow is a high-energy state where the exterior demands of the environment perfectly match the abilities of the person in it. I wrestle with how to integrate this understanding with low-energy states where there are little-to-no exterior demands at all, for example when sitting in meditation.
There is also a conception of equanimity regardless of state that I find an important piece of the puzzle. Since all states, including flow states and other spiritual experiences are temporary (subject to impermanence), they cannot be the ultimate aim, for all temporary experience has an unsatisfactoriness to it. In addition, one can develop craving for such states and aversion to “ordinary” states such as doing one’s taxes, or going to work in the morning. I think you are seeing this when you talk about not being interested in ascendancy or transcendency.
But then what is enlightenment? A spiritual attitude of equanimity with all things? And the dialogue goes on….
First, thanks for your thoughtful comment, Duff. Do keep them coming. As for my response, I’m not really familiar with MC Flow, though I sampled a bit of her music and found is quite compelling. My understanding of flow comes from another MC – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (try saying that 5 times fast!), and my own experience. Flow, from Mihaly’s book, is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” That seems to apply to a large number of low-energy experiences. I can’t help but think of many a yogi expensing the high cost of isolation for the sheer sake of meditation.
For those of you keeping score at home, it has been a bit over two weeks since the last post. One post a week was my goal when I started this blog 6 months or so ago, and up until now I have surprisingly been able to keep that pace. Now, however, work has begun in earnest on my book, I’m in training for a Prasara yoga instructor certification at the end of the month, and I’m working with my cameraman Robert to develop a 6-part Brickhouse Bodymind TV series chronicling his transformation from stressed-out, pot-bellied twenty-something to peaceful, hard-bodied heartthrob using the Brickhouse Bodymind Blueprint as it will be laid out in the book.
In the mean time, the amount of posts will probably diminish a bit, but rest assured that if you maintain your subscription, you’ll be among the first to be privy to the exciting new content coming later this summer. In an effort to keep some content flowing, I came up with the following post. It is an adaptation of a thread I started on the Tao Bums forum today in conjunction with some stuff I’ve been developing for my book. Hopefully y’all will get something out of it. As always, I encourage anyone to comment below if you have thoughts.
I believe we in the post-modern age, particularly those of us in the Western world, have done a wonderful job of compiling and translating ancient and foreign ideas about this thing called enlightenment. This is fantastic, but I fear that a largely borrowed vocabulary lacks enough relevance in the post-modern world to be as effective as it was all those centuries ago. These terms are more likely to make enlightenment seem like some distant thing than part of our fundamental nature. Let me be clear that I know the value of these ancient systems, and that I myself practice some of them, and am influenced by them. My purpose here is not to poo-poo these traditions but to frame their conceptual foundations in terms more familiar to those of us who have survived the Technological Revolution.
The terminology I’m talking about would be integral - both comprehensive and balanced - comprehensive in that it would take into account pre-modern, modern and post-modern sources alike, and balanced in that it would not leave behind any aspect of the individual (mind, body, spirit being the three major aspects).
Anyone who owns a dog knows the amusement to be had when one of them takes off on a slumbering romp through dream-land. Even just five minutes watching their paws flutter in a sideways “jog-in-place” and their lips flap and furl in an attempt to pursue some imaginary squirrel beats the hell out of a whole night of American Idol. I find myself wondering what forest he’s sprinting through, what stream she’s swimming across, or what mailbox he’s pissing on.
Last week I was reminded of all this while listening to this story on NPR’s All Things Considered. The basic gist was that college students everywhere are awakened in the middle of the night by dreams of failing their last final and being unable to graduate, or of tripping on their way across the stage at their graduation ceremony, or of arriving at the show naked altogether.
This sort of dream, according to the story, seems to be stress-induced, triggered by anxiety surrounding the event of graduation, an event looked forward to and toiled over for many years. But these dreams don’t just pop up in the midst of the experience. They can show up years and years later. The theory behind this is that college in general and graduation specifically can be very stressful, so when we encounter stressful situations later in life, and our brains try to sort those situations out, our dreaming selves return to the images of college and graduation in an archetypal way.
Okay, so a lot has been happening. I got sick, my precious 12-year-old golden retreiver, Grace died the middle of last week, and I have been assimilating some new training techniques. Long story short, I’m still working on the mindfulness in your workout article. However, I have the chance to watch a few more talks on TED.com, introduced in the last blog entry, and I thought it might be fun to share a couple of my favorites with you. This is, of course, a two-way street, so I’d love for you guys to share your favorite talks in the comments below. And the article on bringing more mindfulness to your workouts is coming soon, so stay tuned.
The purpose of this post is two-fold. 1) I want to introduce you guys to a terrific website at TED.com. 2) I want to prime your minds with a bit of homework for an article coming later this week on making all elements of your life better through the cultivation of mindfulness.
Last week my dad turned me on to a website called TED.com. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone interested in learning more about science, technology, art, design, business, culture, etc. The website’s subtitle is “Ideas worth spreading,” and it presents (completely free of charge) lectures on all aforementioned subjects by some very knowledgeable and compelling characters. The talke are generally around 20 minutes in length and are well worth the time.
So, homework assignment 1 - check out the following lecture from TED.com. If the player below doesn’t work for you, just follow this direct link. It’s 18 minutes 44 seconds.
Okay, how do you feel now? I for one was very enthralled by this talk. I can tell you I had a visceral reaction to her pulling out the actual brain and spinal cord there. The idea that so much flimsy meat is what controls everything my body does is at the same time astounding and a little sickening. It’s hard to imagine that lumpy mass with its slinky tail, housed inside the bony structures of my body is what makes my human awareness with all its exquisite obsessions possible.
And this brings me to my point. The integral approach seeks to understand life from all available perspectives. This lecture you’ve just watched is a perfect example of the different perspectives on the human mind.
There is an external, scientific perspective illustrated by bringing out the physical brain. This makes a lot of people (myself included) a little uncomfortable precisely because it reduces the special-ness of the human being to so much squishy flesh. It reminds us how vulnerable we really are.
There is an internal, personal perspective, which is what she describes as she experiences the stroke. Notice too, that this perspective changes as she goes back and forth from right-brain euphoria to left-brain panic.
There is finally an internal, interpersonal perspective illustrated by the phone call she makes to her colleague in an attempt to get help. Because of her situation, they have a difficult time communicating and agreeing on what’s happening in her head, but there is finally a mutual understanding that she needs help.
Now for homework assignment 2 - check out this video of Ken Wilber manipulating his brainwaves by meditating while hooked up to an EKG machine. It’s 10 minutes 10 seconds.
This again drives home the concept of multiple perspectives. What I really want you all to get a handle on before my next article on mindfulness is that our internal, personal experiences are inextricably linked to external, physical correlates. This is the mind-body connection we’ve all heard about for so long. It’s for real. Furthermore, this also works the other way. Our physical state of being manifests in our mental/emotional state of being.
You truly are a bodymind unit.
Please comment below if you have thoughts on the videos in this post, or if you want to share your own experiences with the body-mind connection. And be sure to check back later this week for tips on bringing more mindfulness into your life.
