Eating the Menu or the Meal? (5)

Pieces of the Whole Storyis a blog about the return to wholeness of our self and world, both of which we tend to see as broken, isolated, and wrong. I draw on the world’s spiritual traditions, therapies of psyche, soma, and spirit, poetry, folktales, and the epiphanies of everyday life to bring us into awareness of the whole story.

The map is not the territory is the old saying.
I offer a variant: the menu is not the meal.

Following a path of mindfulness means choosing to see what you experience when you let go of your grip on the mental concepts you get from reading the menu, the mental description of experience internally being recited by your mind.  Instead, you choose to taste the meal of your life, directly. With a literal meal this means being moment by moment available to the tastes, smells, textures, subtle sounds of cutting, biting, chewing, and the visual forms and colors of, let’s say, butternut squash made golden in butter with sautéed red onions, shell pasta, fresh sage, and a little cream with ground pepper, umm! Not being with those words but with how the actual meal tastes at this moment, not the last time you had it. Extend that to the meal of your whole life, and it means dropping the concepts of what an experience means (how it gets languaged) in preference to being with the feelings and sensations of the experience as you choose to allow the experience to permeate you entirely. It means you can choose to not hold back from Life; you can choose to let go of what you believe you already know, and instead risk being freshly present with what is.

One of the great lightbulb moments of discovering the power of mindfulness comes when you notice the difference between what you THOUGHT an experience would be, and what you FEEL (with all of the senses) the experience actually is. This is the primordial moment of fresh learning. Ah, so all attractive people aren’t going to shame me! Or, I can feel anger fully and not act it out in a terrifying way (like Dad/Mom/my ex- did)! That gap perceived by noticing the difference has a flavor of freedom about it. You remember you are more than your thoughts. A friend once told me that for him the essence of James Joyce’s Ulysseus was real quite simple (despite the thick complexity of all the layers of meaning in the text). Joyce was just calling out to us: Come on in! The water’s fine!

In truth our experience isn’t purely of the map or of the meal, but some blend of the two. As you try practicing to see how much you are willing to let go of the menu and just be with the meal, you may notice that any moment has a dimension of depth to it. You can stay on the surface, and, as it were, read the labels on the passing boxes of your experience. Or you can slow down the conveyor belt and drop into the box of the moment to feel its depth. This is an action of relaxing, of willingness, of opening oneself fully.

So I leave you with these three metaphors as invitations:
 

• let go of the map and enter fully into the territory
• quit chewing on the menu and eat the mystery food
• slow down the conveyor belt and drop below the box label into the depth of experience.

Learning to Listen (2)

"Pieces of the Whole Story" is a blog about the return to wholeness of our self and world, both of which we tend to see as broken, isolated, and wrong. I draw on the world’s spiritual traditions, therapies of psyche, soma, and spirit, poetry, folktales, and the epiphanies of everyday life to bring us into awareness of the whole story.

So, you know you’re stuck, and you have some sense of at least one particular area of that stuckness in which you guess you’ve got more to learn so as to get unstuck? If that’s the case, then how do you learn to listen? How do you learn to listen to the divine discontent I spoke of in the prior post? ...to the symptoms, the ache, the confusion? How do you learn to hear the excluded parts of your story? (This post is directly in response to the first comment I received about the first post “Hunger for the Whole Story.”)

Here are two inner actions that can open up that conversation: (1) Holding the question, and (2) Welcoming the stranger. I’ll just give a brief description of both of these here and then develop each of them in separate posts.

Holding a question begins with a willingness to not know. That may seem simple, but don’t forget all the years when “knowing the answer” meant to be “loved” (acknowledged-approved-recognized) by teachers, who, for most of us, were our second sources of love. To be willing to not know is to allow yourself to be open to the world and ready to receive and be changed by new experience. That’s a position that can feel powerless and vulnerable (but is it?).

Holding a question may sound like something done primarily with the mind, but it’s not. Holding a question is different than just thinking a question. Holding a question (as with all other holding) is done in the heart and the body as well as the mind. You can begin by sensing into your immediate presence and seeing how and where the lack of knowing plus the urge to know shows up. Scan your inner space to sense where you can feel that lack and urge. Give it breath and space. Ask yourself if you are willing to let it be there. That willingness to allow yourself to live with the question – to live with the admission that there is more to know and with the yearning to become aware of that more – that willingness readies a space like preparing your home for a guest to arrive. Not a known guest, but a stranger.

Welcoming the stranger means to extend a friendliness to whatever shows up. That friendliness begins even before you have much of a clue as to what will show up, so the friendliness precedes the showing up. Such an attitude of welcoming is necessary if that which has been hiding from you will be willing to let itself be known. How would you sit in a meadow if you wanted the wild creatures to approach? The “wildness” is that of being rejected, shamed, and disowned. That which most needs to be listened to is that which got excluded when your personality was being formed. I know of no better expression of this friendliness than in Rumi’s poem, “The Guest House."