This weekend I went to a dance workshop. I moved to music but there were no steps per se - there was no style of dancing being taught. The workshop was more of an exploration.
Led by Martin Kilvady, he offered a container to explore the self and the body through movement and awareness.
I didn't expect this - I thought I was going to move, learn some moves and hopefully extend my range of motion.
But what I came away with was far beyond that.
I found a layer of connection and awareness with my body that I had never experienced before. Through micro-movements and deep awareness, I began to feel where my body holds tension and what rest truly feels like when those tensions are released.
This journey inward awakened me to a layer of knowledge that is embodied and unavailable to be expressed through words.
This piece will not be about what I learned and experienced - I am still processing and integrating that, and putting words to it would be futile.
This piece is about layers of knowledge and finding the right teacher that can guide you into deep experiences of learning.
I have been blessed to receive quite a few life lessons from my mother that have aged like a fine wine.
One of these life lessons came when I was 13 and she was driving me home from school with my friend James in the backseat. He lived down the street from me and I must have been keen to impress him or appear cool on this drive home.
You see my mum had to leave school at 14. Her father passed away from a heart attack and her mother had crippling arthritis so one of the three teenage kids at home had to give up school to look after the farm.
She volunteered and took on the responsibility. My Mum was sharp and wise - life had taught her well, but she didn't know anything about Shakespeare and her math education never went beyond multiplication and division.
So here I was at 13 - in my mind, I was now smarter than my Mum. I knew more than she did, and I was showing this off on the ride home with James that day. I was asking her questions about things that I knew and she didn't, I was being a cheeky brat and thought I could impress James by putting my Mum down.
She didn't change her tone or mood on that drive home, remaining fully engaged in the conversation. We dropped James off and arrived home for dinner. Nothing was said.
The next day it was just her and I on the drive home from school. Just as we pulled up to the house and I reached to open the car door she placed her hand on mine and said "Wait for a minute Patrick - I want to talk about the way you spoke to me yesterday."
She laid it out to me, reminding me of the importance of family and why we need to support one another. Then she told me something that I realized at 13 was a very profound message and its significance has only grown with time.
"In your life, you will meet many intelligent people, these are the people that know things, the world is not short of them - but you will come to realize that there are very few wise people, these are the people who understand life. When you find a wise person hold them close because they will help you grow - I am one of those wise people."
As my life has progressed I have been continually reminded of how true that statement is.
When I was 16, Mike Spencer Brown, the self-proclaimed most traveled man in the world, stayed at our house in Galway.
Ireland was his last country to visit after a twenty-three-year world tour and on arriving in Dublin he was interviewed on the radio and put out an open request for lodging as he traveled around the country.
Julia, my mother missed no opportunity to text the radio station and offer Mike the chance to stay with us. He took her up on the offer and four days later was standing in the kitchen when I arrived home from school.
Conversing with Mike felt both exciting and confusing. I kept starting my questions with "Have you been to...?" because it was a natural way to open the conversation, but he would just blankly respond with “Yes”. The man had been everywhere. Eventually, I ditched the polite questions and just said "Tell me about..."
I would feed him a country and let the stories flow; Somalia, North Korea, Afghanistan, and on and on.
He had incredible stories of all the places he visited but there is one that stood out to me and it happened before he ever left on his world travels. As a teenager growing up in Calgary, he would camp in the woodlands outside the city with no other humans around, spending anywhere from one to three weeks out there on his own.
After four or five days in the forest with no exposure to the modern world, his perception would start to shift. He felt as though he could develop a 360-degree awareness of what was moving around him. His senses had heightened and his internal mapping of the landscape was sharp. He could hear a twig break and know exactly where to look. He had developed an awareness of his environment.
When he arrived back in Calgary he felt it much harder to connect and relate to the intricate dynamics of human interaction. He struggled to read people’s physical cues and found them much more complex than the clear and obvious cues from the forest.
I share that story because, in his journey between the modern world and the natural world, Mike had to cross a threshold. Each time he entered a new space there was a feeling of discomfort until he found a way of adapting. This phase of discomfort, this liminal space is crucial to learning, it is the crossing that brings about change.
At the weekend I found myself in this liminal space, this area of transition. It happened when I was shifting my perception from the external world to the internal. Most of the time when we close our eyes we simply get lost in our thoughts.
This was different. I was trying to be attentive to that which I often couldn't see or feel. I was trying to connect to the motions and adjustments happening within me.
It felt uncomfortable and if I were trying to do it on my own I would have quit after a few seconds because it felt like I was making no progress. In the beginning, there was emptiness and darkness. I wasn't getting any feedback. But as I moved and tried to sustain my awareness I started to feel, very lightly, what was happening within.
This light feeling offered me something, a connection to myself, that no book or video could provide. Martin as the teacher could have tried his very best to prepare me by explaining what should be felt. Thankfully he didn't. He knew that learning would come through experience and each person in the room was on their own journey.
I don’t really know what the other people around me experienced from the weekend workshop. I don’t need to know. This was not a competition, there was no best performer, there was just exploration.
Sometimes I get the chance to speak before audiences about attention and technology. It’s usually a corporate gig and one of the key discussion points in planning for the presentation is around the ‘key takeaways.’ The organizers want to make sure that there is something tangible for the audience to leave with.
I have always felt a great agitation about this. I would rather if each person was given the space to come up with their own ‘takeaways’ rather than being fed to them. As Moishe Feldenkreis said, “I myself do not like predigested food.”1
There is a hesitancy to allow people to think for themselves. When Marshall McLuhan wrote Understanding Media his publishers, McGraw Hill were deeply concerned about how the book would be received because it had so many new concepts. They never published anything with more than 10% new material and this book was 60% new material.2
Understanding Media is a challenging read. It feels like I am searching for missing pieces of the puzzle as I move through the book. Two weeks might go by and something clicks, and one corner of the mental jigsaw comes together - suddenly my perception and awareness have shifted.
This only happens when we are pushed to our edge. If it is too easy, or too linear, there is no effort involved and no skills developed.
One conference that I spoke at last year had a stress-management expert on the agenda. For 90 minutes he stood on stage and explained stress and how to cope with it. There were worksheets to use at points in the talk. I sat there wondering when we would start connecting with the body as a way of managing stress. We never did.
An experience like that is a perfect example of shallow learning. We are optimistic and excited about the new knowledge we have acquired but we haven’t practiced anything.
When the next stressful situation arises we are most likely to snap back into our default response and fail to integrate any of the learnings from the presentation because the stress-response lives in the body and triggers a primal, reactive response that completely bypasses the rational mind.
Podcasting can offer a similar experience. I have been listening to the David McWilliams podcast for two and a half years and listened to nearly every episode. I thought I was learning a lot about Economics but recently I came to realize that I’m not. It’s more entertainment than learning. I listen for joy and on the side, I learn a little. I will never develop a deep knowledge of economics as a listener because it’s a passive act. I am being fed information, I am not going out in search of it.
Be wary of learning experiences that feel as though they are catered to you.
Be wary of information that is diced into little chunks so you can digest it easily.
Be wary of teachings that are fully formed and require little to no involvement.
Seek out the teacher that will guide you to your edge and let you explore unfamiliar terrain, returning with your own original understanding.
Sometimes that teacher can be another person.
Most of the time it’s the journey of life.
So here we are.
What are your key takeaways?
The Elusive Obvious: The Convergence of Neuroplasticity, Movement and Health; Moishe Feldenkrais