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This week: Beginner's Mind Edited by: Sophy  
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Hi, I'm Sophy ~ your editor for this edition of the Spiritual Newsletter.
The Rev. Scotty McLennan, author of the book Finding Your Religion, compares humanity's innate need for spiritual searching to climbing a mountain. In his view, we are all endeavoring to climb the same figurative mountain in our search for the divine, we just may take different ways to get there. In other words, there is one "God," but many paths. I honor whatever path or paths you have chosen to climb that mountain in your quest for the Sacred.  |
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Beginner's Mind
“You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” Albert Einstein
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” Shunryu Suzuki – Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
This week I invite us to consider the concept of “Beginner’s Mind.” During these stressful days of 2017, my appreciation for the practice of mindfulness, an approach to meditation based in the tradition of Zen Buddhism, has grown. It’s comprised of interrelated cognitive skills that help to manage and reduce stress as well as to cultivate a poised/creative approach to living. There are seven principles associated with the tradition including…
 Acceptance: Acknowledging things as they are.
Letting Go: Freeing ourselves of expectations and entitlements.
Patience: Acknowledging that things must unfold in their own time without pressure or interference.
Trust: Appreciation for the validity of one’s own knowledge, experience, competence, wisdom.
Non-judging: Resisting inclinations to evaluate, criticize, approve or condemn. Things are as they are whether or not we approve.
Non-striving: Resisting inclinations to change, improve, achieve, and instead experiencing one-self and circumstances as they are.
And the concept I want to consider together this week…
Beginner’s Mind: Approaching circumstances with curiosity and creatively, setting aside preconceptions, prejudice and bias.
Practicing a beginner’s mind uses questions to spark imagination. What is this about? What else can I do with this? What is possible, funny, interesting, beautiful that I haven’t noticed before.
There is a house that I drive past regularly that always catches my eye. For reasons I can’t quite understand, I always notice that I don’t like it. There’s nothing obviously “wrong” with it – there’s no hole in the roof and the grass is the usual shade of green. But I always find myself thinking I’m glad it’s not mine. Driving by it a week or two ago, I found myself wondering, “What if it were offered to me? Suppose someone left it to me in a will. Would I reject it? What could I do to make it more to my liking?” I imagined changing the color. I imagined what the inside might be like if I took out all the walls and made it a big open floor plan. I imagined having all the floors made of glass so you could see down and up through the whole structure. I imagined a water sculpture along one whole big wall with sheets of water sliding into a collection of polished stones. I drive past that address now and I love that place – even though I’ve never been in it. I feel relaxed and hopeful when I’m near it.
Maybe the most overlooked resource for good in the world is creativity. The possibilities for reducing suffering in the world, for cultivating contentment and satisfaction and cooperation and well-being must surely be gargantuan compared to the reality we settle for by default. Back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s there was an advertising campaign for a company called Anderson Consulting. One of my favorite spots showed a quartet of musicians playing a piece of classical music, and playing beautifully. After a moment, from off camera a basketball bounced into the scene and came to rest in the opening of the tuba. The musicians looked at each other for a moment, set down their instruments, and began to pass the basketball back and forth, simply at first, and then with more and more creativity so that they looked like the Harlem Globetrotters’ magic circle. It’s an example of approaching a new situation, and new challenge, a new opportunity with a beginner’s mind.
Another example of beginner’s mind that has always stuck with me comes from the experience of a tennis professional named Jim Courier. Mr. Courier was the top player in the world for a time in the 90’s, and there came a moment in his career where he began having difficulty. He was losing matches that the was clearly capable of winning, indeed should have been winning. He fell out of tournaments in early rounds to players who were much less experienced and skillful than he was. He changed coaches, and there wasn’t much difference, even though he was able to serve better and had a bigger repertoire of strategies for taking on opponents with different playing styles. He consulted a sports psychologist who had him change his emotional approach to the games. One of the things that was happening was that he would get angry when he made an unforced error. He would berate himself, sometimes out loud, slam his racket, and get belligerent with the officials. This response had helped John McEnroe become a better player, but it was distracting and disruptive to Mr. Courier’s game. So the psychologist had him begin to practice laughing when he made an unforced error. Instead of shouting at himself or others, he just took a moment to laugh out loud, even though at first it didn’t really feel funny to him. With a little practice, he actually began to feel the emotional change – the situation seemed funny, and not at all problematic. This was the factor that helped him get his confidence back and he began winning at the rate he was capable of once again. Although I didn’t know the concept when I first learned the story, I now see this as a manifestation of beginner’s mind – approaching a situation differently than might have seemed useful or even possible at first.
Here’s another example of approaching a situation with a beginner’s mind. There’s a family with a dog who raids the kitchen trash can when they aren’t home to supervise him, making a mess all over the floor. The family has a small home and a modest income, and both parents work so the dog is home by himself sometimes for 8 – 9 hours a day. They have a dog door so he can let himself out to the fenced yard to eliminate. And they have a kennel they can keep him in so he can’t get to the trash. The problem is that if they kennel him, he can’t get outside to eliminate, and if they don’t kennel him, he raids the trash. Their cupboards and cabinets are too small to put the trash can inside. So they came up with a different approach to the problem. Can you guess what it was? Click here to find out ▼ ** Image ID #2120226 Unavailable ** Yup, they put the trashcan in the kennel! Genius!
Sometimes I imagine myself as a spirit looking at life from the outside. Whoever is in charge of things shows me a snapshot of the life I actually have – what body I occupy, my job and my marriage, my health, my appearance, the nation and culture. And I’m offered a choice. I can just stay wherever it is that I’m looking from and see history unfold as an observer, or I can be let back in to see what I can make of things with the resources and limitations of my life as it is. There are no promises or guarantees, and no prizes or penalties. It’s just a straightforward offer. “You can go live our life and do your best with it, or you can be excused.
Here’s a poem written from the perspective of a beginner’s mind…an reminder of how meaningful of the practice of having a beginner's mind is for everyone - and maybe especially for writers!
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, wha t is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver |
Below you'll find some spiritual offerings from other WDC members. Please let the folks know if you read their piece by leaving a thoughtful comment or review.
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Here is a response to my last newsletter "Spiritual Newsletter (April 5, 2017)" "What Connects Us:"
From Mia - craving colour 
Hi Sophy,
I remember the movie well. You've used it to good effect to highlight the theme of your newsletter. As always, I enjoyed reading. And many thanks for including another one of my reflections for further reading.
Mia
Glad you enjoyed it - and you are welcome! 
     
From Whata SpoonStealer  }
Whata great summary of a movie I've never heard of that so clearly answers compassions call. Excellent!
Thank you so much - it really is an amazing movie!
From Mary Ann MCPhedran 
Hi Sophie and thanks for sharing your story with me. I agree that there are many paths to a unity religion no matter what path we choose to follow we are worshiping our Maker .As a child I had many religions although my family and I went to mass in the catholic church on Sunday mornings and holy days.
In my day as a child the religious groups came round the street and had the service on the playing field and I was always sitting in the front row. I enjoyed reading your item and maybe follow this story up one day.
Thank you for sharing.
From Katya the Poet 
I love that movie, too! Now I will want to watch this again, and I almost did some recent evening, so maybe I was getting your vibes.
Maybe so!
Please keep your comments and suggestions coming! Until next time! Sophy |
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Spiritual: May 03, 2017 Issue [#8262]
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