Training 'Authentic Resonance': Attuning to the 'phenomenology of the artist'
Aspasia Karageorge & Daniel Garner expand the inquiry
What is ‘authentic resonance’?
Clinical psychologist Aspasia Karageorge, who practices Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy in Sydney Australia, recently brought this question to me.
Our inquiry delved into what it takes for us to sift through the ‘noise’ of our experience in order to find the necessary ‘signal’ to enact confident and decisive action - despite the massive uncertainty that characterizes our modern lives.
Aspasia then developed the idea further in an excellent dialogue with the philosopher and unorthodox musical educator Daniel Garner of
.Click here to listen to the full conversation
Anticipating a trio sometime soon, I’d like to riff here a bit on the two conversations so far because they point towards a vital question for our collective well being.
How can we get more skilled at discerning between the different layers of our experience that we label with words like ‘thought’, ‘emotion’, ‘perception’ and ‘action’?
Many other words could be added to this list, but I like these four because they fit quite nicely with two paradigms I’m already familiar with:
The Feldenkrais Method
Moshe Feldenkrais said that we are always doing four things simultaneously:
thinking, feeling, sensing and doing.
He based his work in the field of movement on the assumption that all these layers had to be considered. This approach led him to develop a powerful understanding of human learning which can improve not only movement but life as a whole.
Bonnitta Roy’s New Theory of the Body
Philosopher and insight guide
likes to point out the large difference between “the kinds of minds we have today” and “the nature of mind.”She teaches that our greatest potential (and hope for the future) lies in putting the mind back into the body and the body back into nature. She responds to anthropocentric narcissism by showing how human intelligence is sourced in our animal nature.
My own work is all about developing a perspective of falling in love with your life by connecting to the phenomenon I call musicality of being.
If life/the universe/everything is one grand piece of music, what if you learned to feel its rhythms, harmonies and melodies? Are you ‘in tune’ and ‘on the beat’ - or not? This perspective trains you to intuitively relate to the whole of life rather than just ‘the parts.’
But what about ‘authentic resonance’?
Aspasia is pointing to those moments in our lives when ‘it all comes together.’
Feldenkrais might say this is when your action arises from your whole self, when you are capable of “moving in any direction without preparation or hesitation.”
Bonnie might say that you are in the natural state, acting like an animal does. You trust your body to lead you instead of your mind. And it feels effortless.
I might say you are dancing with life, embodying a creativity that is expressed not only by speaking and acting, but equally by listening and allowing others to act.
Given the complexity of modern life, these moments are absolutely golden - so getting a better understanding of how they are generated is a crucial inquiry.
In his conversation with Aspasia, Daniel references “self-forgetfulness,” a notion he attributes to Timothy Keller. I’m not familiar with Keller, but this phrase seems to articulate another key piece of the jigsaw puzzle of ‘authentic resonance.’
The following excerpt is from the essay, The Impossibility of Fulfilling Desire Is the Possibility of Intrinsic Motivation, also found in the book Belonging Again, by O.G. Rose.
“Self-forgetting” is when we simply stop thinking about ourselves, and in this way our “self” is simply something we use (like our thumb) without thinking about it. We become “pure action,” in a sense, and this brings to mind Nietzsche’s “self-turning wheel.” In this state, free of the “object/subject-divide,” we become our goal, which is to say we are our “object(ive),” per se. As such, we cannot think of ourselves in relation to objects or goals we do not have, and thus are freed of a prime source of self-awareness
The conversation between Aspasia and Daniel helped to situate those ‘golden moments’ where we seem to overcome internal conflict within the complexity of our highly conflicted modern lives.
I loved their debunking of the popular commodification of ‘flow.’ They pointed out that ‘right action’ might be accompanied by a wide variety of emotional resonances.
It is foolishly imprecise and unrealistic to think that each “good decision” one makes is going to feel like the skies parting and angels singing as we radiate joy everywhere.
(The hyperbole of the previous sentence aims to capture the energy you might feel listening to a TEDx speaker wax poetic about ‘flow’ while they try to sell it to you.)
Not only do overly simplistic notions of flow seem “to good to be true”, they also set up false expectations about how enacting our freedom of choice might feel.
By considering a variety of examples - and, crucially, asking what prepares the ground for ‘authentic resonance’? - Aspasia and Daniel also help us understand how we can practice.
I’ll mention three of the examples that came up in their discussion:
A soccer goalie blocking a shot
A parent disciplining a child
William Faulkner writing The Sound and the Fury
The first case demonstrates a kind of ‘authentic’ resonance’ that seems very clear cut.
A striker from the opposing team drives the soccer ball towards the corner of the net. The goalie, having been in this situation thousands of times before, ‘knows’ just what to do. With beautiful timing and whole body coordination, he dives at just the right moment, extends his arm and punches the ball out of the danger zone.
If asked afterwards ‘how’ he did that, his truthful answer might be “I don’t know.”
Daniel contrasts this example, where the “success” of the action is easy to define, to the other two cases listed above, where what it means to “do the right thing” is much less obvious, to make a broader point:
“The relationship between choice and freedom is complex.”
In the industrialized world, we are used to having a huge amount of choice in our lives and we often associate this situation with freedom.
Yet it has everything to do with why we seem to be going insane.
Paradoxically, as Daniel points out, in many situations,” making a choice can feel like you’re losing freedom actually, not gaining freedom.”
What does an athlete work really, really hard to be able to do, say in soccer as a goalie? To be able to block a ball without thinking about it.
A testament to great success of choice in practice is precisely the ability to act without thinking - which means that you are using freedom in choice precisely in a way to be able to act WITHOUT freedom in choice - and that becomes a testament to expertise.
On the other hand, if you are supervising children at play and conflict arises…
How do you know whether or not to intervene?
Or when?
Or how?
How do you decide in the moment?
How do you determine, even after the fact, if you made the ‘right choice’?
This example shows why the expectation that the ‘right choice’ will always ‘feel good’ is not helpful. As Aspasia points, feelings of guilt regularly accompany a parent’s interaction with a child - but this alone doesn’t automatically indicate an error.
So, if one can imagine that sometimes a parent ‘must’ discipline a child in such a way that the child is upset and the parent feels bad about it, how does one prepare for that?
These are the kinds of questions Aspasia addresses with her clients in therapy: developing skillful emotional regulation, reducing anxiety, separating narrative projection from reality, and becoming more attuned to one’s felt sense.
Such skills are learned gradually and, unavoidably, through a process of trial and error. Even so, each new occasion requires a kind of “leap of faith” where one does what one does, usually without the benefit of the kind of clear feedback available to the athlete.
Yet what is possible - even if one later judges the action as a mistake - is to feel an internal sense of ‘alignment’ in the moment that overcomes hesitation.
As Aspasia puts it, “I’m connecting that with a clarity of connection with something inside me that ‘sits well with me’. I’m rested in, I’m grounded in that.”
Such an experience, even if ultimately uncertain, is entirely different than acting defensively or impulsively because of anxiety or some kind of inner conflict.
Daniel beautifully ties together the dilemma that a parent faces with a thought experiment about what it must have been like for William Faulkner to write his masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury.
What’s the connection?
Like a parent, the artist has no obvious criteria except for their own internal sense of ‘rightness’ to determine each decision. For the novelist, this literally applies to the choice of every word from beginning to end of the manuscript!
As he wrote his book, Faulkner would have continuously had to find words and phrases that would resonate with his his felt sense, emotional sense, artistic sense and philosophical sense. Without out vibrating all of those strings simultaneously, he could not have struck a chord that rang true with authentic resonance
Long before sending his work to a publisher or receiving public feedback, this would be a question of whether he could even go to sleep at night!
Daniel invokes this image of Faulkner to point to the complexity of what we must traverse in order to find a sense of rightness in ourselves.
In the following clip, he talks about why in this day and age it’s essential that we learn how to cultivate a life that is lived with “the phenomenology of the artist.”
This is 1000% about being grounded in the body!
There are many more crucial questions that came up in this conversation which I’ll just point to in order to encourage you to listen:
When inspiration to act arises, how does one determine ‘the right moment’?
How can errors be used as opportunities to train for ‘authentic resonance’?
How do the judgments of others play a role in one’s sense of ‘right action’?
What is the role of the body in all of this?
I’ll wrap up this post by giving my answer to the last question above:
I believe that the role of the body is decisive.
What Aspasia and Daniel articulate so well in their dialogue is that instances of ‘authentic resonance’ are the product of practice.
This practice might be quite formalized, like the training of the soccer goalie, but just as often, as in parenting, it is the result of treating the experiences of one’s everyday life as practice - making mistakes, correcting, overcorrecting, and slowly but surely sharpening one’s sense of what to do so that one can act more spontaneously.
It’s the body that knows how to lead decisively in the moment, not the mind.
Yet, is the conclusion here just a vague encouragement to ‘live well’ so that the body is more likely to take the lead when we need it to?
No.
Instead, I’d like to suggest that the phenomenon of ‘authentic resonance’ - which might feel a bit more authentic on one occasion and a bit less on another one - points to the need for us to develop a stronger habit of listening to the body in all situations.
As I pointed out in my conversation with Aspasia, there are few things that feel more solid than the earth under our feet. While this feeling is part of our everyday lives, we fail to see what is so essential this experience:
We trust what feels solid.
When we stand on “solid” - as opposed to “shaky” - ground,” we act with confidence.
Our language is filled with metaphor like this for a reason: when we “can’t find the words” to express what we feel, we typically pause and try to ‘feel’ a bit more - until something resonates inside us enough that we can say “what it feels like.”
When we find it difficult to ‘find the words’ - while talking to a child, to ourselves, or while composing a literary work - it’s because what we feel isn’t clear.
(Watching Aspasia and Daniel, you can see this mirrored in their body language in the moments where they are finding the words and the moments where they aren’t.)
Therefore, what I’d like to advocate is that, despite the distance we’ve travelled from our hunter-gatherer origins, there is nothing more important we could do to prepare ourselves for the uncertain moments in life (when we nonetheless must act), than to become more fluent in the wordless language of our bodies.
The fastest way I know to help you do that is to adopt the Anytime/Anywhere practice of becoming more intimate with the fluid dynamics of your ever-present relationships to breath, ground, space, sound and light - by working with the Presence Mantra.
Daniel’s invocation of the “phenomenology of the artist” is especially useful for thinking about the kind of embodied practices that I believe are necessary for navigating our crisis-ridden era.
Yes, we need to recover the feeling of being ‘at home’ in our bodies for basic sanity, health and functionality in daily life.
But, even more than that, we need to regain fluency with the incredible sensitivity of our animal bodies. Rather than allowing our senses to become increasingly dulled under the onslaught of algorithmic distractions, we should be honing our capacity to discern finer and finer grades of somatic experience.
When we cultivate our bodies as highly attuned instruments capable of expressing themselves in harmony with the ‘dance of life’ that I call musicality of being, we can build deeper trust in ourselves and each other.
This trust is a prerequisite for developing the kind of bold and collaborative creativity our world so badly needs today.
Become a paid subscriber to join this month’s workshop on Musicality of Ground
where we will directly explore what trust feels like in the body!
Can't wait to talk about this as a trio - love your thinking and speaking with you, Seth! Aspasia
Wow, bravo, Seth! This one resonates deeply with me. Thank you.