The Hammock Papers: Notice.

23 March 2013

Notice.

Eisenstaedt, Ice Skating Waiter, St. Moritz, 1932

To tune in, do a body scan at any time during the day. Doing this many times during the day, can help re-awaken your sense of feeling what brings you to life.

You can start at the top of your head and scan all over your body, or you can start with whatever place in your body you first noticed. Let’s start with that. Think about tuning into your body. Which part of your body came to mind first?

Now, without trying to change anything, notice and feel what is happening. Feel the sensations, tightness, temperature, and sounds. What image do you have of that part of your body? Is it spongy? Stretchy? Like a rock?

Now take your awareness to another part of your body. You might feel like you are paying attention to the feeling in your back, then you realize you are noticing your belly rumble, or your feet feel sore. Just keep noticing where your attention is being drawn as you scan your body for sensations.

Go back to the part of your body that you first noticed. What is happening now? Explore the sensations. Has anything changed without you doing anything? You are probably starting to give those bodily sensations the name of a feeling. What is it you are feeling? Tired, tense, alive, happy, relaxed, dull?

Whatever feeling it is, notice what you were doing when you first started paying attention to your body. Is there anything that triggered that feeling? Is it in the space you are in now? Or were you thinking about something, or someone? Or an event? If so, explore that.

CONNECT.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL