One of my talented and motivated students takes a lesson a year with me. The fellow lives abroad and comes to Paris for a few days at Christmas time. For our purposes, let’s call him Gerrit. We get along great, and our yearly encounters are meaningful to both of us. Gerrit gives me permission to be creative, to take risks, and to play, and I feel terribly grateful toward him.
This year Gerrit came into the lesson with a specific purpose in mind. He told me that in professional meetings as well as in social situations, he finds it difficult to express his views. He’s overwhelmed by other people’s forceful displays of opinion and sentiment, and he removes himself from discussion. Later, at home, he seethes with anger. At those people, of course! Who won’t listen to him, who shut him down, who push him out! And whose opinions are really quite so very stupid!
I’ve long found it useful to relate seemingly disparate elements to a shared, core principle. For instance, many of our behaviors in life can be studied from the point of view of rhythm: the things we rush through, the things we let drag; the steady routines and the impulsive breaks from routine; the way we cook and the way we clean up after we cook; our manner of walking, of speaking, of shaking hands with strangers. Once we start thinking about it, we see that everything we do depends on our sense of rhythm. To work on your rhythms is to work on your health, your identity, your career, your family life, and a thousand other things. Good health is good rhythm.
Other principles that are all-encompassing include space, time, direction (where are you going?), discourse (the words you use and how you use them), food, ergonomics (the furniture and objects and shoes and cellos in your life) . . . the list goes on.
Hearing and watching Gerrit explain his problem, I decided that he was talking about his presence in space, which I consider a powerful all-encompassing principle for all of us. In meetings, Gerrit doesn’t find his space, he isn’t given his space, he doesn’t take the space he needs and wants. “He disappears.” I then created a number of spatial situations—games, really—for Gerrit to become keenly aware of himself-in-the-problem, so that he could become keenly attentive to himself-as-the-solution.
Gerrit is tall, or taller than me, or tall and striking to my eyes. I asked him to put his arms out and to the side, to open his wings like a condor. His span was gigantic, and my apartment was almost too small to accommodate him. I commented admiringly on his span, and Gerrit said, “It’s the sweater. It makes me look big.” The sweater may have make him look even bigger than his bodily self, but Gerrit was big and is big and will always be big. I pointed out to him that “he diminished himself” by his sweater remark. You are the size that you are, and you are also the size that you think and feel that you are. You communicate the mixture of these two sizes to other people. If you want to be seen and to be heard . . . well, you have to expand. And you have to be alert to your habitual ways of not expanding, the thoughts and feelings and words that you employ to diminish yourself. Here’s Gerrit the Condor. To protect his privacy, I decapitated him.
I keep a megaphone in my teaching room. I opened a window onto the street three floors below, handed Gerrit the megaphone, and asked him to shout at a passerby. He could hardly believe I was asking him to do such a thing, such a nasty thing, such a . . . such a perverted thing. He got all shy and giggly, and I had to persuade him gently and teasingly before he took the megaphone, went to the window, and said a quiet “Hey you” into it. I sensed that Gerrit believed that shouting at people was an angry thing to do. He was amalgamating two separate things: anger and loudness. I asked him to shout a loving “Hey you! Merry Christmas!” to a group of passersby. And, yay! Gerrit did it! The group looked up at us and waved, everybody smiley and happy. Not only do you have the right to speak; you have the right to speak loudly; you have the right to speak in anger if it comes to it; and you have the right to reach out to people and greet them in good cheer, as loud as an elephant in the savanna. Have an internal megaphone at your disposal, and use it as you see fit.
I suggested another game. “I’m going to talk nonstop, and you do it too, okay? We both talk nonstop, okay?” And I started talking nonstop. Gerrit stood there, looking dumbfounded and hurt. After talking alone for a little while, I had to stop and laugh. I pointed out that when confronted with a motormouth he fell silent, or “he went away and disappeared,” when in fact he could have stayed put and become a motormouth himself. We did this exercise again, and now Gerrit talked and talked in his mother tongue, which is foreign to me. We became the Cackling Duo of Beaumarchais. This exercise isn’t about listening to someone else talk, or to be listened to when you talk; it’s about making sounds, being willing to make sounds even if your listeners don’t pay attention, or pay attention but don’t understand you, or understand you but disagree with you. If you don’t make sounds to begin with, you’re cooked!
I said, “I’m going to attack you by waving my hand at high speed close to your face.” If I keep my wrist floppy, the fast wave close to the face can be quite startling and annoying, even if I never touch your face. I went for it, and Gerrit’s first reaction was to move his head (but not his body) back and away from my hand, with a look of displeasure on his face. “He shrank.'“ He had other choices at his disposal: to remain big but to move away, to wave his own hand close to my face, to shout, to playact, to laugh. Gerrit is several inches taller than me. He could easily dominate and overcome me if only he wanted to. He finally sprung into action and held my wrist firmly, stopping the attack and solving the spatial problem I had created for him. The solution required agency: the willingness to take initiative, and above all the willingness to act against one’s habit.
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. (1 Peter 5:8)
Your habit is your adversary, the roaring lion. It’s forever attacking you, tripping you up, confusing you, getting you to think habitual thoughts and to behave in habitual behaviors and to feel habitual sensations and emotions. Habit plays dirty. It’ll do anything to prevail and to survive, sometimes disguising itself as Santa Claus. Embodied mindfulness is like a martial art. You have to defend yourself from the devouring habit—that is, to catch the habit before the habit catches you; to do nothing before you do something; to witness your own behaviors even as you engage in them, the better to exorcise them. It takes distance, agency, and cleverness to tame that devil.
©2020, Pedro de Alcantara
