Creative Mindfulness

    Typically, when I do meditation I try to change in some way. Whether it is trying to relax my muscles, fix my posture, or refresh my mindset, it seems like I am trying to direct my experience into a particular direction. Often there is some goal or something I am trying to get out of it. In recent weeks, I have been trying to do a more goal-less and observational form of meditation and I am strangely finding more utility in that. It gives my brain a break from goals and progress. It slows things down and allows me to catch up with myself and in turn, gives me way more relaxation. Because of this, I was excited to do the 5 senses meditation when it was sent to me. And wow! It was a great experience. It was like a level up from what I had been doing recently. 

    After doing that, I engaged in the contemplative photography exercise. What I ended up photograpghing was a section of my dining room. The colors and shapes stuck out to me a lot more post meditation, and especially the patterns. The spotted pattern of the table followed by the grain of the wood on the chair and then the solid background of the wall, occupied only by fuzzy shadowy gradients. It really imbued a little bit of magic into something ordinary.

        "Symobolism is a question of gaining new sight. It is being extremely inquistive to see things in their own nature." (Trungpa, p. 68) This quote stuck out to me because it touched up on another topic we talked about this week, that being the shift from conceptual seeing to perceptual seeing. Our brain works hard to filter out irrelavent information so that we aren't always overwhelmed by the infinite set of facts that we are constantly presented with. And thats good, because it helps us be productive and establish a sort of independence in our lives. But it is very easy to fall too deep into and be consumed by. One begins to navigate and encounter the world as if they already know all their is to a chair just because we have had an experience with one before. This is when a chair is phenomenologically endowed with "chairness" in our experience. Its more subtle details are subdued because it symbolically fits into the category of "chairness" so we look no further into it. But when we let go of that attitude and encounter it perceptually, we can noptice the grain of the wood, the particular shapes that it is made out of, the way the metal weilds together to make the frame. We can reexperience the chair because we change the way we encounter it. And this can be done for everything! But just like conceptual seeing, we can also go too far with perceptual seeing. As nice as it is to fawn over newly discovered details and ways of experiencing, it can be difficult to move in any particular direction if that becomes the normal. It is all about balance.