Orgo Tutorials

These tutorials were developed in keynote – apple’s answer to powerpoint – and exported to flash. There are some challenges to this development platform but it beats the hell out of learning and programming the whole thing in flash which i just didn’t have time to do. Tricks to know: you’ll need to write a flash pre-loader, don’t use any opacity in keynote, slide transitions are not preserved in the export to flash, and frame rate needs to be upped if you create a preloader.

I’ve started wrestling with my study plan for the semester but still have no idea how much to carve out and which things to focus on first. Since I plan to do a lit review on scientific articles on meditation, I’ve decided that I need to get a handle on functional neuroanatomy this first semester. Without a basic understanding of brain regions, much of the discussion of fMRI data in these papers is flying over my head.

The rest is up for grabs. I might include sensation, perception, and cognition on the science end as well as some work in non-dual philosophical traditions (advaita, zen, taoism). Also plan to include a silent retreat (my third) and a follow-up phenomenological paper on the experience of it.

The week is flying by and there’s a lot to nail down yet. Before I leave Goddard on friday I need to have my semester study plan complete specifying the contents of 5 work packets.

Today is commencement weekend for the Goddard graduates. Over the past several days the graduates have been presenting their theses, mostly in the form of experiential events. Attending these presentations has been marvelously inspiring and encouraging – in other words, at the end of this organic and free process, there is the potential for amazing fruits.

I wish I was able to attend more of these presentations but my body, aching and complaining in more ways I thought possible, has demanded that I close my eyes for far more time than seems reasonable. I’m happy to notice that today the complaints are fewer and quieter and am able to take in more of what’s going on all around me.

I just had a second meeting with my adviser and she continues to be right there with me, asking the right questions while fueling my fire. This afternoon, I meet with my concentration group for the first time – all the other weirdos who have chosen to get a Master’s in Consciousness Studies. Needless to say, I can’t wait!

The people I’ve met so far have been astonishingly like me. Seems we all have had the experience of sorting through many disparate interests to unearth our own interdisciplinary missions. The IMA group, as we are known (short for Individualized Master of Arts), is small, but in residence concurrent with the Heath Arts Students, of which there are at least twice as many. The IMAs are divided further into concentrations: Environmental Studies, Language Arts, and Consciousness Studies. I’m in the Consciousness Studies group and this afternoon I’ll finally get to see how many of us there are when I meet with my concentration group for the first time.

There are no teachers here, only advisor/facilitators. For my first semester, I’ve been assigned to advisor Ellie Epp, one of the faculty members that drew me here in the first place. Ellie and I had our first meeting yesterday. In only 15 minutes we covered lots of ground. She’d visited both of my websites, read my preliminary study plan and bibliography, and had already started a list of additional books and papers for me to check out. It feels like a good fit.

Most of what we’d done do far as G1s (we are designated by which semester out of four we are in residency for) has been orienting us to the process, the library, research methods, etc… Tonight we finally start to dive into what each of us have come here to study. Can’t wait.

It feels like the time has come to leave the closet and embrace the fact that music is pretty freakin’ moving, even to heady types like me. Creating music is even more so and in the spirit of abandoning my own fear of looking foolish I am putting some music noodlings out in the ether.

here is a work still in progress. recording the vocal tracks gave me such a hard time. the ones on this mix were recorded while I sang upside down in downward facing dog.
golden slumber…

and here is my first multi-track recording with the oh-so-fun zoom h4. unchained

In a lifetime long ago, a tragic and somewhat dramatic set of events upended my apparently stable life. This instigated a massive re-processing of beliefs and a re-formulation of my world view after which I enjoyed a honeymoon of sorts. During this period it dawned on me that, though my life was not what I had thought it was, NOTHING BAD WAS HAPPENING. It was a supremely (but quietly) joyful time and one which I did not want to disturb by actually going out on a date. I was walking around in a perpetual state of self-contentedness: working, rock climbing in west virginia, and cooking peach crepe breakfasts for friends on the front porch, so why rock the boat. It was with mixed emotions that I met Adrian, an inspiring & fascinating mountaineer who was out of the country more than he was in it. I considered it a deal-breaker that he was 12 year my junior and so was bound and determined to keep our developing friendship just that. Without recounting all the synchronous details I will simply say that despite my most earnest attempts, 6 months later we embarked on a relationship which, at the time, felt as if it was not my choice to accept or reject. Hindsight has only served to cement this impression. What did it mean? Of course I thought I knew – it felt like I was being rewarded for the hardest emotional work I’d done in my life but then there was even harder work yet to come when, in the summer of 2002, when Adrian told me that his future did not include me. Again I dug deep to find the gift buried in the emotional wreckage and it became apparent, over time, that while the most resonant realization I came to while rebuilding my self after crisis number 1 was that when there are harsh events in your recent memory and harsher possibilities on the horizon, there is still refuge in the present. What I still needed to grasp, and what I learned in spades while dating a mountaineer, was that though there are fresh and vivid memories of the past and incredible anticipation of future reunions, the present is still the only place to be. got it.

That was almost 7 years ago and the ways in which my continuing friendship with Adrian enriches my life make it unnecessary to wonder why we were brought together though it was clearly not what I had projected at the time. My flirtations with synchronicity were in their infancy at that time. Shortly after we broke up he reignited with his college sweetheart, Lissa. It was an incredibly challenging environment in which to heal from a broken heart. In a rare moment of true knowing, I awoke early one morning that fall to a certainty that she too would be a central character in my life (they have since married). Though it was much easier to invite unknowing on the nature of Lissa’s role in my life (after all, I’d not yet met her) I was not yet consciously practicing the invitation. As circumstances played out, Lissa and I met about 9 months later when she drove me from New York to Baltimore. I was returning from a solo re-empowerment trip to Asia and as luck would have it, she was driving down to visit Adrian for the weekend. The friendship we developed in the subsequent years has served to shape the direction of my life in hugely significant ways. It was with her encouragement and support that I resurrected the long-dormant artist in me.

Fast forward to October 2007, just a few days ago, when the gears of the universe seem to have picked up momentum, taking me on a path unintended. I was at a conference on the mysticism of sound in Vancouver that I rather impulsively registered for despite the fact that it would require me to fly home from a vacation in Spain only to stop-over for about 6 hours in my home town of Baltimore before continuing west. What drew me to this event were the Sufi contemplative chanting practices known as wazifas, which I learned of while on a silent retreat in May, becoming entranced by their simple melodies sung in swirling rounds. The conference ended, for me, after a jaw-dropping piano improvisation by a conductor & musician visiting from Munich. Following his performing I simply did not want to hear another note so I began my exit as the next musicians were setting up on stage. I noticed the German pianist grab his coat and leave as well and so wandered off to find the bathroom hoping to give him time and space to make his get away. I’m not all that clear why I was avoiding him other than I did not want it to appear that I was following him out to gush over what, admittedly for me, was a transcendent performance. When I left the theater about 10 minutes later he was still at the front door waiting for another conference attendee. Since he was standing right in front of me, I did my gushing, bent his ear for what I fear was far too long, said goodnight, and walked back to my hotel.

The next morning I made my way to the airport only to find my flight to Denver had been canceled so I was re-booked on a flight through Chicago. As pre-boarding began I heard a page for a passenger with the same last name as the visiting German who I was sure had said he was heading back to Munich. But no, it was he who responded to the page. In the few minutes before boarding I approached him and found that he’d made a last minute change of plans to stop-over for one day in Washington. After mutually arriving at the word synchronous to describe the strangeness of the mornings events I remember him saying it had snowed the day he left Munich and that it felt like fall which he liked since his birthday was in November. Mine too. What day? As I spoke the date I could almost see it coming out of my mouth and crossing space. His facial expression only barely revealed his surprise and he showed me his passport which you, no doubt, have figured out revealed that we share the same birth date.

After I explained that, though we were headed for different airports, we’d only be about an hour drive apart at the end of our trips so we made a tentative plan to meet for coffee in Washington the following day. I couldn’t believe my luck! I had pages of notes from the conductor’s talk at the conference and so many questions for him. I determined that a conductor, or at least this one, is really an experiential educator. I recently had the same epiphany regarding my own yoga teaching to which one of my experiential ed friends replied. “Um, yes and this is an epiphany why?” I suppose it was because my education both in art school and engineering could only be described as exclusively heady, nothing sensorial or emotional about either.

The conductor shot me a text message at 3p.m. as I was stepping out of the shower. An hour and 15 minutes later I pulled up to the National Gallery of Art as he was walking out. While driving down from Baltimore I considered the many questions I wanted to ask him but it occurred to me that maybe I should approach this meeting in the same way I met with a Tibetan Lama a few months ago (see Interview with a Lama – August 31, 2007), that is, not quite knowing why it was happening but knowing my complete presence was required. Our conversation was too short but resonant on topics including consciousness, philosophy, and music.

It is becoming clear to me that if I actually want to interview deep thinkers and write about it I’m going to need much more practice since I seem to digress into conversation while in their presence and meandering essays, such as this, when writing about it later. The fact is, I enjoy the hell out of plumbing my own depths. What is unique for me this time around is that I’m doing a remarkable job of holding at bay any attempts to decipher the meaning of these uncanny events, arguably the most unequivocally synchronous happenings of my life so far. Looking back on my old self I am reminded of a child watching a movie full of plot twists. They turn to you and start peppering you with questions of why and what will happen the only answer to which is “shhhhh. all will be revealed“. That question-peppering child is still in me but I now have a practice that has allowed me to relax into these real-life plot twists: to invite unknowing, a practice given to me during my emotional reconstruction in the aftermath of the Adrian breakup, ironically by his (and now my) friend Joyce. Joyce… the experiential educator. When I have shared this practice with others I have noticed that it is almost always translated to tolerate unknowing or something similar that implies simply suffering through the uncertainty but there is a different quality to an invitation – it is softly receptive.

Invite unknowing. Why? To practice getting out of one’s own way. When we think we understand the meaning of a synchronous event it often leads us to a projection into the future, as in, “because X happened it means I am to do Y”. Several years ago I cold-called a tea salon in Manhattan because Lissa thought it was a great fit for the art I was generating at the time. The owner invited me to bring my work to New York and subsequently gave me a show. I interpreted the swinging open of the door of opportunity as a mandate, though I practically sold my soul in the process of bringing both the work and the show into existence. The gallery owner was one of the most difficult people I have ever had to work with and though the work hung for several months in a lovely space in Manhattan, I did not sell a single piece from that body of work until the show came down. My only other show, one curated and hung by Lissa two years earlier, almost completely sold out. When we hear stories like these the urge to declare what they mean is almost overwhelming which brings me to the companion to invite unknowing… avoid declarations. When we declare, we enter the known zone, as Joyce calls it. No learning happens in the known zone. But I am discovering, in this moment, that it’s quite challenging to END an essay without a declaration and so it appears I am called upon to end it here, pianissimo. shhhh…

In the moment I could recognize my disappointment – no juicy new fodder on free will and a very simple answer to life’s biggest question. His answer: to be happy… To be happy? That’s the only reason we’re here? No learning, no self actualization, no finding our higher purpose? Nope, we’re here to be happy. For the life of me I can’t figure out why I found his answer so surprising, after all, when I teach yoga nidra I tell my own students that their senses, thoughts, and emotions are all pointing them in the right direction, they need only to tune up the receiver, not use yesterday’s data and make sure that what they are reaching for IS, in fact, making them happy. In my own life, the act of paying attention, the kind of attention only possible for me when I’ve slowed to a snail’s pace on retreat, has illuminated many actions of habit that are plainly no longer serving me. Collecting fresh data can yield surprising results especially when it leads us away from things we’ve known and loved and towards those we were sure we’re not so keen on. It would seem we spend the first several decades amassing the sets of likes and dislikes that form so much of our identities. Unless we adopt a practice of challenging our own perceptions these ideas harden and eventually deny us the ability to move fluidly through those challenges we have absolutely no control over.

I love the expressions “come to your senses” and “be sensible” and exploring what they mean literally and what they’ve come to mean. If we go back to them literally, we can explore, with curiosity, the physical sensations we experience as a sensory guidance system but in for this to work we need to actually sense what we are feeling in our bodies when we’re feeling down or frustrated or joyful. While this might sound easy, anyone who’s tried this practice will recognize how incredibly quick we are to move away from pure sensation and into stories and thoughts as we essentially shortcut the process, i.e. use yesterday’s data.

I have learned and re-learned the value of this practice over the years, first exposed to it (though accidentally, briefly, and quickly forgotten) first during a yoga nidra workshop with Richard Miller in 2002. Not long after that I got many more lessons on this when my good friend Joyce coached me through a big heart-break. When I would relate my misery she would, without fail, ask me what it felt like. No matter what I answered (I’m sad, I feel soooo sad) she would challenge me to bring it back to my senses. This was such a radically new practice for me I really had no idea what she wanted – I had so completely short-circuited the processing of my body’s emotional signals into thought and story that her questions seemed nonsensical and downright frustrating. It was her patient and insistent repetition of the question “but what does it feel like… in your body?” that eventually allowed me to experience the power of this practice first hand.

By the summer of 2006 I had forgotten the name of the teacher who’s workshop I’d accidentally signed up for years earlier (I though I was taking a weekend yoga workshop while in Berkeley on business) but for reasons I cannot explain, I had a nagging need to resurrect his name and feared that I’d lost it forever. It was during this time that I was undertaking a massive purge as part of selling my house of 10 years, a 4 story behemoth filled to the brim with art, files, and too much furniture. I was convinced I’d thrown away the handouts from that weekend workshop only to discover them squirreled away in a random file folder. For no reason I could understand I was thrilled to have resurrected his name, Richard Miller, one so ordinary to have defied my efforts at recalling it.

A few short weeks later I received an email from a local yoga studio announcing that none other than Richard Miller would be coming to Maryland to teach his first ever yoga nidra teacher training. Nuh uh. I simply love serendipitous experiences like these, they blow me away, no small feat considering my early years as a hyper-rational Spock-like science type. I still am quite a logical being but I’ve adopted a radical empiricism about my data collection – I no longer collect data only with my mind but strive to include my senses as equal partners, dropping down the ladder of inference as the experiential educators like to say. It is precisely this kind of radical empiricism as described by William James that is required of us to be happy, no? James is a recent discovery for me. His writings resonate with the scientist and mystic in me and are just one more framing of the same practice of experiencing each moment with the fresh curiosity of an unjaded scientist seeking, simply, to be happy.

Yes, to be happy might be a ridiculously simple reason to be here. If only it was as easy as it is simple.