What Not To Waste: A Meditation on the Aims of a Practice

I’ll start this piece with an open hand, laying my cards on the table as to how we ought to organize a full practice:

Practice such that you do not squander your last words, last meal, or last kiss.

The thought occurred to me in the midst of movement practice the other day. As dread rises high around the world and the planet seems to spin us nearer and nearer to the end, we would do well to consider the final bookend of life.

Most folks are out here talking about living their best life.

I’m looking farther ahead and wondering how to die my best death.

A practice worth the time, energy, and attention is one that equips us to meet death with greater composure and to face the big unknown after it with receptivity rather than with regret.

It’s a practice that ought to expand our capacity for engaging in the world around us — physically and psychologically. It ought to help us move with greater ease so that we aren’t encumbered by pain, tension, and excess worry about injury. It ought to develop within us a sense of composure that we can carry to the trying situations that the world presents us. It ought to enliven our sensory experience of the world, rekindling within us a fascination, a delight, an awe for the sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and textures we encounter. It ought to help us reconstitute the meaning of our lived experience, bringing us closer to a state of equanimity in the face of our individual and shared histories.

Perhaps I’d do well to unpack each of those final experiences above.

Your Last Words

You may know that among the most common regrets of the dying is “I wish I’d had the courage to express myself.”

How frequently do we curb the expression of what is most essential within us for the sake of social games, mutely wondering and worrying what people will think? To their credit, these games often feel like matters of life and death.

And yet once life leaves them, the lips say nothing more.

I’m reminded of the work of Paul Watzlawick, famous for paraphrasing the behavioral scientists’ dictum: we can’t not communicate. The silence that stands in for speech says just as much as speech itself, and you likely know all too well that the absence of speech can be deafening.

Consider what you communicate to yourself and to others in not mapping your thoughts and feelings through words. Communication is the substrate of relationships, the stuff out of which they are made. And meaning is made at every step in the sequence of interaction between two individuals — whether or not words are uttered.

In my own experience and in the experiences of my clients it has become clear to me that ongoing embodied practice facilitates a loosening of the restrictions that bind our self-expression. We become more keenly aware of the discomfort involved in “zipping the lip” or “biting the tongue.” Our jaws begin to ache with greater clarity when we “grin and bear it.” The familiar acts of neurotic repression start to shine forth as distinctly unpleasant experiences, and we may find ourselves less likely to squash ourselves for the sake of perceived social norms.

At first this may seem uncontained. It’s a distinct change from the usual habits. However, this sort of practice also establishes a sense of security in the unfamiliar and a movement toward an internal locus of control, in which we become better able to regulate ourselves.

As it turns out, regulation and repression are two very different beasts.

In the consideration of last words, we don’t have to be morbid. We’d simply do well to consider that our lives will at some point come to an end, our relationships with others right along with them, and our ability to influence the meaning of those relationships. I often encourage clients to establish a “death practice.” In the midst of thinking about death, where does the body brace? What thoughts come to mind about the ways in which you’re not yet ready to die? What unfinished business comes to the forefront of your attention under the lens of The End?

Some loose ends warrant tying, while others you may decide are best left as is.

But what we know is that the final word in a signifying chain reconstitutes the meaning of those that came before it. The…meaning…of…a…sentence…is…defined…by…the…last…

If we consider a relationship as composed of a series of exchanges of information, messages coded in word and gesture, then we see clearly that the last words exchanged potentially have the ability to reconstitute the meaning of all that came before. The heartfelt apology, the confession of love, or the rejection of either may well have a profound influence on the discourse’s meaning.

However, here we’re presented with a puzzle. A question arises, do the last words need to reach or be understood by the other party in order to be meaningful?

Quickly we can answer: no.

As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan states, “the self is an Other.” The simple act of formulating one’s speech as if to be heard by another influences what is said — regardless of whether the other receives the message. The articulation of experience begs for a witness, but even if your words are uttered with yourself as the only witness, they have the capacity to create change. We must remember that whatever is spoken aloud is heard by at least one person, for whom the meaning of historical discourse may be reconstituted.

Your Last Meal

We have a curious relationship with food. What other animal has the luxury of being able to eat without first moving in such a way as to procure its food? We’ve flipped the biological order of operations when it comes to food, more often than not moving as a consequence of what we’ve eaten, guiltily burning the calories we’ve previously consumed.

Likewise most animals don’t occupy themselves with other stimuli while eating. Perhaps they find themselves chewing while scanning the horizon for predators, but they’re without a doubt entrenched in the experience of eating. We, however, find any number of ways to turn eating into a box to check. We eat at “meal times” regardless of whether or not we’re hungry. We rarely know when to stop. And all along the way we’re quick to distract ourselves away from the experience, staring blankly at a screen or shoveling in food on the way to somewhere else.

It’s rare that we find ourselves in a situation where we’re present with our consumption.

Perhaps for good reason.

We may find that if we slow down and take notice of what we’re consuming that it doesn’t taste all that great or in extreme cases that we’re frankly revolted by it. We may find that we don’t know why we’re eating in the first place — perhaps we’ve muddled the biological chain of hunger and consumption, all-too-often substituting boredom or distress for hunger.

Consider though that whatever you’re eating — be it plant, animal, or some dubious byproduct — was at one point a living organism. A living organism that is no longer living. We might wonder: does it make sense to distract from its consumption? Is that the sort of respect we choose to pay to life (and death)?

Again, it may seem morbid, but it strikes me as a profound indicator of how we relate to the living world from which we emerge and to which we inevitably return. I can only hope that when the worms work through me, they aren’t in a grudging rush to do it. I can only hope that in their own wormy way, they’re grateful for sustenance and the means to continue their own survival.

I wasn’t raised with any particular traditions when it came to mealtime. Our family wasn’t one to say grace. And yet these days I find myself thinking before each meal,

“Today it is you. Tomorrow it may be me.”

I find that it slows me down and encourages me not to dissociate from the substance of the world. I’m more inclined to taste what I’m eating, to notice the textures and smells. And of course this may well mean that I choose not to eat certain foods any longer, my preferences changing as a result of the sustained attention.

I needn’t make every meal a culinary adventure or hedonic debacle, but I may well hope that I can find a sense of embodied satisfaction in each meal, knowing full well that it could be the last one.

Your Last Kiss

Freud is said to have claimed that the aim of psychoanalysis is enabling the individual to love and work. These, he thought, were the true distinctions of the human animal: the capacity to direct our energy and attention in service of recreating the world around us and to establish meaningful connections to those within it.

And yet our relationships are quite often compromised. We find ourselves mired in familiar routines, taking for granted that we or our loved ones will be there next we look. All too often we go through the motions of affection without any substance behind them.

That’s not to say that we never ought to grow comfortable or that every encounter must be brimming with passion. There’s value in the habits, if for no other reason than they signal stability and the absence of change (which may well be bad for a relationship, depending on the nature of change). It is to say that just as we are often false with our words, we’re false with our affection, sending mixed signals and muddled communication. Consider the lifeless kiss and dry “I love you.” Together they exemplify the vital distinction between what we say and what is said.

We might also consider what constitutes a kiss?

Frequently I guide clients through an exploration of the movements involved in suckling. It’s a movement made only by mammals. It’s one of the earliest movements we make, one on which our lives literally depend. It also has a profound influence on the development of the jaw, the head and neck, and our overall capacity to move. Furthermore it’s one of our earliest experiences of pleasure, satisfaction of biological drives, and connection to a loving other.

And we know well enough that a good kiss has the same devouring quality, doesn’t it? It too may feel life-giving or at the very least may remind us that we are alive. Likewise we might not find it too surprising that our most common terms of endearment have so many connections to food (honey, sweet, etc).

Truly the infant that doesn’t suckle doesn’t survive, and we might go so far as to say that the person who doesn’t kiss doesn’t love. There are of course different loves we experience, but I think you’ll catch my drift.

Here too we’re faced with the benefits of a well-organized embodiment practice — it connects us to our experience of pleasure. It establishes within us an understanding of our preferences, what feels good and what doesn’t, what we like and what we don’t. We find greater comfort in seeking out satisfaction when we develop an appreciation of our own sensory experience. We may well begin to cease our usual inhibitions and open ourselves up to being gripped by the world around us.

I’ll never forget when a client told me that as she explored awareness of her tongue and lips, she was surprised to find herself turned on for the first time in nearly a year — not by any particular object, rather by the restoration of sensory awareness itself.

We are — as we so often forget — animals enmeshed in a sensory world, which may well reward us with continued participation in it.

So again I’ll claim that a practice worth practicing ought to ensure that we don’t squander our last words, last meal, or last kiss. It ought to connect us to the sensory world at the foundation of our experience and enable us to make fullest use of those innately human capacities. It ought to equip us to connect more deeply, speak more clearly, work more deliberately, and love unabashedly. If not, we risk what makes us most human.

Originally published on The Ecosomatics Institute Blog