Gonzo blogging: The blog does the writer

The difficulties I have writing a blog entry about Good Enough learning teach me something important and relevant to what I'm writing about

Threads:                        Context, Learning
Relevant recent posts:     2/14/2011     Unconscious Learning

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate."
             — Madeline L'Engle

Okay, I have to tell you what’s happening as I (try to) write what was supposed to be this blog entry.

Writing the blog has its way with me
First, all these blog entries have taken longer to write than I thought they would, I think for three reasons. One, I’m exploring how to write what I know in a way that evokes in you, the reader, what you already know. Two, I start with an idea of what I want to write, but gradually each entry takes on a life of its own. I follow it, curious what it will turn out to be. Three, (and I didn’t know this would happen before I started the blog) the act of writing these blogs engages and changes me in ways I’m unaware of while I’m writing. Since change is a process that takes time, the writing takes time, too. An example? Back to the particular entry I’ve been trying to write.

I’m excited...
...because I have this simple frame about our learning process that provides a metaphor for how we get stuck and is suggestive of how to get unstuck: When we learn something, a skill, an attitude, walking, anything… when we’ve learned it Good Enough, our unconscious takes it over. That specific learning stops, and it’s available to us on autopilot. Good Enough means good enough for the circumstance in which we learned it. Many variables might get folded into the calculation of Good Enough… and this occurs mostly out of conscious awareness.

Given that conscious awareness seems to be a limited resource—like a flashlight that lights up only what it’s aimed at—it’s to our advantage that we seem to function this way. It allows us to be available to our past learnings without burdening our limited conscious capacity.

“Being present” collides with the “Good Enough Plateau…” in my mind
Okay so far. Now, for some time I’ve been exploring the experience of “being present.” Despite that the experience of “being present” hasn’t ever benefited one whit from my thinking about it, I still have ideas about it. I have thought “being present” means, in part, not having my responses rooted in the past. I have also thought responses unconsciously rooted in old learnings may have been good enough in the past, but some are likely obsolete and constraining now.

Bingo! Here I am writing about the Good Enough Plateau—the repository and Library of Old Good Enough Learnings—and how not to get stuck on it—which is, in part, how I’ve been thinking about being present.

Why write when you can demonstrate?
I have spent days writing this blog entry. I have six single spaced pages of variations on a couple paragraphs where I am trying to evoke what I find so exciting about this frame. Punch line #1: None of them are Good Enough. I am certainly not stuck on the Good Enough Plateau. Punch line #2: I am stuck in the vast unformed foggy space of Not Good Enough, the archetypal creativity that aspires and yearns, and creates—but never entirely captures, never adequately evokes… is never Good Enough.

While I’ve been struggling to write about the benefits of not getting stuck on the Good Enough Plateau, I’ve been demonstrating being stuck on nothing being good enough!

John’s Big Insight
This stuckness isn’t useful, either, because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life writing these couple paragraphs ever more evocatively. I just want to post this entry; I have other things to do. This is an important learning for me. Sometimes Good Enough is good enough. And sometimes it isn’t. And that difference is a distinction worth learning to make for one’s self. Nobody can make it for you, even if they think they can.

Stories and learning

Threads:                        Context, Learning, Mistakes, Stories
                                     (these threads are interdependent; they become a weave)
Relevant recent posts:     2/14/2011     Unconscious Learning
                                     1/25/2011     Learning and mistakes

 The universe is not made of atoms. It is made of stories.
        — Muriel Rukeyser (1913 – 1980)

He was an Ericksonian hypnotherapist. They’re different. He told me stories that seemed to get inside me and mean something.
           — client, describing her experience of hypnosis

Stories can be wonderful and supportive teaching metaphors. With fairytale content that completely engages a young child, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” evokes so much: Exploring out in The World; encountering a whole series of “too big / too small / and just right” circumstances—metaphors for choosing the right-sized limits and boundaries that support comfort and well-being; or perhaps the young listener is drawn to the building tension of knowing Papa, Mama, and Baby Bear will soon return home and discover Goldilocks!

We flesh out stories with our own experience
Although the parent may tire of reading the same bedtime story ten times in a row, the listening child fleshes out the words with his or her imagination… and like a waking dream, explores some experience internally that may change from one night to the next.

Stories teach while evoking what we already know
This ability—for stories to evoke and connect with personal experiences within each of us—does not go away as we grow older. And, like dreams, stories can function as metaphors—the language of the unconscious. Without missing a beat, your unconscious can take in a story about the gradual process of learning to walk—or becoming a non-smoker—and use it as support for other, more relevant areas of learning-in-progress.

Many therapists use stories and metaphors in support of their clients’ learning
The excerpt below is from Sidney Rosen’s introduction to “My Voice will go with you: The teaching tales of Milton H. Erickson." The aging Erickson describes how he taught therapists: 

“I had to spend too much time on one [therapist]. I would rather teach a lot of people how to think, how to handle problems. I have dozens and dozens of letters saying, ‘You have completely changed my way of treating patients.’ I get a lot of [therapists], but I see them less. I see more [therapists] and I see them for shorter times.”

[Rosen] questioned, “And this is the result of…?”

He answered, “Their coming here and letting me tell them stories. Then they go home and alter their practice.”

Obviously “coming here and letting me tell them stories” involved expectations and communications on many levels. For example, anyone who spent time with Erickson was likely to experience various levels of hypnotic trance. With positive expectations, in a trance, we are most open to messages and influences transmitted by Erickson’s stories….

In telling stories, Erickson was, of course, following an ancient tradition. Since time immemorial, stories have been used as a way of transmitting cultural values, ethics, and morality…” 

…and in the context of therapy—or this blog—as support for personal growth.

The stories, quotes, vignettes, and questions below invite your conscious and unconscious mind to connect with what you already know about learning… in support of what you are learning now that matters in your life.
 
                                                                                                                               

The greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fall.
                      —Confucius 

Each of us has experience of this glory: The first time you fell down while learning to walk, did you say, “I’m never gonna do that again”?

Becoming a non-smoker: A story of gradual learning
Even when you consciously have the experience of failing, you are likely involved in learning what will allow you to succeed.

When I start working with someone who wants to become a non-smoker, I ask if they have ever quit smoking before. Almost everyone says no. Then when I ask, “Even for a few days, or a few hours?” they tell me, “I tried, but I can’t quit. I didn’t smoke for 8 months once, but I started up again. And a couple of times I quit for two or three months. But I always started back up. So, no, I never actually quit.”

I’m amazed! They did quit! But because they started up again, they write off their accomplishments as evidence that they didn’t and they can’t quit—rather than see it as part of the process of learning what they need to learn in order to sustainably become a non-smoker. I frame my response:  

You know something about how to stop smoking. You know something about maintaining being a non-smoker—at least for several months. You know something about the circumstances under which you start smoking. So, there’s already a lot to build on here—much more than if you’d never gone through several cycles of quitting and starting—don’t you think? 

A big national study showed that people who are motivated to quit smoking stop and start again an average of six times before quitting for good. If you didn’t know this, you might lose confidence in your own ability to be a non-smoker after several cycles of stopping only to start again.

What learning is taking place each time you quit… and then start again?… that supports you in moving closer and closer to sustainably being a nonsmoker?

It’s not just your head; your body learns, too
Part of becoming a non-smoker is allowing your body’s chemistry, which had included periodic hits of nicotine and other stuff, to come to a new equilibrium. And that process of your body finding a new balance that doesn’t include cigarette smoke takes time… and it is definitely a learning… just like when you were learning to walk, your body feels out of balance, out of whack… until you learn this new balance that doesn’t include smoking. 

What supports you in allowing yourself the time and experience to learn to do something you really want that you don’t yet know how to do? 

Learning to be in satisfying relationship takes time
Learning like this is something nobody else—no matter how well intentioned they are—can do for you. Learning to form a relationship, learning what cues to use—and not use—to decide whether or not you want to continue to explore a new relationship, learning how to communicate with another human being, learning how to include your differences, learning how to have productive fights by which the relationship grows… all of this takes time and learning, learning, learning.

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986, see References, below) was a spiritual teacher with a large following. After a public talk, a member of the audience asked, “How can we do good in the world?” After a pause Krishnamurti responded, “Begin by having one right relationship.”

I want to acknowledge that it may be easy at first glance to be attracted to another human being, yet it is a rich, complex, and gradual learning to be in a satisfying long-term relationship.

About such learning…
Of course being in relationship (with our parents, our friends, our lover, our children, our colleagues) isn’t the only learning we undertake (consciously or unconsciously) as an adult. About such learning, Mr. (Fred) Rogers (see References, below)—a wonderful and profound teacher—offers this: 

When I was young (about eight or ten years old), I was trying to learn so many things all at once, things like the piano and organ and algebra and cooking and typing, and I even started to take clarinet lessons. But I just didn’t practice the clarinet, so I didn’t learn. I think I wanted to learn by magic. I think that I had the idea that if I got the clarinet I would somehow know how to play it. But magic doesn’t work with learning, not with anything worthwhile.

I want it now! Accomplishing slowly what you want quickly
Often there’s a part of you that knows what you want, and wants it fast. Then there’s another part that knows how to take the time to accomplish what is wanted… which might be more slowly than the fast part wants it to go. Conflict. Here’s a question: 

What will the part of you that wants what you want—faster than the time it takes you to accomplish it—do... while the part of you that will accomplish what you want takes the time it needs to accomplish it? 

The part that wants what you want (fast!) and the part that knows how to accomplish what you want (more slowly)… both parts share a common interest; how will they collaborate and support each other? How will you let your unconscious assist you with solving this?
 
                                                                                                                               
References 
More about Krishnamurti

Fred Rogers (2003). “The World According to Mister Rogers (Important things to Remember).” Family Communications, Inc. Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023. (p. 119)

Sidney Rosen (ed.) (1991). "My voice will go with you: The teaching tales of Milton H. Erickson." W. W. Norton & Company, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.
Even if you aren’t interested in therapy, this is a warm fuzzy bedtime read, yet clinically relevant. The stories support fundamental learnings about motivation, overcoming habitual limitations, changing the unconscious mind, taking charge of your life, and more.

Unconscious learning

Learning without knowing you are learning

Thread:                          Context, Learning
Relevant recent posts:     2/3/2011 Mistake of the week
                                     1/5/2011 We are always in a context

"You see, we don’t know what our goals are. We learn our goals only in the process of getting there… You don’t know what the baby is going to become. Therefore, you wait and take good care of it until it becomes what it will."
               — Milton H. Erickson (1979, see References, below)

Now, I will ask you the first question I have asked everyone who has participated in the hypnotherapy groups I have facilitated: 

Would you be willing to learn something useful that you may not know you have learned, nor how you have learned it? 

Learning: to control our bladder and bowels; to see something, reach for it, and grab it; to use a spoon, drink from a glass; to skip; to make sounds, to speak; to control a pencil, to play catch…. To learn about being in relationship: how to play with others, work on a project with others, provide value to others and get paid for it, form and maintain satisfying relationships, care for one’s self and others, raise children....

I invite you to consider that the much of what you learn—that forms the core competencies and understandings upon which you build your life—occurs without your conscious direction of the process. Furthermore, the learning occurs without requiring that you have conscious awareness of having learned anything. Yet, you still benefit from what you have learned! And this is normal for how we learn much of what we learn! 

It is this natural unself-conscious / unconscious learning which hypnotherapy engages. 

I’ll illustrate this kind of learning with a story of how we each come to walk.
 

We learn to stand on our two feet from the head down
There was a time when you didn’t know how to lift your head. When Mother entrusted someone to hold you, she’d say, “Be sure to support the baby’s head.”

Learning to balance your head between your shoulders
Gradually, you learned to turn your head, lift it and lower it. If someone held you under your arms, you could hold your head upright. You learned to balance your head between your shoulders.

This is an important milestone in learning to walk: The means by which you sense your balance is located in your inner ear, so you first need to balance your head between your shoulders in order to have a stable reference for learning to balance the rest of you. Of course you didn’t consciously decide to learn to hold your head up; you simply learned it naturally when you—your muscles, nervous system, and coordination—were ready.

Learning to balance from the waist up; learning to stay balanced while moving
Once you could reliably balance your head between your shoulders, then you naturally began learning to sit up. Then when you could reliably keep your own balance from the waist up, you explored keeping your balance while moving—either crawling on all fours or scooting around on your butt. 

None of this happened because you woke up in the morning and said to yourself, “I gotta put in my 6 hours today in learning how to walk.” You were not motivated by some idea of what you could do—climb a mountain, run, shop at a supermarket without being carried or wheeled around in the cart—once you had walking down. Toddlers don’t think that way. They are engaged fully in the unfolding of their own experience, exploring themselves and their world. And in the course of that unfolding and exploring, an immense amount of learning takes place, including learning to walk. 

Learning to stand on your hind legs
When you were ready—on average at about 10 to 15 months old, you naturally find something the right height to grab with your hands and begin exploring standing on your hind legs. You teeter a lot, and you fall down a lot.

Being out of balance is how you learn a new balance
That’s how you learn a new balance… by being out of balance and learning to make adjustments to stay up. Sometimes you forget to keep sufficient muscle tension around your knees… those muscles relax, your legs bend… and down you go. Sometimes, as you teeter, one foot comes off the ground, and then comes down again as you catch your balance. Your first step? It’s hard to tell, the process is all so gradual. But it happens.

Although others may help, it is your learning
You accomplished this complex task of learning to walk. Parents may be supportive and appreciative of Baby learning to walk, but they didn’t learn it for you. It was your learning… and you learned it at the pace and in the manner that was right for you… and you learned it so well you don’t even think about it. Now, you just do it.

Characteristics of unconscious learning
1)    Like all learning, it is gradual. Learning to walk, to talk, to understand language, to read, to write… each is too complex to learn all at once. Such learning is an incremental, time- and attention-consuming process.

2)    We do not consciously set a goal for what we will learn. From the conscious mind’s point of view, “it just happens.”

3)    We are not consciously aware that we are learning anything even when we are in the process of learning it.

4)    When we learn something in this way, it is not a notable event. We don’t know that we are learning, or have learned, or what we’ve learned. Like finally learning to walk, we just use it. 

As adults, we still have the ability to learn this way; we don’t out grow it
Even as an adult, we continue to learn from our experiences, both good and bad—about our work, relationships, parenting,… and more. We can’t help but learn—any more than a toddler can help but learn to walk or talk. We typically don’t turn the bits and pieces of our life experience into a conscious story about, say, “how I learned to hold my own stance and set boundaries”—any more than we built a detailed story about how we learned to walk. We just do it. 

"My learning over the years was that I tried to direct… too much. It took a long time to let things develop and make use of things as they developed."

"Life isn’t something you can give an answer to today. You should enjoy the process of waiting, the process of becoming what you are. There is nothing more delightful than planting flower seeds and not knowing what kind of flowers are going to come up."
              — Milton H. Erickson (both quotes, 1979, see References, below)

                                                                                                                                
References
Milton H. Erickson (1901 - 1980): These quotes are from a set of posters published by Milton H. Erickson Foundation, 3606 North 24th Street, Phoenix, Arizona 85016.

Erickson was the primary teacher of my mentors, Nancy Winston and Paul Lounsbury.

Bio
Milton H. Erickson's experimental and therapeutic explorations with the hypnotic modality span more than 50 years. His successful rejuvenation of the entire field may be attributed to his development of the non-authoritarian, indirect approaches to suggestion wherein subjects learn how to experience hypnotic phenomena and how to utilize their own potentials to solve problems in their own way.

Erickson is generally acknowledged to have been the world's leading practitioner of medical hypnosis. His writings on hypnosis have been a primary source for several generations of clinicians on techniques of inducing trance, experimental work exploring the possibilities and limits of the hypnotic experience and investigations of the nature of the relationship between hypnotist and subject.

Erickson was the founder of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis and founding editor of both the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis and The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis.

(Excerpted and adapted from Ernest Rossi's preface to “The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson on Hypnosis” (1980) Irvington Publisherts, Inc., NY)
 
Links
youtube video about Milton Erickson
More about Milton Erickson
Selected bibliography about Ericksonian hypnotherapy

Mistake of the week

 ...or "What mistake did I make this week that provided me the biggest opportunity for learning?"

Thread:                         Learning, Mistakes

Relevant recent posts:   1/25/2011 "Learning and mistakes"

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”
         —Albert Einstein, Nobel laureate physicist

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”
         —Niels Bohr, Nobel laureate physicist

A poster of this picture hung on the wall of the physics lab I worked in as a student at the University of Rochester. It reminded us: "Don't take it too seriously."

I blew it!
I remember early in my practice of hypnotherapy, meeting with my mentor, Nancy Winston (see Reference, below), for supervision (a process of learning by reviewing my cases). I was distraught and told her that I’d blown it! After a particular session I realized I had misunderstood something my client said. As a result, I now believed I had responded in a way that inadvertently undermined our rapport and his already precarious feelings of self-worth. Instead of support, or at least of doing no harm, I thought I had caused damage.

Perhaps you think you have to know something before learning it
Here's my recollection of my interaction with Nancy: Her first response was a little laugh and then, “You’re already learning a lot from this client,” to which I said, “It doesn’t feel that way.” She responded,

“Sounds like you think the way to learn something you don’t yet know is to already know it. How do you allow yourself the time, space, and experience to learn something new, something you don’t yet know?”

What had I already learned in order to know I'd "blown it"?
She looked at me while what she said sank in. Then she had me describe in detail how I knew I had “blown it:” 

“When did you know you had blown it?”

“What did you know that allowed you to make that assessment?”

“From your perspective now, what can you see now that happened during that session that would have allowed it to play out differently?” 

Now, how will you use what you've learned?
Nancy brought a levity to our exploration that invited me out of the distress I felt about having made a mistake. Then she said, 

“So, you really have learned a lot from this experience. Now, whether you like what you did or not, let’s talk about how you can make use of it for the client’s benefit…” 

…which we did. I settled down. 

Mistakes are opportunities for—and evidence of—learning
At the end of the supervision session she said,  

“Mistakes are part of learning. You don’t know you’ve made a mistake until afterward, when you already have a new perspective from which you would do it differently. At that point, you’ve already learned something new. You might find it useful to ask yourself:

'What mistake have I made this week that provided me the biggest opportunity for learning?' ” 

She was serious! For the next few weeks, we started our supervision sessions with this question.

It was a great way for me to learn what was relevant for me, because the starting point was always something I was just beginning to recognize and figure out. Plus, without ever saying so, Nancy helped me separate out what was useful from what was no longer useful with respect to my attitudes towards learning.  Instead of the familiar anxiousness of having to get right what I didn’t yet know how to do, there was room and support for something new to emerge.

                                                                                                                                
Please, your comments are welcome…
In what ways had you learned to recognize when you were failing and when you were succeeding?

In what other ways can you now understand what you had called your successes and failures… in a way that now promotes what you want, your interests, and your well-being?

                                                                                                                                
References
Nancy Winston and Paul Lounsbury co-founded and co-facilitate the Advanced Training Group in Psychotherapy Cybernetics. I joined in 1997. We met four to five times a year, three days each time, for more than a decade. Group influences include the work of Milton Erickson, Charlotte Selver, Gregory Bateson, the Milan Family Systems Group, and others. Within the crucible of this group of clinicians we continually discover and experience how to participate in therapeutic hypnotic conversation. I consider this group my primary teacher and Nancy and Paul my mentors.

Learning and mistakes

Separating out what's useful from what's not useful in our context of learning

Thread:                           Context, Learning, Mistakes
Previous related entry:     1/5/2011 "We are always in a context"

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

          —Michael Jordon

“I’m not a great inventor, I just make mistakes faster than most people.”
          —Thomas Edison

How do we make meaning and respond when we are in the context of learning something new? It certainly depends on whether we're alone, at or work, being judged, or exploring our own interests. To a great extent, it depends on our personal history. What's useful and what's not useful about how we have learned to approach learning?

Much learning—to walk, to ride a bicycle, to write, for example—occurs in a natural flow of trying something new, making adjustments, and trying again.

For many of us, as we grow up, this natural process of learning becomes burdened with the tension of having to get it right the first time and trying to avoid mistakes. The following illustrates how this might happen with a single instance taken from an early experience that involves learning the alphabet, learning to write, and learning to use an eraser.

The natural pleasure of learning
I was an earnest little kid. I was learning to distinguish the lowercase ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘p’, and ‘q’ from each other. Sometime in first grade, we graduated from those big thick pencils to the more grownup thin yellow models with an eraser… it felt like a big deal.

While copying words the teacher had written on the board, I wrote a ‘b’ that should have been a ‘d’… and I caught it! With my new pencil I carefully erased it and made the correction. I felt good.

Learning about mistakes
When the teacher walked by my desk she said, “You didn’t erase very well—I can see both your mistake and your correction. Erase it again, and then copy the correct letter.”

I now understood that I had made two of what the teacher called “mistakes.” First, I made a ‘b’ instead of ‘d’ and, second, I didn’t erase well enough. I didn’t feel good about this. I wanted to make it right so the teacher would approve of me. (I couldn’t yet distinguish between Teacher’s approval of my work and her approval of me.)

Learning to try to avoid making mistakes in front of others
Intent on doing it right, this time I pressed the eraser harder into the paper. It ripped! From across the room she said, curtly and more loudly than necessary, “Get another piece of paper. Now you’ll have to copy everything over.” Whatever Teacher’s intentions, I understood that I had done something wrong and that I was being admonished in front of the whole class. I felt stupid and ashamed.

Learning to be anxious and hesitant about circumstances of formal learning
On some level I understood that even when I tried my hardest to avoid them, mistakes had a way of sneaking up and happening anyway. When learning something new, like using an eraser, I couldn’t anticipate what might happen, like ripping the paper. But not being able to anticipate what might happen is what made it learning instead of already-knowing!

Over time and with enough experiences of this sort, we approach formal learning situations (school, work settings) anxiously and hesitantly. We want to avoid making mistakes and the resultant feelings of shame—of having screwed up again. It doesn’t matter if we know we can’t see a mistake coming. After we make a mistake, we can still beat ourselves up thinking we should have known better. Not a good feeling.

A variant: Learning to be hypercritical of oneself (I always make mistakes)
Perhaps you grew up around a critical parent who found fault with you (“On that paper that got a 97, what’d you mess up to get dinged 3 points?”) or who “helpfully” corrected you (“Toy dump trucks don’t fly! Here, let me show you how to play with that”).

As the natural pleasure in our own process of learning is repeatedly interrupted, we gradually learn to think of ourselves as incompetent and in need constant correction. We learn to be hyper-critical of ourselves.

Another variant: Learning I must be perfect (no mistakes!)
Or perhaps you were seen as a smart and capable child. Your parents, relatives, or teachers may have held you up as someone other children should emulate… as when Uncle says to Cousin, “Why can’t you be more like [your name]?” or Teacher says, “[your name] was the only one to get an A on this paper. [Your name, again], please read your essay to the class.”

As nice as this might feel at the time, it puts a lot of pressure on [your name] to be perfect… and to not make a mistake. From this, one might learn to have impossible and unhappy-making expectations of oneself.

Splitting our attention between what we are doing and doing it right
About such learning, Charles Brooks in his book “Reclaiming Vitality and Presence” writes:

As children, we naturally gave full attention to everything, though it all may have changed every moment. Then the authorities told us about our responsibility not to just do things but to do them right. Since then, our attention has been divided between what we are doing and whether we are doing it right. (p100)

In other words, our natural enlivening process of learning something new becomes burdened with self-consciously trying to avoid making mistakes.

Imagine this: No mistakes, just learning
To put the above experience in sharper relief, imagine if my experience had played out this way: The first time the teacher sees my paper she says, “Ah! You erased something [points to it]. Do you see how you can still see the old letter you erased? You learned how erasers work when you press them into the paper very gently. If you press a little harder you can erase the old letter so you can hardly see it. Try again on another letter.”

I press a little harder and now focus on erasing the pencil marks. I rip the paper! The teacher immediately says, “Great! Now you know more about too soft and too hard. Pick another letter and practice with that eraser. If you rip the paper, that’s too hard, if you can still see it clearly, that’s too soft.” I pick a letter and begin erasing. She watches and then says, “That’s it, that’s better, it takes a little practice to really learn something new.”

Learning to like formal and directed learning
In this fantasy, my natural trial and error process of learning is welcomed into the setting of formal and directed learning—a school room. I am learning to enjoy learning around others, and to accept and use the support of others in my own process of learning. 

                                                                                                                                
References
Selver & Brooks (2007).“Reclaiming vitality and presence: Sensory awareness as a practice for life; The teachings of Charlotte Selver and Charles V. W. Brooks.” Lowe, R. & Laeng-Gilliatt, S. (eds.). North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327 Berkeley, CA 94712.

Great article by David Brooks in The New Yorker

Thread:                           Context

Previous related entry:     1/5/2011 "We are always in a context"

The January 17, 2011 issue of The New Yorker magazine contains an article by David Brooks: “Social Animal: How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of life.” It combines compelling storytelling and the current findings of social science. In one section, Brooks describes the unconsciously held contexts at play as a young man and woman first meet and go on to form a primary relationship. In another, he writes of how we acquire the contexts out of which we live and make meaning:

“…I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.”

And about the unconscious mind:

“After all, the conscious mind chooses what we buy, but the unconscious mind chooses what we like.”

Other quotes from this article will appear in subsequent posts about context.
 
Click here for the entire article by David Brooks

We are always in a context

Thread:                             Context  
Previous related entries:    12/17/2010 “Context is the matrix of meaning”

I think of the contexts in which we function as one way the human organism uses its considerable resources to organize learnings from past experiences… and apply those learnings to navigate similar circumstances in the present… in a way that is on behalf of well-being now. 

Some things we are born knowing…
We are born knowing to hold our breath underwater, a knowing that is held in our inherited intelligence compliments of our brand new nervous system. In the context of being underwater, our nervous system (but not our cognitive intellect) enacts an appropriate response: We hold our breath.

Even when older, we find it impossible to willfully inhale (without an airline) while submerged in water. We don’t consciously hold this context to benefit by it; a more accurate description is to say the context holds us. 

…other things we learn as we go
As we grow, we learn to recognize other circumstances and to associate sets of possible responses with each circumstance.

For instance, along with learning to recognize a spoon, we learn how to grasp it, which way is right-side up, and how to use it as an eating tool (rather than as something to hit stuff with or make an adult pick up when dropped on the floor). Throughout life, when we recognize a spoon, we access our knowledge about how to use a spoon and what we can do with it. Of course, we aren’t burdened with sorting through our knowledge about spoons when we use one—all that reliably takes place under the hood.

Along the way we learned to recognize sidewalks, that streets are primarily for cars, that being hit by a car is bad, and that sidewalks are safer for walking than streets. When a bit older—and in the context of these learnings—a walk down the middle of a seldom trafficked neighborhood street might be experienced as a low grade act of daring. Without conscious awareness, throughout our life, when in circumstances that include sidewalks, streets, and walking, we access our relevant knowledge of such things and behave accordingly. Viola! Another instance of context is the matrix of meaning (and response). 

This learning of distinctions, categories, and circumstances—of forming contexts in which we make meaning  that allows us to navigate the world—goes on and on; it is the business of growing and developing.

Some things we learn awarely, and much we learn unawarely
Although we may be aware of what we are learning and that we have learned, much learning is accomplished without our conscious notice. For instance, we may have been aware of learning to draw the letters of alphabet; but few of us were consciously aware of learning (much less how we learned), as children, to build The Story Of Who We Are. This we learned, in large part, from how we were treated by others. We also learned—seemingly by osmosis—how to be in relationship by being with our parents as they interacted with each other and with others. 

All these learnings form the contexts from which we make meaning and respond 
At any given moment, although we may be consciously aware of some aspects of our current context, it is my experience that we spend much of our time making meaning and acting within contexts of which we have little or no conscious awareness.

This is certainly the case when we use a spoon or a sidewalk, but it also includes the functioning of contexts in which we find ourselves enjoying (or not) the company of people we find physically attractive, or enjoy public speaking (or not) and socializing (or not), or feel chronically good about ourselves (or not), and a whole host of ways of being and responding about which we might tell ourselves “that’s just who I am.” 

Contexts shift in response to circumstance
We each harbor a unique and richly layered weave of contexts—some we are born with, some we learn either awarely or unwarely in the course of our life experiences. Now, like a jukebox that holds our own extensive selection of favorites, when we recognize familiar circumstances, we access the associated context, and make meaning in a particular way that includes a set of familiar responses from which we choose. 

All these contexts and knowledge are resources…
Most of the time this is a great thing—without conscious management, much of our structure of contexts and knowledge functions as a deep resource on behalf of our well-being and interests.

…unless they’re constraining 
Of course, some of our old learnings are no longer relevant to our current circumstances and are, as a result, constraints. When obsolete learnings function outside of conscious awareness, we feel like there’s nothing we can do about it—again, “that’s just who I am.”

More about this in subsequent blog entries.