Plugged in, Turned on, Tuned Out

Findings published from the third installment of the Kaiser Foundation’s research project on children and their use of media shocked technophobes and -philes alike. According to the report, kids ages 8-18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day plugged into an electronic device (such as an ipod, smart phone, computer, or television). This figure does not include an extra hour and a half spent texting or talking on cell phones; time devoted to homework, or an extra three and a half hours of media exposure accrued by multitasking.

As one commentator concedes: it no longer makes sense to debate whether such technological use is good or bad. We need to “accept it” as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

Must we equate ipods with oxygen? Debates over the morals and merits of technology are as old as human civilization. There are questions to ask that move us beyond good and evil.

1. Are we using our tools in ways that weaken the sensory capacities they extend?

Every human invention extends a set of basic bodily capacities in a direction farther than it could otherwise go, and in effect, reduces our need for developing those skills and sensations.

Recall Socrates’ debate, for example, over the act of writing, as an extension of our capacity to remember. When we write something down in order to remember it, aren’t we giving ourselves permission to forget?

2. Who is using whom?

The tools we use organize our patterns of physical and mental movement; shape our thoughts; space and time our tasks, and map our sensory awareness. Using tools grants us a sense of ourselves, and what we can do. It structures our relationships to other people, places, and elements. Whether pencil or plow, book or boat, ipod or iphone, the tools we use use us to make them work. We learn, in using the tool, what turns us on.

The issue these questions share concerns our participation in the rhythms of our bodily becoming. The movements we make are making us. But how? As we invest ourselves in this technology, are we cultivating a range of skills and sensibilities that aligns with our ongoing health and well being?

Answers are trickling in for kids who are plugged in. Regarding the sensory education such technology use provides, evidence is emerging of a correlation (at least) between hours spent consuming media and pounds added consuming calories. However, the causal factor between childhood obesity and screen use, believe it or not, does not seem to be sitting.

While researchers point to food advertisements as encouraging excess intake, the issue may have more to do with how screen use educates our senses. While watching a screen, regardless of whether we are in a chair or on an exercise bike, we train our attention away from what our bodily selves are doing and towards what is coming to us through the monitor. Tuned in we tune out. We reinforce the sense of ourselves as minds over bodies that causes us to override the wisdom of our bodily selves in all realms of our lives--including in our ability to follow the arc of our eating pleasure to a sense of enough.

Moreover, in using these devices we not only train ourselves to think and feel and act as if we were minds in bodies, we train ourselves to desire this sense of ourselves as itself a primary source of pleasure, accomplishment, and even health. Our dopamine level surges when we override our bodily discomfort to check email, harvest soybeans in Farmville, or receive the latest tweet from our favorite star.

As for how our tools are using us, commentators regularly comment on the enhanced multitasking ability of the techno-savy. However, it isn’t the multi in this formula that is new. Humans have been manipulating complex maps of parallel and entinwed processes for millennia in order to survive. What is new is the sensory and kinetic range of the tasks: since media use occupies a smaller swath of bodily selves than the tasks of, for example, making all our own food and clothing, we can indeed train ourselves to tolerate more of them.

So what difference does it make if our kids use these technologies in ways that reinforce their sense of themselves as minds over bodies, and reduce their sensory range?

I offer three points, knowing there are more.

First, Rodolfo Llinas' recent book argues that how bodies move influences how brains develop. One implication, anticipated by Nietzsche in Human All Too Human, is that when we train ourselves to still our bodily selves in order to think and read and write, we cut ourselves off from a primary realm of our creativity—our senses—and the source of materials through which we think at all. It is not an accident that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a dancer.

A related vein of inquiry concerns empathy. As the Blakeslees document, people with a greater visceral awareness—that is, a heightened awareness of their own feelings and sensations—demonstrate a greater capacity to empathize with other humans. Such empathic qualities correlate regularly with the ability to create and maintain mutually life-enabling relationships. One implication is that bodily practices that train our attention away from our sensory selves—even in the name of networking—may diminish our capacity to form strong, mutually beneficial relationships with other humans. (In what sense are fellow Facebookers friends?)

A third line of concern is one Richard Louv raises in his book, Last Child in the Woods. Louv diagnoses a nature-deficit disorder among our children, precipitated in part by an increased use in technological devices. As kids train their senses away from the natural world, they don’t learn how to be in the natural world—how to open to receive it. They think that “nature” is what they see in their wildlife videos, and get bored with the real thing.

Louv asks: where is the next generation of environmentalists and natural scientists who will be able to notice and care about the destructive impact humans are having on the very web of life that enables them to be?

Whether we are talking about the relationship to our bodily selves, to other humans, or to the natural world, then, the logic is the same. We may be losing our ability to sense and enact what we need in order to be able to create relationships that will support us in our ongoing sensing and enacting. Nietzsche called such a state decadence.

We do know that the question of how to cultivate relationships with ourselves, each other, and the natural world is a primary challenge we confront in the 21st century. It is also clear that electronic devices are not about to disappear.

The question that arises then is this: what kind of practices can or must we engage alongside our electronic device use, so that we can be sure to develop the sensory awareness we need to engage and use this technology in ways that enhance our ability to thrive?

Next week: what kind of movement matters?

Movement Manifesto, Part 2 of 2

Cats of all kinds are famous for it, after their notable naps. Cows do it too, after hours curled cud-chewing. I see human babies doing it, and know I can’t live without it. Even so, I was somehow surprised to realize that chicks do it too. Chicks stretch.

Our twenty-six fluff balls are now three weeks old and sprouting tufts of feathers from all sides. One by one, while otherwise peeping, pecking, and pooping, a chick pauses. A ripple of movement begins in its shoulder, fans through its feathering wing, leaps to a lengthening leg on the same side, and spills out through a perfectly pointed toe with such intensity that its wingtips tremble. Chicks stretch.

It makes me think. For these birds, each stretch spreads through a range of motion that the bird needs to fly. The stretches bubble up spontaneously, improvised yet patterned. The moves are obviously pleasurable (or perhaps I project). If birds could smile…

It makes me think. Why stretch?
*
Cultural conversations about stretching reflect our attitude towards bodily movement in general. As noted in the last post, discussions about movement are dominated by the language of exercise and fitness. Stretching, in this regard, is something you do to your muscles in order to have a better workout or race result. Stretching is a physical means to a physical end.

From there fierce debates ensue over how, when, whether, and why. Does stretching weaken our muscles or prevent injury? Does stretching disperse lactic acid for a speedier recovery or put undue strain on fragile tissues? Does stretching increase flexibility or merely preserve it? Should it hurt or not? Should you bounce or hold or resist? What seems to count most are the measurements—how fast, how far, how much. Can you touch your head to your knees? Your hands to the ground? Hey, how’s your split?

Haunting these debates is an assumption that a muscle is a mechanical piece prone to harden over time like a rubber band or an old shoe. Keeping “it” toned and tuned is the responsibility of some one called “I”—someone armed with science’s best results. Yet according to science, the verdict is out. No one knows. Or do we?
*
Leif wakes up from his nap with a big smile. It was a good one. I watch as his fists ball, his elbows bend, his knees tuck up, and his back bends in an arc of intensity that shudders through his small self. His body is yawning, opening, releasing his limbs to move. He smiles again, waving his legs, extending his joy through the tips of his toes. No span of sensation escapes the awakening. All here and now he is.
*
We are missing the point about stretching because we have lost a sense of our bodies as the movement that is making us. Even while neuroscientists plot body maps in the brain, most people remain convinced that movement, aside from a few involuntary processes and reflexes, is from the top down. Brain drives; Body follows.

However, our brains are bodies too, and the bodies we are are not ours. If anything, we are theirs. The muscles we move move us, and they are alive, ceaselessly recycling, replenishing, and regenerating energy that exists to empty itself along a string of similar cells. Like a plant wants the sun, our bodily muscles want to move.

Moreover, this muscle movement that we are is not simply physical. Muscles don’t just move bones. They move our senses—the eye that scans, the ear that cocks, the nose that nears, the digit that fingers. How we move determines what we perceive, what we feel, and what responses we can imagine. The movement of our muscles also orients us in space and time: time is how long a movement takes; space is where it gets us.

It is the action of our muscles, grunting or groaning, that draws into sensory awareness a lived experience of ourselves as agent “I.” Approach or withdraw? Tangle or resist? Grab or release? My “I” is the one who did and can and will again make that move.

How we move our bodily selves, then, provides the basis for everything that our brains have to do in the realm of the executive “I.” Organizing, abstracting, calculating, reasoning, conceiving, planning, and carrying through are all mental movements predicated on and predicted by the earliest contraction and release of our bodily selves.

Stretching is an impulse to move. Stretching we bring our senses to life, animating the planes and surfaces of our sensory awareness so that we have at our fingertips what we need to participate consciously in making the movements that make us who we are.
*
I lie down on the floor. The congestion in my brain, the tension in my shoulders, the stiffness in my limbs are all letting me know: it is time to move. I breathe down into the ground and lift one knee towards my chest. Holding it with laced fingers, I exhale down into my bent hip and out through the leg lying along the floor. I do it once and then again. Suddenly a hamstring releases, seemingly of its own accord. My lower back sinks into the ground. Ribs lengthen, and ripples reorganize the bones of my spine. The front of my forehead eases and thoughts begin to flow.

Ah yes, that is what I was forgetting while sitting at my desk. While it is true that I begin the stretch, soon enough the stretching is stretching me past patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, and into a present place where I am free to respond anew, in the moment and for the moment.

More is being stretched than muscles here--I'm stretching my sense of self. It is my "I" that is in danger of becoming hard and rigid, unyielding in its beliefs. It is my sense of who I am that must remain elastic, flexible, and free, not identified with the past patterns of movement that I have become, but rather with the process of making those patterns that "I" am. That's the point.

It's all about love.
*
Stretching I find ground, or ground finds me. A sensing center of self emerges where I can discern what will keep me moving and loving based on how I have moved and where I am now. My bodily self knows.

It is this finding and feeling that feels so good I want to do it again. I want to be this awake, this resourceful in every moment of my life, regardless of how restricted my reach may be. If I am beating and breathing, my movement is making me, and there is an infinite range of increasingly subtle sensations to discover.

Let's.

The Limits of Listening (to Your Body)

Leif is on the move, sideways. At three months and a day, the urge in my infant son crested and broke, releasing him to roll. Back to front, front to back, within hours he mastered the move.
He begins with a pulse, pulling in his knees, clasping his hands above them, and rounding his back into a ball. Tilting slowly to one side, he hovers just shy of the tipping point, holding, holding, until finally, the balance shifts. In one move, sturdy legs thrust out, arms jackknife up, and he unfolds from his center in a graceful, belly-landing surge.

A huge smile cracks his face. I fall in.

How did he learn to make this move? Not by watching me. Yet he knows, with precision, how to navigate the pull and push of gravity and ground. He knows the physics of levering his small self into position, and he knows the pleasure of doing so. How?
*
Listen to your body. The phrase has lately acquired mantra-like status. We hear it everywhere, calling us to dial down our busy lives and tune in to what we are feeling; to relax and rejuvenate, to eat sensibly, exercise thoughtfully, and live well.

As far as it goes, the imperative offers an important corrective in a culture where we are otherwise trained to perceive our bodies as material objects which “we,” as rational minds, are responsible for making fit and fit in. Too often we are encouraged to think and feel and act as if we were minds living over and against these bodies, destined to master and control.

Even so, does the call to listen to your body go far enough?

Listening has its limits. For one, “listening” is a metaphor: it is not sound that our bodies are making but sensation. Where are our inner ears? And when we use this metaphor to describe a desirable relationship to our bodily selves, we smuggle in assumptions that limit the imperative’s radical reach.

Listening implies that there is a distance between the “I” who listens and “the body” that speaks. It implies that this “I” can choose to listen or not, and then to respond or not, given whatever criteria “I” hold dear. It implies that what “the body” or “my body” has to “say” is simply there for the hearing. All I have to do is tune in. Further, as frequently used, the metaphor implies that what “the body” has to say to “me” is simple: go or stop. All wisdom and discernment remains with my “I,” the one who knows.

The call to “listen,” in other words, reinforces the very mind over body ways of relating to ourselves that it aims to correct.

So what are we to do? Not listen?
*
Leif is lying next to me. I’m on my belly. He is on his back. I’m writing. He’s wriggling. We are each, in our own way, waving our limbs—channeling energy, tracing shapes, and expressing ourselves in time and space.

I marvel at Leif. He is so present in his movement. I wish the same for my words. Every ounce of his small self is alive. Every patch of skin, inside and out, is raw radar, moving, sensing, responding. He is all ears, one great ear drum, resonating with the forces in him and around him. With fingers and toes flared, legs and arms pumping, he is collecting impressions. With every movement, he senses; to every sensation, he responds; with every response, he makes himself into the one who moved and sensed and responded. With every movement he has been making himself who he is—ready to roll.

I see now—what seemed a spontaneous move wasn’t. He has been practicing his whole life for this moment. His gyrating arms and legs pull blood and breath and nutrients into his muscles, growing tiny abs of steel. The contracting and releasing action creates a sense of center in him. As he plays with the forces working through him, on him, and around him, he discovers who he is and what he can do.

And why does he do so? Because it feels good. He is following the paths of his pleasure, the arcs of energy that open for him as he moves. Dancing, he pulls into his awareness a sensation of self, ready to roll.
*
The autonomy we claim from our bodily selves in so many aspects of our lives is an illusion. It is a powerful one, and effective too, but an illusion nonetheless. For the mind that can think “I” would not exist without the beating and breathing, the firing and wiring, the sheer movement of the bodily self it claims to control.

The movement I am is making me.

We are born bodies, born to move, and because this is so, we need to do more than learn to listen to our bodies. We need to learn to be the bodily selves that we are. We need to cultivate a sensory awareness of ourselves as movement—as the movement that is making us able to think and feel and act at all. And we need to practice, for if we don’t, we will unknowingly practice the mind over body ways of living that dominate our cultural moment.

As we practice, we begin to find wisdom where we have least come to expect—in the bodily sensations we are collecting and expressing, moment by moment, as we move through our lives.

We find in ourselves the sources of our creativity and our freedom, and the impulses guiding us to create the relationships that will support us in becoming who we are.
*
Our culture is at a tipping point. In so many realms of life, from health and fitness to agriculture and architecture, we are poised to shift the balance towards earth-friendly values, practices, and ideals. We are on the verge, leaning towards a new way of being. We’ve been exercising the patterns of awareness that we need to make it happen. What we need now to help us along is a shift in how we think about, feel through, and experience our bodily selves.

I’m ready to roll! Are you?

What do you think—is there wisdom we have learned to ignore that is unique to our bodily selves?

*
For a related article, see Gina Kolata in the New York Times, "That Little Voice Inside Your Twinge."

Cultivating Values

Sometimes I wonder why I, as a philosopher of religion and dancer, am writing a blog about life on a farm. How did I get here? Then I think again. Despite what it seems, this blog is not just about farming. It is about issues I have been working on for years: it is about the relationships we must to cultivate with ourselves and with others in order to survive as individuals, communities, and a planet.

How so? We are on the verge of an ecological crisis whose urgency is increasingly apparent. Voices from all over the world--scientists, philosophers, journalists, religious leaders, and scholars of religion--are all calling for changes not only in the way we transport our bodies, grow our food, and heat our homes, but in the values we rely on to guide us in doing so.

While our addiction to fossil fuels bears much of the responsibility for the warming of the planet, the deterioration of food-producing soil, and the pollution of water, air, and earth, so too do the values that have been guiding our use of them--values that privilege the individual human as the mastermind of the created order, existing over and above all others.

Instead, as commentators like Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, and Sallie McFague aver, we need to cultivate values of interdependence, interconnectedness, and community. We need to value our relationships to each other and to the natural world as essential to our individual health and well being. Such ecological values, many argue, will foster care and compassion towards others, a sense of responsibility and a willingness to sacrifice. In cultivating such values, we will become better humans, and better citizens of this precious planet. Harvard scientist E.O. Wilson goes so far as to say that our spiritual well-being is at stake.

I agree. Still, I find that something is missing from these discussions of ecological values--something that I am learning from our life on the farm. What?
*
This past week we had quite a scare. Jessica comes in from chores, reporting an observation that concerns us all. Her Jersey heifer, Precious, has a swath of blood-streaked mucous on her tail--a sign of being in heat. According to our calculations, however, Precious should be seven months pregnant and two months shy of giving birth. We are counting on the milk she will make--for her calf and for us. How could she be in heat?

Our future is suddenly in flux. Will we have milk? Especially this summer during those two months when we give Daisy (our two-year old) a health-preserving break before she gives birth to her second calf?

The milk shortage we are currently experiencing due to our thirsty bull babes (see New Arrivals!) is already challenging. The thought of relinquishing our dairy independence completely is downright disheartening. Sure, we can always go to the store and grab a bottle (as well as a pound of butter, a carton of ice cream, yogurt, cream, and cheese and all the other goods we make from Daisy’s donations), but it feels so good not to be spending our dollars in support of fossil-fuel-driven agricultural practices that deplete our soils and warm our earth. We are completely dependent upon Daisy for this pleasure, as well as for her delicious milk. In this moment we know viscerally how dependent we are.

So what is it? Precious, are you pregnant?
*
What is missing from debates over ecological values is what a body knows. The model of ethics in play relies on the same mind over body sense of ourselves as individuals that critics critique. Somehow it is assumed that we simply need to articulate these new values, recognize their relevance, and then impose them on our wayward selves. It is diet plan logic. Just come up with a plan and stick to it. Tighten your belt. You have no choice. As Bill McKibben insists, the costs of doing nothing are and will be greater than the pain of making changes.

Nevertheless, the challenge is ever evident. People don’t just switch values, even if they can argue themselves blue in the face about why such values are rational, practical, and even life-saving. Scare tactics only go so far. People resist change unless the need for it strikes them in the gut. Thus critics aim to communicate a visceral sense of urgency by showing time-lapse photographs of the ice caps melting, and of polar bears swimming for miles in search of a solid surface. We are moved indeed, but not far enough. The polar bears, as endearing as they are, are too far from home.

In the shift to a fossil fuel economy, we have lost more than the family farm. We have lost the living contexts within which values of interdependence, interconnection, and community are necessary. The same life ways that are negatively impacting our environment are ones that also separate us from the experience of our sensory selves--from what our bodies know.

To cultivate ecological values, we need to know in our own sensory selves why those values are, dare I say, valuable. Our values grow in us. They take shape as patterns of sensation and response. We develop a sense of what to notice, how to evaluate it, and how to respond. If we are constantly making movements in our lives that reinforce our sense of ourselves as minds living in and over our bodies, our ability to embrace ecological values is limited.

We are the movements that are making us. Here on the farm the movements we are making are making us. They are making us into a family of persons needed to run the farm, yes, and into persons who appreciate our dependence on one another for sustaining our common project. We are members of a calf-caring team.

Yet even more, the challenges are providing us with an immediate sensory experience of our absolute dependence on the natural world--its elements, plants, animals, and other humans--for every aspect of our living. This is no mere “inter” dependence. We are nothing more or less than moments in greater currents of life that sustain our every waking moment.
*
Jessica decides to make some further observations. I go to the computer to research signs of early labor. What could it be? Was Precious ever pregnant? Will she give birth to a premature calf? Sounds messy. And dangerous.

Jessica enters the house, a burst of hope. “Dandelion is in heat! She and Precious have been sleeping in the same place. Maybe it’s not Precious... but Dandi.”

The sense of apprehension releases. It looks like we will have milk after all.
*
The change we need cannot be limited to imposing new values on our excesses. We need an experience of doing the work that is required to make and produce what we take for granted as given.

Milk hits closer to the gut than polar bears.

I am not suggesting that everyone should move to the country or buy a cow. But we will need to seek out adventures and experiences that give us a sensory education to our absolute dependence on the natural world for our food, our water, our warmth, our health, and our life. Such sensory education will help us grow the values that can guide us beyond this time when our current practices are no longer sustainable.

Athletes of god

The Olympics are on, in case you haven’t noticed. Once again we are awed into submission to our television sets and webcasts by bodies—the bodies of these women and men—reaching, twisting, bending, spinning, flipping, thrusting, hurling, heaving, kicking, rowing, and running. We are impressed and again amazed by the concentration focused, the effort expended, the will to win demonstrated time and again in extraordinary bodily movements.

Close, yet so far. On the one hand, these bodies are just that—bodies like ours. Their movements are ordinary, basic to the workings of nearly every healthy human on the planet. On the other hand, we can hardly imagine making such extreme versions of those movements. We come away strangely rapt, somewhat inspired, giddy, determined, and humbled all at once.

Yet what rivets us in the end, what we celebrate and cheer, is not the particular accomplishments, as great as they are. It is the human power to become: the basic capacity of bodies to become something other than what they once were, whether swimmer, gymnast, runner, shooter, equestrian, fencer—someone who can empty his or herself, mind, heart, and soul, into a split-second breathtaking bodily act of extraordinary precision and grace.

What we celebrate and cheer is the power of bodily becoming. You might call it the spirituality of sports.
*
Inhaling. Exhaling. The movements of breathing, the basic rhythm accompanying and enabling every moment, every movement, of our lives. Inhaling, we take in the possibilities that await us—the resources that may become us. Exhaling we release what we were, to become something new.

Inhaling. Exhaling. Present in this basic oscillating rhythm is a moment where we are not—a moment between who we were and who we now are. It is a moment of transcendence—a moment when we are transcending ourselves, becoming other to ourselves, moving beyond ourselves, and becoming something else. Someone else.

Are you breathing?
*
It is tempting to think of sports and spirituality as two distinct realms of life. We tend to think that in sports, we use the power of our minds and wills to push the limits of our physical bodies, whereas, in our religious and spiritual paths, we plumb the heights and depths of our spirit or soul, expanding our horizons beyond our finite bodies, bound as they are by time and space.

The distinction is a false one. For our spirituality is itself an expression of our bodily becoming. Our bodies our infinite, not our minds, and they are infinite in the range of movements they can potentially make—movements that include believing, breathing, and bounding over a pole.

Spirituality, like sports, involves a rigorous education of the senses to certain possibilities of experience.

A gymnast learns to notice the give of a parallel bar, the spring of the mat, the curve of the ring, the tilt of the horse, and spontaneously make the micro adjustments needed to align his intention and action.

A member of a religious group learns to move with the melody of a song, the cadence of a chant, the names and images of god. A member learns to make the gestures of prayer, think with the arc of repeated narratives, pay attention for the anticipated length of a ritual, and so too, learn to make spontaneous micro adjustments that align her heart and mind and body with the beliefs and intentions expressed.

In each case the apparatus—whether material or conceptual—provides the one who practices with an ability to develop an acute awareness of a given sensory range, and devote himself or herself to the perfection of certain virtues, the completion of desired tasks. Each offers a particular course and context, a training ground and goal for our bodily becoming.
*
Nevertheless, there is a difference, and one worth noting. What distinguishes sport from spiritual is the moment in the rhythm of bodily becoming that each values as worthy of sustained attention.

In our spiritual lives, we are drawn to various tests and challenges that exercise that moment of our bodily becoming when we become other to ourselves—that moment when we move beyond who we are, expanding beyond our myriad fears and insecurities, troubles and ill—to connect with a source or presence or energy or whole that is greater than we are. We inhale and absorb visions of who we are and what we can be. Doing so, we strengthen our capacity to transcend.

In pursuing excellence in sports, we exercise that moment of our bodily becoming where we become other, realizing, in our physical actions, what we desire. Making the goal. Winning the prize. Overcoming all obstacles.

The two are not mutually exclusive. At the extremes of practice in either case, the difference is negligible. Our sensory and spiritual selves, inhaling and exhaling, are fully entwined in the pure presence of awareness—the action of the moment.

It is this entwining, really, that we celebrate. It is what we yearn for in everything we do. It is what makes anything satisfying to do. Finding it, realizing it, is what gives us the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that will satisfy our desire for spirit. We become, in the words of one faith, "athletes of god."

Next week: Why and how this model of spirituality can help us in a world torn by religious conflict.