Viewing entries tagged
mindfulness

Tsunamis and shakti mats

A few years ago, Rach ordered a shakti mat online. She described it as a modern-day bed of nails, and was very excited about it’s arrival. I wasn’t so sure. Not because the science isn’t solid, because it is - distributed weight means less downward force means less pain - but because, at a very basic, carnal level, I don’t ever want to step, sit, or lie down on sharp pointy things. It’s just not comfortable for me to even think about.

As a kid, I stepped on a tack once. It was right under the arch of my bare foot, so it didn’t go all the way in before the pain registered, but it was enough to elicit a substantial squeal, a bucketload of tears, and a vow to never go barefoot ever again for the rest of my life. So I felt like my wariness of sharp things was at least a bit justifiable.

I remember when it arrived - a thousand tiny spikes hand stitched into what looked like a rolled-up doormat - and Rach was so excited. She danced downstairs, rolled out the mat, and promptly lay barebacked on the spikes. Her eyes went wide, and a she emitted a little gasp, but she didn’t get up. I started thinking about where the ambulance would park to most effectively collect her.

But ten minutes later, she was still on the mat, describing sensations of warmth, healing, physical restoration. I asked her if she knew where she was, and how many fingers I was holding up, but she assured me she wasn't delirious. This is just what happens with a shakti mat, she said.

Short story long, I tried it too, and yep, these mats are amazing. Because the pressure is distributed across all the tiny spikes, there’s enough pain to increase blood flow to the area, but not enough to actually break the skin and make a mess. It’s like Rach said - there’s a healing going on - something powerful and regenerative.

I think storytellers understand the power of a shakti mat. Not to heal their bodies while they write or anything like that, but in the way they distribute conflict.

In a really well-written story, the conflict is never singular. Storytellers know that if their story has only one level of conflict, then, like stepping barefoot on a single tack, it elicits too much pain for the protagonist to think about anything else. The story becomes one-dimensional: how do I find immediate relief from this pain? It's hard to hold the attention of the audience if that's all that's going on. But when the conflict is distributed across multiple levels, the story becomes richer, the protagonist draws deeper insights, and the audience is held for longer.

Take a story about a great tsunami that floods New York City, for example. Our singular conflict resides in the physical environment, and if that is the only conflict level the writer stays on, we’ll end up with a cliche action adventure full of disaster after disaster, and a cast of thousands either making it, or not making it, and an audience who may even start rooting for the wave instead of the people.

It's entertainment, but it's not meaningful. It kills the time, but there aren't really any lasting insights.

Distributing the conflict, however, would allow the writer to explore relationships, emotions, mental weakness, political failings, societal ironies, etc. This is how we connect, after all: we don't draw insights from the tsunami itself, it is how others respond to the tsunami that matters to us.

How did she manage to smile after THAT happened?
What did they do to keep their relationship so strong while THAT was going on?
Where did she find her strength in THAT moment? What made him do THAT? Why would she say THAT? How would I have dealt with that situation?

So, even in an epic tsunami movie, the writer could tell a simpler tale, perhaps with a cast of just three, and by exploring multiple levels of conflict, actually keep the audience engaged the whole way through, and come away from the story with their own insights into some of those topics.

And that's really the goal of storytelling: to hold the audience's attention, and to move the audience's hearts and minds.

But this post isn't about disaster films, or even about writing. It's about living.

I think at the core of it all, we just don’t give conflict the respect it deserves. When any discomfort comes our way, we immediately try and resolve it, remove it, avoid it. We hate discomfort. We get angry at the injustice, we feel terrified of the pain, we feel embarrassed, ashamed, abused, hurt, astonished, enraged, weak, destroyed. We feel bullied, controlled, manipulated, lost, desperate. All the things. So we put all our efforts into this one question:

"How do I find immediate relief from this pain?"

Which is an absolutely legitimate response to discomfort. In story and in life, a character will always seek to return to comfort when presented with conflict. It’s how we are wired, it’s automatic, genetic, natural.

The great tension of life and story, though, is that conflict is the vehicle that moves a character forward in their story. It’s the only way to make a character move.

Without discomfort, or conflict, a book's lead character would just stay on the couch binge-watching Netflix for twelve chapters and then the book will end, and and it won’t matter how it ends, because nobody is still reading it anyway. They’re using it to hold open a back door, or they’re scrunching the pages to get their fire started in winter.

Writers know this truth: We need conflict in our stories, in order to grow, change or move.

Which brings me back to the shakti mat, and the single tack.

If anyone steps on a single tack, and it jams itself full length into their heel, there is no space for insight, growth, or wise reflection on the discomfort. You just get that sucker out of there. The pain is intense, and the demand for relief is urgent. Nobody should "embrace" that sort of conflict.

But the pain from many tiny tacks, with all their points distributed, is not the same. The pain exists, but it is not as intense, it doesn't have the same immediacy. It allows for nuance, and healing, and learning, and change.

A writer’s challenge is to distribute the conflict. And our challenge, in living our real life stories, is to help spread that conflict out. To consider all the small pain points in our lives as pieces of our identity, artefacts of meaning. Before they get too big and sharp and urgent, we have the opportunity to work with the pain, to learn about ourselves, to choose our responses.

The pain points are there anyway, so we may as well acknowledge them all, roll out the mat of tiny spikes, and see what can be restored and healed.

Quitting the stage is the deepest betrayal

Thank goodness, a blank page.

My mind has just been racing through pages and pages of news and social media, and I’m exhausted and on edge. It’s not that I’m reading disturbing information - mostly they are fun articles, entertaining stories and interesting facts - but there is an undercurrent of panic that slowly rises through my limbic system, the longer I scroll.

But now, here is a blank page, and it feels like I can finally take a full breath, taste actual air, and set my compass again to the stars above me.

My life is filled with hustle. And beauty. Excitement, conflict, moments of wonder, moments of peace. At the end of many of my days, I don’t feel ready to go to bed. I feel like I want to achieve more, shine brighter, love deeper, write better. I want to do all the things I’m here to do, become everything I’m called to be.

But then I pick up my phone, and start scrolling, and start sinking. My screen is like oxygen when I’m underwater. Sinking into the deep, I take short sharp breaths of instagram, a quick shot of high-octane news updates, and tell myself that this is air.

But that small voice of truth tells me it is not air. It says "you are being entertained, but you cannot see the stars anymore."

This honestly isn’t a rant against social media. Before we ever had screens and internets, we were still finding ways to distract ourselves. At the dawn of the written word, Socrates was arguing that our memory would be weakened by reading - that words on parchment are a weak substitute for lively in-person connection. We've always had the challenge of curating the myriad inputs of our lives for meaning, not just for pleasure.

And I’m also not encouraging you to “do more” or “be better” or any of that. You are doing great. Your life is your life and you are daily discovering more about it and yourself. You're okay.

This is really about staying present, and finding the meaning. There are so many shiny distractions in life, and I find it the most difficult thing in the world to stay clear, and afloat.

I’m adding another metaphor now, but it honestly feels like this:

I am on a stage. It is open, expansive, clear. The floorboards are a rich mahogany and I can dance on them, any way I want.

I am present, acutely aware of my environment, my place in it, the players who will join me for different scenes. We will relate, shine, bond, create. We will share our unique expressions with the audience, who will resonate and respond and celebrate each act.

But then, my phone buzzes, an exciting distraction pops up, or a concern, a fear, a responsibility, a deadline, and I’m gone. My brain exits stage left, heads into the audience, and takes a seat. It stares back at my empty shell, motionless on those mahogany boards, and reaches for the popcorn.

I know not everyone responds like I do - I have friends who are amazing at instantly metabolising information, from any source, into really meaningful conversations, in real-time. But I don't do that - I just end up disengaging. Drowning in the data.

I think that’s why the panic comes. It’s a lump in my throat, a whisper in the back of my mind that says “betrayal.”

Quitting the stage is the deepest betrayal, because I am quitting myself. Instead of actively engaging with life, in all its conflict and beauty and whimsy and power, I am choosing to just be entertained by it.

“Distraction” is the antagonism to traction. Forward motion. In any story, the Antagonist is there to force the Protagonist to change, grow, make decisions.

I think when distractions come our way, we need to be really, really aware of our “traction” - Where am I heading? What do I believe? What will keep me moving towards that North Star?

Because the battle of our lives is right here, in the holding of the course, the mindful forward-motion that daily asks all of us to stay on the stage, to play our parts, to leap and shine and reflect our truth to the rest of humanity.

Like-minded vs like-hearted

This week, I spent a lot of hours writing a thing. I had an idea, and was focussed on sharing it, pushing my opinion, convincing my readers that the idea is true. I was going to post it today.

But then I read it. And then I trashed it.

I realised that I was writing so that others would agree with me. Like-minded others who would rally to my side, while I shared a polaric opinion about something I honestly didn’t know enough about.

There is a great difference, it turns out, between being like-minded and being like-hearted.

Like-minded people gather together and agree, and rant against those that disagree. We form groups and sides, and double down on our beliefs and stances and our right-ness.

Like-hearted people, in contrast, gather on the plain of love, acceptance, and difference. We believe different things on the surface, we can disagree, and have totally unique life experiences. But we stay together to learn from each other: perspectives, opinions, wisdom from other angles.

I often find it difficult to engage with a single-minded writer. They either have me on their side, or they don't, and then they are just trying to convince me of something. That's fine for a science paper, but it's not STORY.

Storytelling is all about like-heartedness. All writers have deep beliefs and opinions, but the great ones never explicitly need to share them. They wrap their world views in a trojan horse of shared narrative experience, allowing their audience to walk with them and draw their own conclusions in their own time.

Storytelling invites everyone in. It may seem like the softest tool of revolution, but it honestly has the most power to actually change someone’s mind. Living like-heartedly means you don’t have to convince, win or own. You just have to invite, and listen, and share the stories.

Active audiencing

I love being in an audience. Whether it’s a stage show, a concert, a standup comedy routine or a cinema, when I am in the audience I feel safe, and ready to experience a world that is different to my own. As a spectator to a story, I have permission to open up my mind, consider beliefs and perspectives that I normally wouldn’t ever consider.

If the protagonist on the stage (or in the movie) is stricken with poverty, then I can safely subscribe to that identity, and for a moment walk the same path. I begin to understand why she would steal that loaf of bread, lie to her children, sleep with that man for money. As myself, I would stand strong in my narrow-minded worldview that stealing is wrong, prostitution is wrong, etc. But as a spectator, I can agree that in this world stealing is vital, the prostitution was necessary, and in fact if I were in that situation, I may take the exact same actions.

Of course, this is one of the goals of storytelling - to move the audience towards new ideas, feelings, perspectives. But the role of the audience as spectator is not a passive one. To be an observer is to invest time into someone else’s story. But more than that, it suspends judgement, observing with an open mind the perspective of another. One of the first things a storyteller needs to create is a world that feels TRUE to the audience, and the great power of observation is when you can accept another’s experience as true - even if you don’t agree with it.

When we experience a great story, we have all willingly opened our minds to it, acknowledging that “though I do not agree with this worldview, I feel completely safe to subscribe to it for the duration of the story.”

Imagine if we held that attitude in our everyday conversations?

Imagine listening to another’s story, and not immediately defending your own worldview, announcing your own belief system, arguing your truth versus another’s. It’s not that impossible to observe without judgement, listen with an open heart, consider that there may be truth in a completely different set of beliefs. After all, we do it every single time we experience a story.

This week, instead of just information-sharing or social positioning, try some active audiencing with others. Observe with an open heart, a gracious mind and a less-fearful ego. Suspend the judgement, believe that the way life is for another is as true as the way life is for yourself.

Who knows, you may just leave the show with some fresh perspectives and a richer worldview.

A slower determination

Rach and I are reading Margaret Wheatley’s “Perseverance” this morning.

At 5:30am, the sun has just crested the horizon, the sky is already an apricot wash, the temperature is already 12 degrees.

And she and I sit naked in a bed, cradling our coffee cups, reading words so wise, we can’t do more than a page a day.

Wheatley writes that in the Chinese language, the character for perseverance is often the same as the one used for patience. Which I find really validating, to be honest. Perseverance often carries with it the expectation of pushing through, being tenacious, fighting forward. But, the ancient Chinese scribes used the character for slowing down, resting and waiting, managing during a slower organic growing of oneself.

I think it’s one thing to have a deadline, work all night, “persevere" to complete a task - it’s cinematic, right? The audience applauds when the lawyer doesn’t sleep for a week and finds the loophole to win the case.

But, it’s a much more courageous thing to believe, and do, over a longer, slower period of time. We need more than adrenaline when the timeframe is months and years. When the work is a life’s work.

We need patience. Grace for ourselves. It’s a slower determination that lasts the distance of a lifetime. And that’s a whole different skill set.

Perseverance doesn’t yield. It sees us through to the end. It sees the difficulties and pushes through. But it’s not a fight. More, a deep resilience that gets us through the mundane, the everyday. It’s a daily acknowledgement:

"I am everything, and I am nothing, both at once.
And I will go softly forward ever forward into this life, with patience and determination.
I will grow as the tides and rivers grow, in ebbs and flows, but ever strengthening.
There is no hurry."