Experiment: Cultivate a Beginner's Heart

To achieve what the Zen Buddhists call “beginner’s mind,” you dispense with all preconceptions and enter each situation as if seeing it for the first time. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” wrote Shunryu Suzuki. “but in the expert’s there are few.”

As much as I love beginner’s mind, though, I advocate an additional discipline: cultivating a beginner’s heart. That means approaching every encounter imbued with a freshly invoked wave of love that is as pure as if you’re feeling it for the first time.





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CHEERFULLY AND ENTHUSIASTICALLY GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS

In her book Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés suggests that we all need to periodically go cheerfully and enthusiastically out of our minds.

Make sure, she says, that at least one part of you always remains untamed, uncategorizable, and unsubjugated by routine. Be adamant in your determination to stay intimately connected to all that's inexplicable and mysterious about your life.

At the same time, though, Estés believes you need to keep your unusual urges clear and ordered. Discipline your wildness, in other words, and don't let it degenerate into careless disorder.





WABI-SABI

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese term that refers to a captivating work of art with a distinctive flaw that embodies the idiosyncratic humanity of its creator. An aqua groove in an otherwise perfectly green ceramic pot may give it wabi-sabi. A skilled blues singer who intentionally wails out of pitch for a moment may be expressing wabi-sabi.

Wabi-sabi is rooted in the idea that perfection is a kind of death.

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"The essence of wabi-sabi is that true beauty, whether it comes from an object, architecture, or visual art, doesn't reveal itself until the winds of time have had their say. Beauty is in the cracks, the worn spots, and the imperfect lines."

—Todd Dominey

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Wabi-sabi is a kind of beauty that's imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete, says Leonard Koren in his book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. It differs from Western notions that beauty resides in the "monumental, spectacular, and enduring." It's about "the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are almost invisible at first glance."

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"When bread is baked, some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker's art, are beautiful, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating.

“Again, figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit.

“And the ears of corn bending down, and the lion's eyebrows, and the foam which flows from the mouth of wild boars, though they are far from being beautiful, please the mind."

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by George Long





IRREGULARITY AND UNPREDICTABILITY ARE IMPORTANT FEATURES OF HEALTH

"Irregularity and unpredictability are important features of health. On the other hand, decreased variability and accentuated periodicities are associated with disease. Healthy systems don't want homeostasis. They want chaos."

—John R. Van Eenwyk, "The Chaotic Dynamics of Everyday Life"

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"One must have chaos within oneself if one is to be a dancing star."

—Friedrich Nietzsche

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"We are too sincere, too productive, and too realistic. We need to enter more fully and more willingly into that realm under the rocks and behind the mirror."

—Thomas Moore

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"There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music."

—John Keats

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"Half of what you know today will be obsolete in five years. That prospect should fill you with excitement."

—Vimala Blavatsky

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"In teaching my students, I try to figure out what questions I can ask that have no right answer. I seek to frame paradoxes, to force students to develop original thought."

—Meg Gorman, teacher





BOW TO THE NEGATIVE THOUGHT

Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield espouses an interesting method for dealing with negative and unwanted thoughts. Don't let them possess you, he says, and don't assume you have to act them out.

On the other hand, don't struggle mightily to suppress them, either. Instead, try this: Bow to the offending idea. Acknowledge and admire its power. Express your gratitude and respect to it for galvanizing so much of your psychic energy.





INNOCENCE IS NOT THE SAME AS NAIVETE

Most people associate innocence with naiveté. Conventional wisdom regards it as belonging to children and fools and rookies who lack the sophistication or experience to know the tough truths about life.

But the Beauty and Truth Lab recognizes a different kind of innocence. It's based on an understanding that the world is always changing, and therefore deserves to be seen fresh every day. This alternative brand of innocence is fueled by an aggressive determination to keep clearing one's imagination of all preconceptions.

"Ignorance is not knowing anything and being attracted to the good," wrote Clarissa Pinkola Estés in *Women Who Run with the Wolves*. "Innocence is knowing everything and still being attracted to the good.





ART SHOULD BE SOOTHING . . . AND DISTURBING?

French Impressionist painter Henri Matisse wanted his art to be "free from unsettling or disturbing subjects . . . soothing, a cerebral sedative as relaxing as a comfortable armchair."

Spanish painter Pablo Picasso had a different opinion. "Art is offensive," he asserted. "At least, art should be allowed to be offensive. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous."

As you practice the art of pronoia, you will probably get best results if you swing back and forth between Matisse's and Picasso's approaches.

Every once in a while, try out William Butler Yeats' idea, too: "Art that doesn't attempt the impossible is not performing its function."





THE NIRVANA FALLACY

"The nirvana fallacy is the belief that because something is not completely perfect, it is deeply flawed or even broken. It is very common in economic and political discourse.

"The nirvana fallacy compares actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives. It can also refer to the tendency to assume that there is a perfect solution to a particular problem. A closely related concept is the perfect solution fallacy.

"By creating a false dichotomy that presents one option which is obviously advantageous — while at the same time being completely implausible — a person using the nirvana fallacy can attack any opposing idea because it is imperfect.

"Under this fallacy, the choice is not between real world solutions; it is, rather, a choice between one realistic achievable possibility and another unrealistic solution that could in some way be 'better.'"

—Wikipedia





There’s a way not to be broken that takes brokenness to find it.

– Naomi Shihab Nye





WE'RE ALL FAMILY

We're all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as 10th cousin, and no one on Earth is any further removed than your 50th cousin.

With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and, owing to the wind's circulation, every year you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as by everyone who ever lived. (Source: Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life)

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Your body contains about four octillion atoms. That's four with 27 zeroes after it. Believe it or not, 200 billion of that total were once inside the body of Martin Luther King, Jr.

For that matter, an average of 200 billion atoms of everyone who has ever lived and died is part of you: including Malcolm X, William Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, and Cleopatra. I am not making this up.

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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says: There are more molecules of water in a cup of water than cups of water in all the world's oceans.

This means that some molecules in every cup of water you drink passed through the kidneys of Genghis Khan, Virginia Woolf, Abe Lincoln, or any other historical person of your choosing.





PRAYER FOR US
(Hear this as a song)

This is a perfect moment. It's a perfect moment because I have been inspired to say a gigantic prayer. I've been roused to unleash a divinely greedy, apocalyptically healing prayer for each and every one of us—even those of us who don't believe in the power of prayer.

And so I am starting to pray right now to the God of Gods—the God beyond all Gods . . . the Girlfriend of God . . . the Teacher of God . . . the Goddess who invented God.

DEAR GODDESS, you who always answer our very best questions, even if we ignore you:

Please be here with us right now. Come inside us with your sly slippery slaphappy mojo. Invade us with your silky succulent salty sweet haha.

Hear with our ears, Goddess. Breathe with our lungs. See through our eyes.

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DEAR GODDESS, you who never kill but only change:

I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words will move you to shower ferocious blessings down on everyone who reads or hears this benediction.

I pray that you will give us what we don't even know we need—not just the boons we think we want, but everything we've always been afraid to even imagine or ask for.

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DEAR GODDESS, you wealthy anarchist burning heaven to the ground:

Many of us don't even know who we really are. We've forgotten that our souls live forever. We're blind to the fact that every little move we make sends ripples through eternity. Some of us are even ignorant of how extravagant, relentless, and practical your love for us is.

Please wake us up to the shocking truths. Use your brash magic to help us see that we are completely different from we've been led to believe, and more exciting than we can possibly imagine.

Guide us to realize that we are all unwitting messiahs who are much too big and ancient to fit inside our personalities.

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DEAR GODDESS, you sly universal virus with no fucking opinion:

Help us to be disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation, not destruction.

Teach us to know the distinction between oppressive self­-control and liberating self-control.

Awaken in us the power to do the half-­right thing when it is impossible to do the totally right thing.

And arouse the Wild Woman within us—even if we are men or any other gender.

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DEAR GODDESS, you who give us so much love and pain mixed together that our morality is always on the verge of collapsing:

I beg you to cast a boisterous love spell that will nullify all the dumb ideas, bad decisions, and nasty conditioning that have ever cursed all of us wise and sexy virtuosos.

Remove, banish, annihilate, and laugh into oblivion any jinx that has clung to us, no matter how long we have suffered from it, and even if we have become accustomed or addicted to its ugly companionship.

Conjure an aura of protection around us so that we will receive an early warning if we are ever about to act in such a way as to bring another hex or plague into our lives in the future.

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DEAR GODDESS, you psychedelic mushroom cloud at the center of all our brains:

I pray that you will inspire us to kick our own asses.

Give us bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems.

Help us learn the difference between useless suffering and smart suffering.

Provoke us to throw away or give away everything we own that encourages us to believe we're better than anyone else.

Brainwash us with your compassion so that we never love our own freedom more than anyone else's freedom.

And make it illegal, immoral, irrelevant, unpatriotic, and totally tasteless for us to be in love with anyone or anything that's no good for us.

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DEAR GODDESS, you riotously tender, hauntingly reassuring, orgiastically sacred feeling that is even now running through all of our soft, warm animal bodies:

I pray that you provide us with a license to bend and even break all rules, laws, and traditions that hinder us from loving the world the way you do.

Show us how to purge the wishy-­washy wishes that distract us from our daring, dramatic, divine desires.

And teach us that we can have anything we want if we will only ask for it in an unselfish way.

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DEAR GODDESS, you who just pretend to be wild and unknowable so you can get away with doing what's right:

Help us to be like you—wildly disciplined, voraciously curious, exuberantly elegant, shockingly friendly, fanatically balanced, blasphemously reverent, mysteriously truthful, teasingly healing, lyrically logical, and blissfully rowdy.

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And now dear God of Gods, God beyond all Gods, Girlfriend of God, Teacher of God, Goddess who invented God, I bring this prayer to a close, trusting that in these pregnant moments you have begun to change all of us in the exact way we needed to change in order to become the gorgeous geniuses we were born to be.

Amen

Om

Hallelujah

Shalom

Namaste

More power to you

(Hear this prayer as a song)





INTERVIEW WITH A WITCH

I had the good fortune of being asked to do an interview with the brilliant Amanda Yates Garcia, author of the book Initiated: Memoir of a Witch. Listen to our conversation here.

It's rare I find colleagues with whom I am aligned in so many different perspectives. Amanda Yates Garcia is one of those colleagues:

* sacred political activism

* psychospiritual commitment to dealing with the darkness as well as reveling in the light

* moral integrity based on an unselfish celebratory love of and care for all creatures

* valuing the mandates of the soul over the demands of the ego

* regarding beauty and joy as essential ingredients in a well-lived life.





ONE OF YOUR GREAT BLESSINGS

Brian Swimme writes: "The Sun, each second, transforms four million tons of itself into light, giving itself over to become energy that we, with every meal, partake of.

"For four million years, humans have been feasting on the Sun's energy stored in the form of wheat or reindeer, as each day the Sun dies as Sun and is reborn as the vitality of Earth.

"Every child of ours needs to learn the simple truth: She is the energy of the Sun. And we adults should organize things so her face shines with the same radiant joy.

"Human generosity is possible only because at the center of the solar system a magnificent stellar generosity pours forth free energy day and night without stop and without complaint and without the slightest hesitation.

"This is the way of the universe. This is the way of life. And this is the way in which each of us joins this cosmological lineage when we accept the Sun's gift of energy and transform it into creative action that will enable the community to flourish."

—Brian Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, video





TOUCH IS CRUCIAL

"The more we learn about touch, the more we realize just how central it is in all aspects of our lives — cognitive, emotional, developmental, behavioral — from womb into old age. It's no surprise that a single touch can affect us in multiple, powerful ways."

— Maria Konnikova

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"Everything we touch becomes a jewel for our enjoyment. We do not have to possess them, because every jewel is available for our delight. Everyone and everything here is a jewel."

— Thich Nhat Hahn

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"Of all the gifts we can give to people, the gift of our touch is one of the most priceless. Through our hands we convey a kind of radiance. A warmth seeps out from our inner fire, a wrap for someone's chill, a light for another's dark."

— Jan Phillips

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"A pat on the back, a caress of the arm — these everyday, incidental gestures that we usually take for granted, thanks to our amazingly dexterous hands. But after years spent immersed in the science of touch, I can tell you that they are far more profound than we usually realize: They are our primary language of compassion, and a primary means for spreading compassion."

— Dacher Keltner

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"Paradise is attained by touch."

— Helen Keller

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"Although not everyone is blessed with a healing touch, our touch can be a source of healing and blessing for others, especially when accompanied by a brief prayer."

— Tom Cowan

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"Touch is far more essential than our other senses. It's ten times stronger than verbal or emotional contact."

— Saul Schanberg

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"Touch deprivation is a reality in American culture as a whole. It's not just babies needing to be touched in caring ways or the sick. It's not just doctors and nurses needing to extend it. It's all of us, needing connection, needing to receive it, needing to give it, with genuine happiness at stake."

— Rev Anthony David

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"Touch is not optional for human development. From tool use to chronic pain to the process of healing, the genes, cells, and neural circuits involved in the sense of touch have been crucial to creating our unique human experience."

— David J. Linden





Nothing will tell you where you are. Each moment is a place you've never been.

—Mark Strand