Experimental Self-Inquiry #4

Find your way in the dark

photo by Vitto Sommela

This series consists of provocations to stimulate your body’s deep instinct to learn.

Written instructions are provided to invite you to be the author of your own process.

The practices can be explored briefly as a way to simply create a new pattern in the flow of your day or at greater length to allow for deeper investigations of your patterns and potentials.

Initial postings will be available to all subscribers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. By doing so, you can help me to publish this series one day as a book.

Paid subscribers will also be able to access to audio instructions. Mixing guided audio with self-paced practice via text will yield you the most creative potential to find your own way.

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4. Find your way in the dark

Spend at least 15 minutes with your eyes closed in your home. 

Set a timer for your chosen duration and commit.

Sitting in a chair doesn’t count. Give yourself tasks to do. 

Go to the kitchen and get yourself a glass of water. Go to the bathroom and brush your teeth. Find your shoes and put them on. 

Of course you will move slowly. Of course you will be constantly reaching your hands through the darkness to prevent collisions. Of course it will be awkward.

Sometimes you will flinch as if you are about to collide with something even though there is nothing there.

Despite all that, try to relax into your commitment to experience blindness and imagine that you could become highly adept at the art of echolocation.

Take your time with everything you do. This is a game. The stakes are low.

Breathe slowly and easily and notice anywhere in your body that tension creeps in. Be willing to pause again and again rather than allowing the tension to take hold.

Whenever you’re not sure what to do, pause and listen deeply.

Soften yourself. Then continue.

Learn to listen from places deeper and deeper inside yourself.

Here are some words of inspiration: 

“Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” 
- Pauline Oliveros

“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh

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Discussion:

This experiment comes from Moshe Feldenkrais, creator of the Feldenkrais Method. He proposed it in his essay, On The Primacy of Hearing, as a correction to a developmental aberration that impacts all of modern humanity: 

“As the child first begins to be trained in reading and writing, his hearing is gradually withdrawn from most of the space around him. He learns to pay increasing attention, sometimes exclusively, to that sector of space which he sees. In general, it is the case that we see only a small part of the space around us, even though in hearing we hear from all around us. We see here a particular instance of something very general and fundamental: in learning to direct his attention to what his eyes see, the child withdraws his general watchfulness and becomes oblivious to the greater part of the space around him.”

This experiment, then, is not only an opportunity to unlearn personally limiting patterns, but to shake off limitations that have been baked into the mix of human culture since humans began reading.

As he so often did, Feldenkrais frames the investigation in terms of a basic survival paradigm - an essential perspective often forgotten in modern times.

“While in your home or some familiar surrounding, blindfold yourself and live by your ears only. To begin with, do it for only half an hour. You will quickly realize how your awareness is mostly limited to what you can see. Any creature who had to guarantee his individual safety and security could not survive if two-thirds of the space around him was ignored and did not reach awareness . . . If you continue this demonstration and rely exclusively on your ears for up to a few hours, you will realize how poorly we use ourselves even when our eyes are open. You will notice not only a change toward wider attention but the tonus of your entire being is heightened to buoyancy and freshness. Some esoteric disciplines believe that in such a change the entire consciousness is raised to a higher level. At this level your memory will resemble more what it was during your early childhood before you learned to read. Moreover, your ability to learn and retain will equally improve.”