Mindful Intensity
The Joy and Freedom of Being a Beginner
“I found myself practicing the meditative movements for hours at home. Given the complicated nature of my chess life, it was beautifully liberating to be learning in an environment in which I was simply one of the beginners — and something felt right about this art.” ~ Josh Waitzkin (chess & martial arts champion and subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer)
Photo credit: Beate W
The above quotation is from Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance, the introduction to which is available on the Talent Development Resources website.
I’m no competitive chess player, nor am I nearly as accomplished in any one area as Joshua Waitzkin is in chess (or martial arts), but I understand completely what he means about the freedom of being a beginner.
That’s what I feel in this series: the joy and liberation of making a beginning, of being a beginner. If you are a novice to the idea of mindfulness, please be assured that I am, too. I have always used writing as a way to learn more deeply and widely about what interests me, and this series is no different. Some of the works and ideas I plan to read and share here I have spent time with before; some are new to me. Even the authors I am revisiting, however, feel new because I am bringing a perspective, a new self to them. One of the liberating aspects of mindfulness is that we are always both beginning and beginners because each moment offers a new chance to pay attention, and no moment is the same as another.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.~ T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (“Little Gidding“)
When I teach creative thinking to engineering students, one of my favorite exercises is to have them generate as many questions as they can about their chosen topics or problems. At first they balk about not being able to answer their own or others’ questions right away, but we push on and continue to ask rather than answer, until the white boards and their notebooks and computer screens are filled with nothing but questions. It is a way to help us to begin with the end in mind.
In that spirit, here are some questions that come to my beginner’s mind for our series:
- What is mindfulness? Are there different definitions?
- Is secular mindfulness different from spiritual mindfulness?
- Is the goal to be mindful all the time?
- How do we start?
- What are the benefits of mindfulness?
- What are the challenges to being mindful?
- Are there different ways to be mindful?
- Is mindfulness particularly helpful for people with intensity/overexcitabilities?
- Is mindfulness particularly difficult for people with intensity/overexcitabilities?
- Can children learn and practice mindfulness?
- Is mindfulness a good practice for perfectionists?
- Could mindfulness be an integral part of gifted education?
- Would gifted/intense college students benefit from understanding and practice of mindfulness?
What questions about mindfulness do you have?
This weekend, enjoy the intensity of Josh Waitzkin in a two-part ABC News interview, where he says “The idea isn’t so much to ignore or block out your emotions, but learn to channel them into intensity”:
