Last night I went to a lecture/workshop focusing on music’s potential to heal. While I don’t doubt music’s healing potential, I was underwhelmed with the session itself.
The evening began with a quick definition of mindfulness,* which was followed by a breathing exercise during which we were instructed to stand, close our eyes, and imagine our breath entering through our feet then exiting from the back of our heads.
I think I got it. I was supposed to experience the rhythmic life-giving fluidity of breathing through my entire body. But for me, opening these imaginative pathways was quite an intuitive leap (counterintuitive, actually), one that would require both quiet mental focus and practice time to accomplish. Yet, after fewer than ten breaths the facilitator had us listen to the main theme of Bach’s Goldberg Variations while continuing our breathing exercise.
Breathe and listen mindfully, we were instructed. Maybe I am slow, but I was far from able truly to attend and commit to both tasks simultaneously.
When the music ended, our facilitator told us how our limbs were tingling with the energy we had just tapped into. They were? Alas, the only tingling I felt was from my incredulity.
For me, the entire exercise was an excellent example of how not to be mindful.
To what were we supposed to listen? The undulating melody? The musical timbre? The unfolding harmonic progression? The slow, almost breath-like rhythmic pacing? To everything and anything according to our individual interests and listening skills?
Does listening to music heal automatically? Any music?
The facilitator had told us we needed to be ‘in the moment.’ But music, unless one restricts that experience to timbre and individual (and momentary) harmonic relationships, becomes meaningful not in the moment but across time.
Is mindfulness simply an Eastern expresion for the colloquial, but more visceral, Western idea of “taking something in”?
Outer world perceptions come through our senses. We hear, see, smell, touch, and taste through physiological doorways that (unless we are sleeping) are simply “on.” (Vision is a bit different, I suspect, because we need to open our eyes to see the outer world.)
But we don’t automatically “take in” a great deal of our sensory potential (whether our perceptions are directed inward or outward). For that, two things are necessary. First, we have to pay close attention to sensory stimuli. Second, we have to hold our attention long (and gently) enough that the perception might freely take root. The “something” we attempt to take in must be allowed to live within us. It must retain its essence as a living and unfettered mental picture.
Almost always, closely attending to our perceptions results in the formation of conceptions (hopefully correct, but often not). Percept (mindfulness?) precedes concept. Does the union of percept and concept accurately describe the experience of “taking something in”?
Conceptualization (for me, at least) takes (unhurried) time. Conceptions are easily made cold by insufficient empathy and made lifeless by adhering to process over intuition.
* There are any number of definitions of the term “mindfulness.” Our facilitator emphasized being “in the moment.” Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) suggested we try to Be Here Now (1971).
musicandstroke 
Steve, thank you for your excellent and thought-provoking post! Given that my efforts recently have been directed toward photography, I try to interpret your insights in terms of vision and seeing, rather than listening and music. “Being here now” is central to creating photographs that convey the emotional and visual essence of a place and time. I think the “unfolding over time” idea is also important in photography, even though the images represent moments, and so the meaning must be different than for music. The crux, for me, is deciding what to attend to, of the many possible things that might capture, or distract, our attention.
Thank you Mark.
Your comments make me wonder if thinking/experiencing spatially might be connected to our sense of time. I can’t yet really explain this new intuition, but will make a preliminary attempt.
As I sit at my computer, the window behind the video screen opens up to a third-floor view of my neighborhood. If I first focus on the house across the street, then into the tree-top distance, I have to readjust my visual focus and mentally ‘travel’ to the new spot. Each focus point also sparks distinct ideas and remembrances.
Making the change in perspective not only takes a few moments, but (if I pay attention to my thinking) is also accompanied by a sense of movement through conceptual space.
I can be here now. Or I can be there now. But (baring some sort of transcendent state), I can’t be in both places now.
Do we have the same experience when perusing a photographic image?
Does perspective necessarily segment time?