Contact and Mindfulness

Contact and Mindfulness     by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
Dec 2009

     A few years ago I spontaneously devised a game where a friend and I, with fingers extended, reach across to touch the other’s finger, reminiscent of God and Adam in Michaelangelo’s famous painting found in the Vatican. An electric contact is made with an accompanying zzzzzzz.  We then break into much laughter.
 

     I like this game greatly (known among my friends as “doing a God and Adam”). To me it sums up the exciting quality of contact, and not just human contact. There is electricity in the contact between humans and other animals and humans and plants and the rest of the earth, when excitement and interest is there.  

      Recently friends and I swam with seals off Carnac Island in Cockburn Sound off Rockingham in Western Australia – an incredibly beautiful place with pristine waters and white sands. Though there we did not actual touch the seals in a physical sense, we were wonderfully energized in meeting the other.

       I also met a shell as I dived down through surging water, my fingers not quite close enough at first, but with an extra kick, I touched, grasped, and plucked it from the sea floor. This was a gift for a friend.  The shell’s sharp salty smell a sweet reminder of her days on the West Coast’s beaches.

It is likewise wonderful dropping down the streets of cities, like Sydney, meeting a surge of people as they come up the other way; of making contact with a smile with people I don’t know; of chance meetings with the like minded in book shops or cafés.

     Or the contact of meeting eye to eye with a green tree frog found under a tarpaulin in my backyard, or hearing a bird reiterating my laughter, or the deep swish of the wind in the trees as I, too, realize something new. Or the touching of an ancient melody caught for a moment on my lips.

     Contact is extraordinary.  Here we are, entities apparently separate, coming together in maybe a short time, and meeting and sharing and parting. It is this rich encounter that excites me when I greet each client. Indeed, it is the promise of such rich encounter that I look forward to when I wake up each day. 

      In contact, though, there is something even more powerful than the delight of connecting. In contact we can move into new levels of consciousness with ourselves, one  another and the deep ecology of the environment. This requires mindfully being  present and watching without attachment to what arises for us in our bodies, our breath, and the passing parade of our thoughts.  When we are  profoundly present for another person our presence  shifts the other’s conscious experience from their pain-body (as Eckhart Tolle describes it) to a gentler state of being.

     Staying in contact within ourselves is much harder. When we are afraid we want to escape from it; when we are angry we want to lash out; when we are embarrassed we want to end our embarrassment, and so on.  These inner feelings generally have deleterious effects on our ways with others and our world. Dumping onto others what we experience as   suffering within ourselves is no solution (wars are made of this). We do need to acknowledge and   make full contact with it within ourselves: to know its edges, the stories that arise and the habitual responses that surround it, as well as all those grumbly reactions and irritations that we feel in response to it. In staying in contact with the feelings we normally try to dispel we actually have new capacities, new insights, and new ways of responding. The intensity lifts. It doesn’t generally happen quickly, though.  I have found that this method of mindful contact with the suffering I’ve known throughout my life is often intensely uncomfortable, interesting in a curious way, but difficult nonetheless. I also know, at least for myself, it is necessary in order that I be truly who I am. It is a method of mindfulness I encourage my clients to explore.

     Contact is electric and when combined with mindfulness practice fundamental shifts in awareness and new insights and ways of engaging with others becomes real and alive. We become alive, playful and ready to engage  wholly with those about us, even the small green tree frog in our garden and the swish of the wind in the trees. 

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell