Tag Archive for 'susan waters-eller'

Susan Waters-Eller: “Watching Tennis for Self-Improvement”

carla published on September 8, 2010 in celebrity. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Good Morning, SuperForest!

Alright, I’ll admit it. I’ve been glued to the television set these past few days cheering on my favorite gentlemen (cough, cough, Novak and Roger) in the incredible celebration of grand slam tennis that is the US Open. What I didn’t know was that as I watch the lovely sport that is tennis, a lot more goes on in my brain than the flurry of emotions that go through the minds of sports fans. Then the ever-insightful SuperForester Susan sent this in for us to read:

My love of watching tennis began in the seventies when I was hunting for a Sunday morning news show. Instead the screen was filled with the face of Bjorn Borg and I was hooked immediately by his look of predatory concentration. Little did I know at the time, that my mirror neurons were firing up brain circuits as though I was making that face myself. I just knew I liked the feeling. My fascination was fueled by the neural action of focus and determination, my own neurons paralleling his. I was feeling the look of winning. Part of the power of visual intelligence is the internal matching of what we see. When mirror neurons were first discovered, the researchers were surprised to see that the same neurons that fired when the monkey performed a certain task also fired just by watching that task performed by someone else. Understanding facial expressions depends on the same mechanisms. We feel them from the inside as though we were making them ourselves. Like the worldwide expert on facial expressions, Paul Eckman, says, “Make the face, feel the emotion.”

And imagine the benefits to the rest of my motor circuits firing as I watch such outstanding athleticism. Tennis players are excellent examples of visual/spatial intelligence at work. Awareness of the court, assessing the speed of the ball, the movement of the opponent and previous knowledge of a particular player’s style constitutes a constantly changing whole that a great player is always adjusting to along with a host of other factors. The best players exhibit intelligence as well as athletic excellence as they make lightening fast decisions. In the heat of an exciting volley, my whole body is twitching, not indifferent to the excitement unfolding in my mirror neurons. Watching these things trains my capacity for awareness and concentration on a purpose.

In the past, when people were curious about why I liked watching tennis, I used to say something about how much I loved saying “wow”, appreciated being impressed, and assuming some good brain chemistry was involved. I later learned that my body’s pleasure response was rewarding me with endorphins for attention to something I admired and dopamine for the unexpected shots and physical stimulation. This has survival value since admiration stimulates our own potential for greatness and novelty focuses attention on something new to learn. Through my mirror neurons I get to play along with the best, the residuals of which are there to inspire me when I sit down to draw.

Today the look that comes closest to the feeling I got from Borg’s is found on the face of Rafael Nadal. But whereas Borg’s intensity was of having his prey in sight, Nadal projects the feeling of a warrior vanquishing a foe, of something being conquered. The war cry accompanying Maria Sharapova’s hits contrasts with the steely sense of purpose on her face before she serves. What we see tunes the qualities in ourselves that respond to it. There is no one best way to play tennis. There are as many styles of play as great players. I’ve often wondered how Roger Federer managed to slow time, gliding easily through points where other players were rushing around. Then I read about new research showing that brain waves vibrate at a higher frequency during peak experiences like intense competition. So if the brain is operating faster, then clock time would seem slower. When we’re most deeply involved we have plenty of time.

The thing the winners most have in common is concentration and attitude, not the same attitude but each individual version of purity of purpose, unswerving determination. When Sharapova’s expression shifted to frustration, Dinara Safina’s face showed her prey cornered, moving in for the kill.

Our brains are changed by what we pay attention to, our reward system designed to keep us doing what’s helps us grow. It’s a pleasure (more endorphins) to see players from all over the world competing together without politics. Most fans don’t necessarily root for the players from their countries but for qualities of individual style. My endorphins flow seeing men’s and women’s tennis treated equally as part of the same tournament. Watching tennis is immersion in a world where excellence rules. Maybe what the feeling of inspiration really is involves the activation of those circuits where our own excellence wants to bloom.

Pretty awesome, right? Lucky for us, Susan has an entire blog that holds these types of writings and reflections. And I highly recommend you give it a good read whenever you get a moment.

Love and thanks to Susan for sending that in!

Susan Waters-Eller: “Light”

carla published on August 14, 2010 in zeitgeist. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

Good morning, SuperForesters! Our talented guest-blogger, Susan Waters-Eller, has just sent in this wonderful essay which discusses the concept of “light” and how it can help us transcend a lot of conflict and struggle on this planet, especially between the world’s religions. It’s quite the fascinating read, and I’m sure you’ll find it just as “enlightening” as I did.

In the course of my search for imagery that might assist a more comprehensive understanding of our spiritual nature it occurred to me that the image of light is associated with the all-encompassing universal intelligence in most if not all religions. Arguments between different faiths overlook this shared central image and I wondered why didn’t we see beyond the human-like god with its warring dualities to the inclusive light beyond it. A conversation with Kris Hjelli the night before he died pointed to the answer.

He was very concerned by all the problems created by our anthropocentrism. The human mindset of being separate and better than the planet and everything on it was for him the root of the problem in our ecological dilemma. That humans think that only humans are important leads to disrespect and disregard for everything else and encourages an underlying selfishness. This started me thinking about whether the anthropocentric mindset might be behind our inability to go beyond human-like images of the divine. By putting an emphasis on the human image, it becomes other and separate. The Image molds the viewpoint and the viewpoint leads us to see a multitude of individual separate beings with a separate god outside of ourselves. Arguments break out around which separate supreme entity and codified book is the right one and none of that feels very spiritually focused.

The image that encompasses all of the separate views and is part of many references to the Infinite Intelligence is the image of Light. It’s a part of mystical experience in all faiths. It’s always been present, but our focus on what’s human kept us on the level of distinctions. Perhaps Islam’s distrust of images had to do with their focus on what is manifest, on what can be seen. But since imagery is so important to understanding, a better image may be necessary to get us to a place that includes us all. Since light includes and envelops all that is around it, it makes sense to go back to Light. After all it was there in Genesis, in the Clear Light of Buddhism, in the radiance of the saints. Darkness is ignorance, inability to see clearly. The metaphor of increasing our light makes the pursuit of learning a spiritual path, since it moves toward greater light. Knowledge illuminates.

Beyond the religious image of light, light has long been a central metaphor for intelligence. We bring a new issue to light, we cast light on a problem, something is seen in a different light. The light in the heart enables us to see our deepest meanings. A person might be referred to as bright, a prophet called a light to the world. When I say a person is full of light, it’s not so much a particular quality I’m feeling, but an outward directed interest, a lively curiosity that connects to what’s seen. We feel it as a level of attention and are more fully in the light in someone’s attentive gaze. The light of receptive attention feels like love. Words of love can betray. Responsive, accepting attention IS love. It doesn’t just represent it. We always have the choice to offer that to others, to be Light. We are drawn to the Light because it offers greater awareness. What we see becomes known in a deeper way than what we hear or read. Envisioning something in relation to our existing inner model is the only way we can integrate our accumulating perceptions into our worldview. We all have these associations with light. It’s been so close we couldn’t see it. We couldn’t see beyond the human intermediary.

What is all encompassing suits me better. Learning, meeting people with different backgrounds and views, seeing and experiencing different places, all increase my light. It’s something we could head toward together.

Pretty amazing, no? If you have any questions or comments for Susan, please be sure to write in the comment section below. And if you’d like to read more of her work, be sure to visit her blog, Seeing Meaning. Love and thanks to Susan for the share!

Susan Waters-Eller: “Dreaming”

carla published on July 25, 2010 in zeitgeist. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Heyo, SuperForest!

In response to all of the excitement (mostly demonstrated by my cousin, Erik) about the movie Inception, I went to go see it this past Monday. Yeah, it was awesome. And yeah, when you walk out, your perception of reality is a little blurry. But what was even more “awesome” was that after watching the film, I was reminded of a blog post on SuperForester Susan’s “Seeing Meaning“. It goes into the details and functions of dreaming, and because of all the hype that’s gone around regarding this very subject, I couldn’t think of a better time to share this lovely piece of work.

The purest experience of imagery in mental processes occurs when we dream. Visual language is the medium of dreams. We are shown the way to look at something where the goals of waking life may obscure an important ingredient. Dreams are a mechanism in our ongoing adjustment for balance. The current idea about the dream compensating for the one-sidedness of waking life dates back to early Taoism, which has many passages where the dream functions as a counterbalance.

Since many researchers connect dreaming to learning and solidifying memory, this would reinforce the idea that what we learn has to be integrated into our inner model, connected to our existing representation of reality. Ulrich Wagner of the University of Luebeck, Germany, says sleep develops our capacity for insight as adjustments are made in the hippocampus, consolidating new information within that organizational center. The hippocampus is considered to be the headquarters of our internal model of reality and these nightly revisions and additions include the felt significance of our experience. With conscious purposes focusing most of our attention during the day, subtle feelings about experience are missed. In his book, Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck wrote about the dramatic nightmares Charlie had the day he saw his first bear. The dog enacted the movement and sounds of terror during REM, establishing his sense of the danger. Dreams reinforce circuits and display unconscious evaluations. They show us how we feel.

Dreams almost always occur in settings, drawing from and developing the existing inner model. Just like none of the individual objects is symbolic without the context, the setting itself can stay the same but host a range of different feelings, an ordinary living room shot with feelings of terror.

Judaism has always regarded dreams as important to deep level understanding. One of the many passages about dreaming in the Talmud states, “Dreams that are not understood are like letters that are not opened.” Rabbi Jonathan said, “A man is shown in his dreams what he thinks in his heart.” Psychiatrist Erich Fromm was saying the same thing when he wrote,” A dream is the true picture of the subjective life of the dreamer.”

Having a dream journal, even if I only remember one dream every few months gives me the opportunity to reflect on a dream at a distance. Looking back at dreams, seeing a larger context with more development over the intervening time, the picture can seem much more understandable than the morning after having the dream. My persistent nightmares of quicksand as a child, I now can see as a fear of suffocation, and the horror of disappearing completely from the surface world.

Most of us are pretty good at suppressing our fears, but to ignore them altogether is to not see a danger apparent to the unconscious mind. The dream insures these evaluations will be integrated into overall memory. Researchers have found that two-thirds of dream content is unpleasant. So bad dreams don’t mean something’s wrong with us, they show how we feel about what’s happened to us, or what we fear might happen. The idea that the unconscious mind is broader and smarter than the conscious mind is certainly supported by the many stories of dreams solving problems or predicting outcomes. There’s a rich history of predictive dreams (Lincoln dreamed of his assassination the week before it happened) and a parallel history of dreams showing solutions that eluded the waking mind (Mendeleyev’s organization of the Periodic Tables of the Elements). We are all artists at night, creative imagination unbound by the assumptions in our ideas about reality.

I think when we don’t remember our dreams it’s because they did their work, the adjustments have been made in the image that underlies the way we think and doesn’t need conscious attention. When we do remember, just by the act of remembering in the day, we perform another act of reinforcing the circuits and weaving it into the fabric of conscious memory. I remember some of my childhood nightmares more vividly than any particular episode from waking experience.

The correlation of sleep problems and depression shows how a lack of time sleeping and dreaming deprives us of the opportunity to balance the negative feelings. Understanding the value of this nightly development of our perceptive intelligence, we might value sleep more, and appreciate that important work is being done.

You can check out more posts like these on the ever-insightful, Seeing Meaning!

SuperForester Susan Waters-Eller Presents: “The Sense of Beauty”

carla published on July 8, 2010 in art, celebrity and zeitgeist. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

Dearest SuperForest,

It is with extreme pleasure and excitement that I present to you one of SuperForest’s newest guest-bloggers, Susan Waters-Eller! It was a few months ago when SuperForester Jon called me to describe his mentor and how her writing would make for excellent contributions on the site. He explained that she was a teacher of his in art school, that her work sparks insight and reflection, and that by sharing her writing on SuperForest, Susan would be able to share her teachings in a “global classroom” full of “conscious, aware and change-making students.” What an introduction, right? Needless to say, I was excited to read her thoughts and as soon as I visited her blog, I knew instantaneously that Jon’s descriptions, if anything, were an understatement. Here she is with her first guest post “The Sense of Beauty” which features some of her original artwork! I hope you’ll find her teachings as incredibly profound as I have. And from everybody on Team SuperForest, welcome aboard, Susan!

In her book “Neurophilosophy”, Patricia Churchland points out that our idea of five senses leaves out many very particular sensitivities, like our sense of position and awareness of interior states. I would like to suggest that beauty itself is a sense, attuned to proportion, harmony of form, and order. Like the other senses, it is a response to these qualities and not an idea about them.

The sense of beauty offers guidance. Science uses the concept of elegance as indicative of a good theory and many scientists and mathematicians refer to their sense of beauty as leading them to the answers they sought. Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Blink” described the ability to discern significance as an aesthetic sense. The expert knew the statue was fraudulent because she could feel something missing. Her body of knowledge and increased sensitivity to her subject enabled her to quickly see “what’s wrong with this picture.”

Beauty is not an external thing, but part of our deepest understanding. External perceptions of beauty are triggered by what enlivens the inner sense.

We are what we give our attention to and recognize ourselves in our response to what we admire. The concept of projection is true for positives as well as negatives. Just like we recognize our own negative qualities in the world and tend to call out others for faults we also possess, we recognize our best selves in the things we value. In an experiment that asked people in an office to pick the best worker and say why, most people chose the same person but the traits they listed reflected their own best qualities. What we admire activates corresponding patterns in our mind and strengthens them. We get pleasure from the experience because it aids our growth.

When a beautiful work of art offers an insight into a feeling or paradox it can change our way of seeing. It is this power that Dave Hickey emphasizes in his book, “The Invisible Dragon”, writing, “Beauty…provided the image’s single claim to being looked at and to being believed”. Beauty has authority because it gets attention. If it’s more beautiful it keeps attention. Like plants have a tropism toward the sun, we have a tropism toward beauty.

Elaine Scarry, in her book, “On Beauty and Being Just”, writes that beauty “adrenalizes”. It stimulates the mind and draws it into contact with the place where beauty is discovered. She notes that beauty has no precedent. It is not something you can pin down, but is particular, yet you know it when you see it. The mirroring part of your brain brings the beauty inside. When we admire beauty we participate in it. It is the beautiful part of us that understands it. If the quality wasn’t in us we wouldn’t respond, couldn’t recognize it. This is true of human behavior as well as art. Attending a meeting of high school students taking a stand against violence, my admiration for their efforts reinforces the parts of me that know that caring and striving for a more just world connects us and is deeply beautiful. As Michael Samuels writes, in “Healing With the Mind’s Eye”, “Beauty is a force that links.”

Because of this capacity to connect, beauty is spiritually fortifying. I think of spirituality as what connects us to what’s beyond ourselves, criminality as what disconnects us. Being drawn to a work of art is a connection to the artist. The heart says, “yes” to a feeling recognized but perhaps never expressed before. We respond to what aligns with our own inner model.

Art educates our understanding of feeling. When we resonate with something it is because it’s already a part of us. We recognize and admire the qualities that we ourselves possess and strengthen them as we find them externally. Psychiatrist Alfred Adler said “Art may be esteemed the highest training for social life, inculcating into us attitudes of value and thus improving the nature of our responses.” Likewise, philosopher Susanne Langer felt that having beautiful objects around was essential to educating a child’s sense of proportion and quality.
Beauty nourishes our better selves, and because we love what is beautiful, beauty stimulates our ability to love.

To experience some more of the “beauty” of both her writing and her artwork, please be sure to check out her blog, Seeing Meaning.