These Are Certainly Uncertain Times

As news about the coronavirus began to spread in early March 2020, I found myself doing something I often do when I’m feeling vulnerable: voraciously gathering information, reading and listening to the news multiple times a day, and incessantly refreshing Twitter.

At the time, I was spending my days in a conference room at hotel in Boston, with more than 30 people, for a training in Functional Integration®, the hands-on part of the Feldenkrais Method®. As the 10 days wore on, and coronavirus cases started to pop up in Boston and the surrounding area, it became questionable whether it was smart to gather together and spend the day touching each other.

But none of our public officials seemed to be offering any clear advice. The idea of “flattening the curve” was just beginning to show up in the news. There was a lot of speculation about what was happening—and some horrific projections about what might come to pass—but no consensus about what was the best thing to do right then. In addition, it was becoming frighteningly clear that our country’s leadership was failing to act in any effective way.

THERE ARE NO ADULTS IN THE ROOM

I eventually left my training early to return home, and over the next week, feelings of anxiety continued to increase. One morning, during a distracted meditation, I had the shocking realization there were no adults in the room. No one knew what was happening in the present, let alone what was going to happen in the future.

The only thing that was certain was uncertainty.

Now this is not a new idea to me, but living in uncertainty—practicing “I don’t know mind,” or beginner’s mind—is a lesson I have to be reminded of again and again. In this case, I saw how I’d been trying to wrap myself in facts as if they were my own personal protective equipment against the sense of wild vulnerability that threatened to overwhelm me. If I could buffer myself in “the known,” then I could bypass the difficult feelings and go about my business.

Economist and psychologist Herbert Simon said, “…information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

I had been using information to try to manage my emotions, but all it did was distract me from being with the very legitimate set of feelings and reactions I was having as I watched our society start to collapse into fear and distress. My effort to find certainty and know what was going on was taking my attention away from the most important thing—being with myself, here, now, feeling all the feelings, and having the human experience.

It makes sense to want answers, to desire reassurance that it’s all going to be okay. And it probably will be okay in some big cosmic sense. But on this relative level, it’s also not going to be okay for a good many people. An uncertain number won’t come out of this alive or whole, and it’s going to hurt. Of course life is always that way, but the scale of this is impossible to ignore.

THE SOMATICS OF (UN)CERTAINTY

As I saw all this during my meditation, I felt a tremendous release in my body. I hadn’t realized how much tension I’d been holding, and it melted away. Rather than the fear taking over, it just dissipated. Despite all the Feldenkrais practice I’ve done in recent years—seeing my old habits and patterns of movement and making space for new possibilities—I was still surprised at how much my cognitive attempt to control the world was reflected in the muscles and tissues of my body.

When I was young, I was in a candlepin bowling league (a style of bowling unique to New England with small balls and straight pins). I can remember sending the ball down the lane and then contorting my body in an effort to somehow make the ball to go where I wanted it to go. My ribs would jut out to the side and one knee would bend against the other, my whole body participating in an attempt to direct the ball into that magic spot right between the first and second pins.

In this case, my tight eyes, clenched jaw, frozen neck, rigid belly, and shallow breath were all futile attempts at gaining some kind of control over the uncontrollable spread of the coronavirus.

As I sat with the reality that control is an illusion and nothing is certain, the image of being on a rollercoaster dropped into my mind. When you get on a rollercoaster, the best thing to do is strap yourself in and go with the flow. No matter how much tension you hold in your body, it won’t have any measurable effect on the ride. But you can make your own experience less painful by holding less tension in your system and responding to the curves and dips with as little resistance as your energized system can muster.

To do this takes practice. I work with my mind-body in meditation and therapy, and with my body-mind through walking, dancing, and Feldenkrais. Your practice may be different from mine, but if there ever were a moment, now is the time to commit to something that speaks to you. If there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that we’ll need to marshal our attention into the here and now if we hope to make our ride through these uncertain times a little less difficult.

Forgiveness Is a Process

I love learning about words—their meanings, where they come from, how we use them. But sometimes I wonder if I missed a pivotal week in school where the vocabulary list included words like love, kindness, compassion, and forgiveness.

I'd heard these words held aloft as aspirational signposts since my first Sunday school teacher explained the Golden Rule. I'd even, on more than one occasion, had the experience being described by each of these words.

But the concepts themselves remained abstract and intangible to me most of the time. I knew they were real, but often it felt like I sometimes feel when passing through business class on the way back to coach. Someone else got to sit in love and compassion while I grudgingly wedged myself into acceptance and tolerance, wondering how exactly one gets access to those roomier seats.

Because these words are, well, words... I had assumed they had clear definitions. And if something could be defined, then it could be gift wrapped with a bow and neatly filed on my shelves of understanding, ready to be taken out when needed.

However, when I found myself in need of compassion, I'd take the box off the shelf and it would be empty. I'd think to myself that I know kindness would be useful in this situation, but I seem to be fresh out and don't know where to get more.

I felt locked within an intellectual fortress, forbidden entry into the garden of good feelings and betrayed by my reliance on reasoning.

Then Zen teacher Cheri Huber introduced me to the idea that the concepts these words refer to are not discrete, static things. You can't put them on a shelf. You can't point to them and say, "There, that's love. And over here we have joy." Instead, they are states that can be cultivated—experiences of being that can be wooed into existence through repeated effort.

It turns out love, kindness, and the lot are more like a process. More like verbs than nouns. And there are things we can do (and things we can avoid doing) to create the conditions for these states to flourish and fill our lives with goodness.

Frederic Luskin, Director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project, explained to me in an interview that forgiveness is "making peace when you didn't get what you want."

That's great. Except peace is another one of those words. How does one actually "make peace?"

It turns out making peace—or forgiving—is a somewhat quantifiable process that has 3 steps:

Become more grateful. Practice gratitude all the time and learn to recognize when your heart is open.
Relax. Calm your nervous system. Stress chemicals narrow your thinking and block your capacity to forgive, so actively practice relaxing.
Change your story. When you talk about what happened, change the language to give yourself a little perspective. For example, instead of saying "I had a terrible childhood, my parents were the worst," you could say, "My childhood wasn't great, and I imagine my parents did the best they could."

Thankfully each of these steps is an action that can be practiced. We can commit (and recommit when we forget) to regularly being more grateful, relaxing, and changing our narrative.

And when we do, Luskin explained, we create and experience forgiveness.

Well, almost. It turns out that not every part of the process is measurable, which I imagine is why there is this thing we call faith.

"These simple skills are trainable, but I would have to say that I still don't know actually how to teach forgiveness. I can teach these skills and they tend to make people more available to forgiveness, but there's still something ethereal or consciousness or spiritual or grace or something that still has to fill that human space beyond those skills, and I don't know what that is," says Luskin.

Spiritual teacher Caroline Myss says, "Genuine forgiveness is a self-initiated mystical act that requires the assistance of grace."

Much like forgiveness is process that results in a resolution of our objection to something that happened in the past, perhaps love is a process that resolves hate, compassion a process that resolves indifference, and kindness a process that resolves animosity or selfishness.

And if forgiveness isn't filed away somewhere on a shelf between envy and goodness, and is instead there for the having if we attune ourselves to it, then love, compassion, kindness, joy, awe, wonder, and all those other yummy things must be hiding in plain sight too.

Maybe they're right there available to us when we actively create the proper conditions for them and then let go and let the magic happen.

Here’s a short clip from my interview with Fred Luskin for the Omega Institute: