AI image, "A woman in awe celebrating the cosmic universe"
Yesterday, I ate dinner at a vibrant Ethiopian restaurant with a few friends before attending a friend's New Age light and sound concert. Lively music, loud chattering voices, and roaring laughter echoed throughout the restaurant. While I appreciated the social vibe, something very different than that energy captured my attention.
A young boy was slowly wandering around the restaurant, his wide and open eyes scanning the colorful paintings on the wall. His hands reached out to touch things. Occasionally, he would smile to himself or lose his balance from being so engaged with what he was focusing his attention on. He seemed to be in his own time and space. His sensitivity to his environment was an orientation to reality that reminded me of when I was a child, where I would often "zone out," turning my mind off and noticing what was around me. In this space, it was like I could sense the energy of things, whether it was a plant or a painting or an expression on someone's face. By tuning into the energy, the colors around me sharpened. Textures of physical objects felt alive. The sounds of music would overwhelm my bodily senses. These moments would often bring about a profound feeling of awe and wonder, where tears would rush down my face.
Watching this young human embody such presence immediately invited me into my own sense of presence in my body and environment. I felt myself relax, dropping my shoulders and taking a deep breath. By simply slowing down and taking that pause, I was reminded of the unconscious tendency for the mind to dominate when under stress. Scanning for threats, comparing/contrasting, worrying, intellectualizing, getting lost in projections about the past or future. Meanwhile, reality is so much more than what our mind can make sense of.
I've been stuck in my mind a lot. Worrying about money, the chaotic state of the world and its uncertain future, my competency as an associate director for a nonprofit, work timelines, my dog and her bloody stools, my persistent asthma that seems to be worsening, my long-distance love relationship, along with a whole other litany of things related to the past and future.
My monkey mind wants to fill me with excessive worry and projection, believing it has a full handle of reality and therefore should be in charge. It believes that I should be filled with worst-case scenarios, because that will get me to take action. While this has a place in my ability to take right action, the larger mind includes other perspectives. Being inspired by the young boy and grounding myself in the present moment had me noticing how imbalanced my approach has been to facing my life challenges. By getting stuck in my head, I wasn't tapping into other resources available: my body and its senses.
So later on that night, I'm sitting in a yoga center watching my friend's show called "Synesthesia." I think I uttered the word "wow" over 50 times from the incredible alchemy of the visuals and live music.
This experience reminded me of the transcendent and healing experiences I've had on ecstasy, psychedelics, and even cannabis. The monkey mind quiets, and the body and senses take over. The awe of the mystery and wonders of life emerge, and we attune to a larger picture of reality way beyond what our mind can comprehend. Sitting there in awe of this visual and auditory experience, I came to some clarity about how to address my life challenges without any real effort or push.
First of all, the awe of the moment slowed me down. Way down. Insights emerged from here. A voice spontaneously appeared in me: The only thing you can control is following what you love and what you're passionate about. In that moment, a sense of relaxation filled my body, and my asthmatic wheezing literally subsided.
Until this point, I've been making sense of my problems by following my fears of what could happen, the bad things I have to prevent, and all the ways I'm not good enough as I am. On the other hand, the feeling of love and passion for my life was the flip side of the coin. I feel awe and gratitude for the opportunity I have to help shape a rare organization. I feel awe over the fact that I have love in my life. When I feel the goodness of these feelings, I realize that I want to be taking action by centering love and passion for what I care about, instead of centering my fears and insecurities. In another words, my situation is the same, but my thinking and relating has changed. This subtle, not-so-subtle shift matters a great deal in what I attract in my environment.
With work, I made a list of the things I feel most passionate and curious about doing. With my health, I wrote down a few things I can do now to ease the physical suffering I've been feeling. The other day, I let my significant other know what I specifically want and what makes me come alive in our relationship. That was challenging (and delightful) for me to speak for my needs like that.
I might've come to these conclusions and outcomes with fear as the primary motivator. However, the process was more enjoyable and resulted in less tension and struggle to process. I grounded myself in what I'm passionate about, which created a sense of purpose and creativity that previously got stomped out by paralyzing fear and anxiety. And instead of thinking "whew, I made it out alive this time," or feeling like this positive development is an exception, I trust more and more that this goodness and awe I feel about my life belongs to me.
Kirk Schneider, a leading psychologist in existential-humanistic therapy, has explored the role of awe as an antidote to the polarized mind. By developing what he calls an "awe-based consciousness," he has helped former gang members become gang mediators, drug addicts become case workers and yoga instructors, police officers resolve conflict with activists, and people with cancer cope with existential fears of their death.
The capacity for profound, intimate experience is in jeopardy. Facebook is replacing face-to-face friendships and corporations are manipulating what we see, think and feel—as well as how we vote and get our news. In short, we, in much of the industrialized world, are losing our capacity for presence, discernment, and psychospiritual depth. We experience an ever contracting range of personal engagement and we seek after the instant and neatly packaged.
There has been a wave of studies about the cross-cultural power of awe. These studies indicate that the cultivation of awe—above and beyond even happiness—can increase life-satisfaction, patience, volunteerism, gratitude, and empathy for one’s fellow humans. The studies also suggest that the sense of awe can have beneficial effects on the immune system, on psychological problems, such as anxiety and depression, and on disease in general. Finally, the studies are revealing the potency of awe to connect people to a nondogmatic, noncontrolling “higher power.” This power has had remarkable affects not only on the reduction of addictions, but on a sense of the creativity and richness of day-to-day life.
[I define awe] as the humility and wonder or sense of adventure toward living. The sense of awe requires pause, requires time. When do we have time in this culture, to slow down? How do you appreciate things without being able to slow down some? How do we appreciate this moment, you know, fully, unless we take some time to realize the amazement of what we’re doing, what we’re probing, inquiring into, discovering together.
Even while doing something disagreeable, slowing down and affirming the preciousness of the moment can sometimes render alternative perspectives. Cultivating awe as central in our consciousness requires that we move away from many of the values with which we are continually confronted: consumerism, conventionality, competitiveness, and mindless entertainment.
And sometimes that leads to re-discovery of something very meaningful, like maybe a relationship that people feel that they need to revive or an interest in a job, interest in some project, or a more specific goal. It’s about one’s whole approach to life, developing a new attitude toward living that comes out of all that practice one did, blood, sweat and tears in that practice, too. This is not just intellectual practice. This is whole-bodied encounter with what’s been killing us and what we want to break through to.
And when you’ve done that with your whole being, with all your sweat, blood and tears, you come out of that pretty powerful in the best circumstances. And that can lead to an ability to stay present to our smallness and our fragility, as well as our greatness, our boldness, our capacity to discover new ways of living.
One doesn’t have to belong to a particular tribe or culture or even religion to be touched by awe. It also affirms people’s pain, without resorting to a quick fix or absolute that tells them how to live. Finally, it also affirms people’s hope (participation in something greater than themselves). In this sense, awe resonates with religious and secular alike, and empowers people to decide how to live, in spite of and in light of their pain.
Practicing mindfulness is how we make space for awe. Mindfulness is both a principle and a state of consciousness. It emphasizes focusing on the present moment with an observational mind, tapping into our body and sensory sensations to help us make sense of reality. This naturally slows our fast-paced minds to the speed of reality, which isn't as efficient and quick-fix oriented as our mind wants it to be. It also isn't as catastrophic as our mind projects it to be at times.
When we get too caught up in the fearmongering noise our head creates, mindfulness fosters openness and sensitivity to what's happening inside and outside of ourselves. That's why nature, art, visuals, music, poetry, and movement have such a profound impact on us, because it invites us to feel, not just think. The doors to awe and the wonders of life open.
Mindfulness isn't some sort of New Age spiritual superiority, nor is it just for the monks at the top of the Tibetan mountains. Mindfulness taps into who we are as a living system. Ron Kurtz, founder of a body-centered psychotherapy practice called Hakomi, asserts that "living systems self-organize, self-create, self-maintain, and in many ways, direct their own evolution."
Mindfulness is the inner wisdom needed to create change through awareness, rather than effort. Awareness opens us up to new ways of relating, thinking, and being. It considers the profound impact of the mind-body connection. The body is a constant reflection of our beliefs, our way of being in the world, our way of organizing our experience. It stores information that our mind, in its busyness, doesn't notice. When we study and understand our body tensions, we learn a great deal about our beliefs, expectations, and automatic behaviors. On the other hand, experiences in the body generated from positive, awe-based experiences can help us rewire our conditioning and habitual patterns.
When have you experienced awe and wonder in your life? How has that impacted you?
