What’s at the top of the list of our most vital human capacities? Love, of course. But what about learning? Is there an intersection, a space where love and learning blend together, empower each other?
Learning is what we do all day long, and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum; we’re always drawing on the past to learn what to do now.
Today, learning is light-years away from the fight, freeze or flee system built into our primal human nervous system. Our dizzying, disorienting, and often dissatisfying world can be a gracious invitation to access the power of mindfulness—to regulate our mental and emotional states, so we don’t keep dosing ourselves with cortisol as we face challenges we never expected.
Margaret Kachadurian co-founded Montana Mindfulness Project in 2019. She now serves as the Executive Director and Board President.
Learning is, according to Dr. Rick Hanson, PhD (Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength and Happiness) “the superpower of superpowers, the one that grows the rest of them. If you want to steepen your growth curve in life, it pays to learn about learning.”
For me, learning gives me a sense of safety. Learning makes me feel stronger, more confident. Like in math, problem-solving is a matter of following a logical sequence, followed by that “a-ha” moment of satisfaction. Learning in a group with a teacher fosters an even deeper sense of safety as we explore together, offering the added benefit of learning different perspectives while expanding and enriching our own. There’s often a feeling of pleasure–even a kind of delicious relief–when understanding lands. It is inevitably joyful, as every young child knows.
This is the doorway where learning and mindfulness meet.
Mindfulness trains us to pause, notice our body’s sensations, and enjoy the burst of those delicious neurochemicals (dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin). It’s an inside job. Infusing your day with mindful attention is radical learning: noticing the body’s signals, savoring a calm and focused mind, and allowing bursts of wholehearted feeling to emerge.
With steady balance, we can cultivate the fruits of learning by simply being curious and asking ourselves, “what’s missing?” My daily mantra these days is: “There’s more.” When we risk surrendering to not having to know so much, we simultaneously choose the satisfaction of being our own scientist, exploring to find the deep source of exuberant feeling, of being there, delighting in the mind that bursts open. The paradox is it was only a hair’s breath away.
Playing in the green field of awareness, we can choose to step out of our deep grooves of being on auto-pilot, either lost in thought or anxiously avoiding what might happen on the other side of “letting go.” What if I lose track of time, or worse, of who I think I am? I’m wasting time; what if I don’t accomplish anything? …scary thoughts.
Of course, the mind doesn’t give itself over so easily.
Enter the brilliantly clear clarion call of mindfulness, freeing us to directly experience inner aliveness, even ecstasy. In many meditation traditions, steadiness of mind is cultivated for bliss states which is a natural awareness. We often lived in bliss states as kids. Mindfulness practices unearth the absolute beauty of daily living and moments of sheer delight. Think about your first bike ride, the amazing moment when your balance, focus and body came together and off you went! I remember never wanting to stop, in fact, I still bike and I still love that moment.
I’ve just started the no-nonsense book Mysticism by philosopher Simon Critchley.
I’m fascinated by his “simple” offer:
“Wouldn’t you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness? If so, it might be well worthwhile trying to learn what is meant by mysticism and how it can shift, elevate, and deepen the sense of our lives. …Mysticism is existential and practical. It is – and this can serve as a rough and ready definition – the cultivation of practices which allow you to free yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings and see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically.”
When I began writing this reflection last week, I paused to look out my window at the bike park across the street. And there, I witnessed Critchley’s ideas playing out in real time.
Bikers were taking turns, standing at the top of a dirt start hill, each assessing the risks, straddling, steadying, finding their balance. I imagined the thrust of their adrenaline pump, muscles tightening, eyes focusing, willing a few magic moments of “this is it.”
Bikers activating their brains thrill switch that pushed the pedals down, the whipping speed of the downslope, the rise to the top of the hill for lift-off, clearing earth to fly through space – dreamscape moments – then the thud back to earth, immediately bracing for the next ride through space, the mind craving more and more.
It made me wonder: What if the thrill of living didn’t risk breaking bones? What if our minds felt the thrill as an elevating transcendence, a mystical inner journey.
Critchley elaborates on the mysticism in music:
“There is a mysticism in the experience of music, a godless mysticism if you like, which operates in the realm of the senses and which resonates within us and beyond us. Sensate Ecstasy. Music, and this is its miracle, can somehow hold an emotion and hold us there for that moment; we are the music for as long as the music lasts.”
I wonder what music the bikers are hearing? The lyrics from “Somethings Coming” the West Side Story song come to me as I watch:
“Could be, who knows?
There’s something due any day, I will know right away soon as it shows. It may come cannonballing down through the sky, gleam in its eye, bright as a rose.
Who knows? It’s only just out of reach, down the block, on a beach, under a tree.
I got a feeling there’s a miracle due, gonna come true, coming to me.
Something’s coming, something good. If I can wait. Something’s coming. I don’t know what it is, but it is gonna be great.”
This is exactly the risk inviting mindfulness into our lives offers.
The brave protagonists, Tony and Maria, risk everything for love, and their supporters risk dying to protect their love, ending tragically for too many, yet the human sacrifices bring an end to racial prejudice, healing the community through transcendent love. This is the true mystical power of mindfulness, passed down to us by ancient meditative traditions. When we allow ourselves to take that first courageous step toward what is true for us—loosening our grip on control—we can begin to feel a sense of freedom rising from within, even if only for a brief moment.
It is in this space where moments of bliss reside. Mindfulness meditation and practice is so powerful, even setting the intention to practice is considered an essential beginning point. The bikers know this physically; maybe they know it in their biker’s soul, too.
So where does this leave us?
If we were to step into this realm of true mindfulness, we would taste the freeing, simple, often sudden sort of ecstasy Critchley writes about. As Critchley says quoting Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), “This movement from woe to well might happen suddenly. In a twinkling of an eye, we might be lifted up, rescued, healed.”
Mindfulness invites us to give ourselves permission to slow down, even dare to loaf about without a list of what’s next at our elbow, to playfully entertain ourselves, become bored, letting the mind out to roam about in new territory and cultivate our own unique path and style to come home to ourselves, our true nature. We’re like fish in an aquarium, we’re both the energy flapping our fins and the water – but ours is an ocean of compassionate love.
