Context Meditation
- There are multiple kinds of being in the present moment. One is a kind of pure, contentless presence. Mindfulness often involves focusing on the breath, to the general exclusion of thoughts.
- There's another kind of presence, however, which involves being deeply aware of what time it is. This could be precise measured clocktime (what the Greeks called "chronos") but I'm more interested in a kind of time awareness that they called "kairos", which is opportunistic, meaningful, subjective time.
- In any case, I shall briefly describe a kind of meditation that emerged for me summer 2019, in the petri dish at Liminal Space Agency. We've been experimenting with doing 3-minute meditations before many of our conversations, both formal-ish group conversations and 2-person sync-ups. During that 3-minutes, I found myself doing something that basically goes as follows:
- Context Meditation Steps:
- On each in-breath, clear your mind
- Method not vital here. Can be deliberately trying to not think or can be more like allowing thoughts to do their thing.
- Just prior to each out-breath, focus your attention on a person that is present
- You totally count as a person, though typically I do myself last if at all.
- Also the person doesn't have to be physically present. For instance, if it's a group that usually has 5 people in it, and one is absent, then their absence might be just as conspicuously present as the physical presence of the other person. Or if you know that someone physically present just got out of a conversation with someone else, that person is in a sense present.
- More generally, you can also consider a relationship or a subgroup of the whole group, and do this with them as the focus.
- During the out-breath, stream-of-consciousness braindump on everything you are aware of what you know about what is so for them right now, as well as what you are aware of not knowing.
- I sometimes do this in a pretty verbal subvocalizey way, but also sometimes it manifests as more of a rich visuospatial gestalt.
- If I have enough time to do multiple out-breaths per person, I might aim for the first such breath to be more verbal/linear, and for the second to be more of a bigger-picture all-at-once shape.
- Why I think Context Meditation is cool & worth doing:
- I think it generally functions as practice in How to intentionally shift to RH thinking in the moment
- It can cause me to notice things I wouldn't have otherwise:
- a question I want to ask someone
- something I realize someone else doesn't know, that I want to bring in
- something I'm aware of as being emotionally present for someone
- Context is an important part of presence. It's not enough to just not be lost in a Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings—one must be actually in touch with what is so in the here and now.
3 linked references
December 27th, 2019
- jotted down a short bit on Context Meditation