Facing the Catastrophe

I finished reading Jon Kabat-Zinn's book on stress reduction. Now I have to face the catastrophe of actually writing my dissertation, since I'm done with my self-selected reading list. I wonder whether to go about this by returning to the beginning and summarizing the first book I read, The Worst of Evils (a history of pain relief) or start by summarizing the treatment (Kabat-Zinn's book). It's a lot less scary writing here than opening up a Word document, so I'll start, in the spirit of things, with where I am now.

Kabat-Zinn outlines in his book an 8-week stress reduction class that he taught at Massachusets General Hospital over a period of many years. The first two weeks are devoted to a meditation he developed, called the 'body scan', during which patients notice and feel the sensations in all the parts of their bodies, literally from toe to head, while lying supine on a mat. In the next two weeks, they learn to breathe while doing yoga stretches. The next weeks include sitting meditation, sometimes with a focus on an image of a mountain, or on lovingkindness, or simply breathing. He included guidelines for walking meditation. During the final two weeks of the course, patients practice on their own, first without and then with Kabat-Zinn's meditation tapes. The book is studded with vignettes of patients' miraculous recoveries from pain, or at least regaining control over their lives or learning a new sense of dignity in the face of adversity. Following the chapters describing the different techniques are Kabat-Zinn's views on stress, meditation, mindfulness - all presented in a straightforward manner easily used with a general audience. What impressed me the most was the high rate of continuation with the practice, about 90% of people who attended the course were still practicing 6 months later, 42% 3 years later and 30% 4 years later. I heard from a professional who attended the course that Kabat-Zinn has a profoundly empathic style and a talent for relating personally to each of the students in the class. He must also be very charismatic, to have achieved such a high practice rate at followup, since meditation is hard to practice regularly on one's own. Reading the book makes me want to start a class like that, I think my patients would have a lot to learn from it.

On a more philosophical note, I am not sure about some of Kabat-Zinn's views. He says that we are not our pain, we are not our thoughts - but if so what are we? A disembodied intention, a stream of awareness, a renegade shard of some greater unity? My own view is that I am part of a larger tapestry, but at the same time 'I' am a discrete part of it with ends (birth and death) bound to my body by the reality of my pain, filled with thoughts and feelings that as much as they are shared with others within the cultural milieu are also a defining part of who I am. This doesn't matter so much except that instructions such as 'being in the pain' have to be explained a lot more clearly to someone who believes that there is somewhere else to go.

So this afternoon, instead of facing the catastrophe and beginning to write, instead of resting my knee so that it will heal faster, I went on a lovely leisurely stroll with my friend, up on the Berkeley Fire Trail. This trail was described by Dorothy Wall in her book, Encounters with the Invisible, about her struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. In fact, it was where she first met her husband, before the disease overcame her and when she was still able to jog. I felt sad that I couldn't run on the trail, where I have ran many times before. On the other hand, I enjoyed walking hand in hand with my friend, whereas when we run he always runs ahead.

Modern Yoga

Finished reading A History of Modern Yoga by Elizabeth de Michelis. I love the title of her concluding chapter: "Modern Postural Yoga as a healing ritual of secular religion." Here are some selected quotes:

"... the term 'secularization' refers, in a general sense, 'to the gradual decline of [institutionalized] religion as a consequence of the growth of scientific knowledge and [to] the continued diversification of social and ethnic groups in the Occident' ([Fuller, 1989]). All of these elements would be especially prominent in conditions of 'urban living', and it is in such environments that MPY grows and thrives. Adopted and cultivated in conditions of marked privatization and relativization of religion, MPY is successful, like other Harmonial belief systems, because it provides 'experiential access to the sacred'.
Such experiential access to the sacred, epitomized by the 'secular ritual' of the MPY practice session, represents the third key to understanding the current success of MPY, along with its fitness and de-stressing applications...
Thus the MPY session becomes a ritual which affords various levels of access to the sacred, starting from a 'safe', mundane, tangible foundation of body-based practice... there is room for the practitioner to decide whether to experience her practice as 'spiritual' or as altogether secular. Except in cases of thoroughly utilitarian (fitness or recreational) performance, however, some notion of healing and personal growth is likely to provide the deepest rationale for practice."

"Health is religious. Ill health is irreligious." (BKS Iyengar)

De Michelis' book is a thorough and thought-provoking look at a discipline that repeatedly emphasizes experience over knowledge. Because of this, the book is inescapably written from an 'etic' (outsider's) perspective, but is nonetheless empathic to the 'emic' views of yoga practitioners. What I have learned is that far from being a claptrap religion cobbled together to fill the void left by science, Modern Yoga was carefully crafted by a series of Indian intellectuals in a reverse mission to the West that began in the 19th Century. More recently, BKS Iyengar initiated the Modern Postural form of yoga, with its emphasis on the practice of asana poses. It came out of an expression of his own experience of yoga and his artistic creativity, carefully setting up the structure of the yoga session that has become a framing ritual for many Americans and people around the world.

The moment of creation, Thoughts

I just finished reading Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought. His premise is that we can learn something from the structure of language about how humans think. He argues that while assuming communicative intent, relevant and veridical content, and so on most speech acts involve an element of politeness with the aim of preserving 'face'. Human interactions are governed, at an emotional level, by three forces - communality, authority (or deference) and reciprocity - and these forces set the context for communication and the scales on which 'face' is to be preserved. According to Pinker, we understand complex, abstract concepts by their metaphorical relation to simple, intuitive ones, that come from our discrete, topological understanding of space and time. Communality is the force for togetherness, authority is the quest to power, and reciprocity is the desire for fair exchanges. Pinker claims that it is only through metaphorically extending the definition of the emotional commons to include knowledge that we are able to advance our scientific theories and have rational discourse, including fair legal and mercantile process. The goal of education, according to Pinker, should be to shed the garb of our emotional baggage, now it has been pointed out, and to go beyond 'face'.

I like Pinker's revision of the Benthamian stance so pervasive in this post-Freudian culture that there is always some 'secondary gain' an imaginary 'bottom line' to all our interactions with others. It seems that linguists have come up with this concept of 'face' through their analysis of dialogue that simply fails to squeeze onto a single dimension.

Much of Pinker's book is anglo-centric, and some distinctions (like the one between 'for' and 'to') simply don't translate. I grew up speaking Hebrew, a langauge that lacks that distinction. Nevertheless, while focusing on the inferences drawn from one language he has come to conclusions that could potentially be supplemented by examining other languages in as much detail. I can remember the experience, during a time in my life when I was switching from speaking mostly in English to speaking mostly in Hebrew, of having a thought in my mind and holding it there before choosing which language to think it in. So my intuition is that thought precedes and shapes language, although not all thoughts are translatable into all languages and the language of a person's thoughts places bounds on the ones they are likely to have.

I believe that the goal of education should be critical thinking. Pinker gives no examples of what moving away from the emotional aspects of language would be like because, I think, that is not actually possible. All metaphor is, in my view, empty without tying it in to some narrative. It's like a dictionary that allows you to translate from one language to another, but where is the story? Critical thinking is not an escape from preserving 'face'. Instead, it is the faculty of following a story or a line of reasoning and holding in memory all the different parts, checking them out not only against a simple, intuitive snapshot frame of the dominant metaphor but also against all the other available stories that have become a part of the culture. We can change the way people talk, in fact politeness like language varies from one culture to another as well as over historical time. We may not be able to sever the links between language, thoughts and feelings, but we can and do rearrange them all the time.

I created this blog to share my thoughts and observations. They probably won't all be as linear and coherent as the above book review. It's interesting to think that there was something I wanted so much to express about that book, it made a big impression on me and I persevered with reading it through some mental resistance to the content and tedium over the more technical parts concerning verbs. There is so little time for reading, and so much time for expressing oneself these days! And I could have just added it to a book review site, but that's not really what I want. I don't want to offer my judgment on the book to others. I want to express how I related to it. There may be no audience, but I don't mind dancing alone on a dark stage to my own music.

Next on my reading list: Feast of Souls, by CS Friedman. Recommended by my son.

Next in life: sleep... Why is this so hard that I am always trying to pay back a debt in catnaps?