Mindful learning

Mindful learning

What does that mean?

To me I think it means learning in the way that the brain learns naturally.

If you think about it, learning is what the human brain is made to do!

Think about babies learning to talk. All you ever have to do is talk to a baby, talk around a baby, in any language, or number of languages, and eventually and in a predictable way that baby will learn to speak. There have been studies that show that babies exposed to a language for as little as 20 minutes are already able to tell the difference between a language spoken correctly and a language spoken incorrectly. This is amazing!

Think about learning to ride a bike. You start out clumsy and not knowing how it works. You try jarringly to steer and pedal at the same time. You spend a lot of time falling until one day something just clicks in your brain, and all of a sudden, you know how to ride.

Think about learning a skill or a trade. What often works best is to spend a lot of time watching and learning from people who are already proficient at your chosen skill. You follow and you put in a lot of time doing and practising and eventually you find that, not only have you gained a skill, but a deep understanding as well.

All of these are ways of learning that I think might be called attunement. I think this is when we expose ourselves to a..something, be it a skill, a situation, an environment, and right away and constantly our brain is working away making sense of things. We are not even consciously aware, but our brain is paying attention to everything. It takes note of every detail, all the different relationships and aspects of everything. As we try and fail and succeed our brain is watching and learning some more. At some point our brain has enough  information and something clicks. We all of a sudden are confident in something we didn't understand at all before.

We all learn this way all the time.

When I think about how we as a society think of learning I don't think of attunement. I think of a bunch of people in a room explaining things. Explaining about the history of something or the process of something or the reasons of something. This involves a lot of conscious thinking.

When I think about this kind of learning it reminds me a lot of storytelling.  Like how in ancient tribes the elders would sit around the fire with the wives and the hunters and the young ones and tell stories of lore, and of old times and important things that happened. Maybe they shared these stories to help the young ones learn from the mistakes and lessons that the older ones had already had. Maybe this gave them a more advanced place to begin their learning from, possibly giving them the opportunity to learn more then the generation before them.

In our world right now things are really complicated. Some things maybe cannot be learned very well through attunement without a base level of understanding of how things work. Our stories are now all about what the people who came before us have learned. Our stories represent thousands of years of trial and error and innovation and mistakes. Our stories are very very important to being able to move forward together as a society in every way.

It's important to remember that our stories are not the only (and perhaps not even the most important) way that we humans learn. When we focus on using our conscious mind to organize and remember facts (and then be able to spit them back out again) we often get very anxious and stressed. Unfortunately this often impairs our subconscious mind from being able to pick up on the enormous amount of information that it is working with.

It might be useful to remember, as we want to learn or to teach, that all we really need to do is place ourselves in the situations for learning and open ourselves up and pay attention with the expectation that we will learn. This is all we need to do to put our brain in the position to do what it does best.

Live and learn

A place to stand

I think I was digging to find the edges and shape and taste and texture of this existential dilemma we all face. Why is it that we end up in places that we can not stand to be, and yet here we must stand.

If we want to live and thrive on this planet, it seems like we must engage in the great exchange. Life always comes from death. Everything that lives dies and is eaten. We understand this intellectually. Mostly we look away, choose not to see.

Some of us cannot stand to be a part of the exchange, and so we abstain, and choose to eat only vegetables. I'm sure it feels much better to do so.. But I have to tell you, plants do feel pain. Not only do they electrically and chemically react to damage to themselves, but they also react to damage done to plants near by. They feel each other's pain. I'm sure this argument sways no one. We don't believe plants have sentience (yet), so it doesn't matter that we hurt them (right?).

Some of us understand intellectually that it is "okay" to kill and eat animals. It is the natural way of things, but we (rightfully I think) have a problem with cruelty. So we abstain for that reason, or eat meat only from cruelty free processes. Kudos!

This problem has been hounding me and pursuing me and I have been unable to escape until now. I finally see that I have missed the point. Maybe we all have.

This isn't really about how to eat.

This is about how to be. It is about how to stand in an impossible place and simply to be.

I thought vegetarians just didn't understand, but they do! I was wrong. Eating meat is maybe just exactly as horrible as they think it is. Being killed and eaten (cruelty free or not) is just as scary and painful as you would imagine it is..

But also, I think, eating plants is also not a way out. Having your living body ripped apart or cooked to death is just as horrible a prospect for them as it is for anybody.

But how then do we live? All of this intellectual struggle and taking a stand is so that we can find a place where we can feel like we are doing the "right" thing.. Making the "right" choices. In this situation we see "right" as "not causing suffering in order to consume the nourishment we need to survive".

But what if there is no "right" place? What if we have to stand in the place where we have to see all the suffering we cause and not look away or stand to the side and say that this is not for me. What if we are supposed to look suffering in the eye and say, "I see", "I'm so sorry", "I'm so thankful for all you gave up for me".

This kind of thinking is almost too much. We cannot bear this kind of burden. But we do. Every day in so many ways we cause the suffering of others. It isn't even just our food. Buy a five dollar t-shirt, recycle a smart phone, put gas in your car, put on makeup, turn the light on, drink a bottle of water, live in a house, the list goes on farther then I even know. All of these things directly and indirectly cause suffering.

I have this feeling that there is this other place to stand. Not the place of greed or uncaring that turns the blind eye of denial of suffering just to make it easier to keep more money in the pocket. Not the place of anger, sadness and resistance to what is, where we are in denial about the nature of things. This other place is like awareness and surrender and wisdom and respect all rolled into one. This other place is uncomfortable.. But we do not flinch from the discomfort, we sit with it.

One very important place to apply this might be in the choices we make in our relationships with people close to us. How often do we make choices that end up hurting the people we care about. Sometimes it's not on purpose, and we only realize after the fact that we have caused suffering. Sometimes it's malicious. We are angry or afraid and we act with the intention of causing suffering. Sometimes though, we have to stand in a place of awareness where we know full well the consequences of our choices, and yet we still must choose a choice which causes suffering.

I find that often, when I have caused someone I love pain, I react with defensiveness. Finding a reason to be angry, or a reason the other person is wrong, so that somehow I can feel like they deserved their suffering and I can avoid the pain of awareness. Now I am trying to stand in this uncomfortable place of knowing, with compassion for myself and the other, and just be, and accept this place for what it is. From this place there can be understanding and wisdom and learning and healing.

This place is different for each one of us because each one of us is different, and this is good. From this place of awareness we will all make different choices, and this is good. This is how we bring balance.

Maybe this place is not so different to you, and you already stand there. To me it is vastly different. It is the difference between standing in the right place, making the right choice (and feeling okay about things now), or standing without judgement and seeing that there are many, many choices. Each choice representing a vast array of causes and effects. Each choice my responsibility alone.

May you see very well, my dear ones.

Another perspective on context

I present to you two scenarios...

Scenario one

My husband works very hard. It seems like he is almost never around. Sometimes I think he loves work more than he loves his family.  Just look at how he yells at the kids as soon as he walks through the door. I almost don't even want to talk to him. Dinner is a nightmare as usual. I can feel the tension and negativity all around him. Even as we go to bed at night I feel no connection. Where is the closeness that is supposed to be in a marriage? I have needs you know.  It's just not fair.

Scenario two

My husband works very hard, and I am so thankful for him. He makes it possible for me to stay home with the kids which is such a luxury in this day and age. Speaking of kids.. I'm just going to scoot them outside to play for a bit because it's almost time for him to come home.  I know they miss him and want to jump all over him, but I know he is tired and needs just a few minutes to land first. I appreciate how he connects with us over dinner and finds out how everyone's day was. I am really looking forward to our time just before bed where I get to rub the knots out of his back and hear about how his day was and share about how mine was. I love being able to give him my love and attention.  I can tell he really appreciates it. I love how he gives me his love and attention in return. I am blessed.

Before you call me sexist, I should point out that you can use husband and wife interchangeably in these scenarios. I know because in actual reality I have played all the roles in these stories.

Many years ago I was struggling in a haze of depression carrying around the thoughts of scenario one.  It was almost more than I could carry. I failed to recognize that, in addition to working very hard, my man was also struggling to bring himself out of some of his own deep personal struggles at the time.. All by himself. Things were not very good for us. I'm not sure what would have happened if I had not woken up one day and realized that I didn't like the person I had become and that I could change how I think about things.

There was also a long period of time where I was the one who had to work very hard and the man was at home with the kids. Do you know what? There were so many days where I would come home from job number 3 and just want to curl up in a ball and cry. If my family had been angry at me for being away (I was pretty angry at myself for being away), or if they had jumped all over my poor overstimulated self, I would have felt like running away. They were not like that though. They showed me love and grace and appreciation. I will be forever thankful for that.

Right now we are both working moderately hard, but I think we have all learned that what you think counts for a lot. I choose love.

Context

I have noticed, as I look at people through these rose coloured glasses I wear, that behaviour is often very context driven.

One of our daughters has a friend who is so shy that her parents are worried about her. She spoke so quietly in class that her teachers thought she was slow and transfered her out of the special program they were in.  The thing is.. At our house, around her friends, this girl is confident and loud. Absolutely and instigator! Not in a bad kid way, but almost not the same girl that her parents are worried about.

Think about it! You might notice that you act differently around your boss then you do around your friends. You might speak differently to your children then you would to a stranger.  I notice this a lot where I work around kids. When I tell parents how good their kids are as they come to pick them up they often don't believe me. Those kids who hide behind their parents legs and cry when they leave quite often become strong and confident the moment their parents are out of sight. 

This is something that happens to all of us and everyone we know, but I think it is too often overlooked. I'm sure why this happens is probably pretty complicated since each person is a unique individual, but THAT it happens I think is both interesting and important information.

As we learn about our selves and begin to heal ourselves we can begin to notice what this looks like in us.  We can notice how we feel and act around people in authority, people we have authority over, people we are in relationships with. This is good to notice. Once we become aware of these things then often we start realizing where these feelings and thoughts and behaviours in us come from. This is how we heal. It is like somehow, when we notice our thoughts and feelings without judgement and realize where they come from, the things that don't line up with who we really are just sort of start to fall away.

Another interesting thing can happen as we begin to heal. We can begin to get a better sense of the context of everyone else. Firstly because we often realize that a lot of the things that bother us about other people were actually coming from our own hurt. But also, we can just see more clearly the heart and the struggles of other people once we are not looking through the lens of our own pain.

The ability to see clearly is very valuable. I think it is sometimes called discernment. When you can see clearly, without pain or agenda, then you might be able to see what is really going on in difficult situations. You might find that the solutions that work in one situation are not appropriate in another. I would like to be able to do these things. I'm working on it.