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