Then choose a topic from your personal or professional life and do the same exercise – ask ten questions about your career, your relationship, your health. Record the questions in your journal – no answers yet, just questions.
THEME OBSERVATION
Working with a theme is a powerful tool for focusing your Curiosità. Choose a theme for the day and record observations in your notebook. You can jot down your thoughts throughout the day, or just make mental notes to be recorded in your notebook at a quiet time before sleep. Aim to make accurate, simple observations. Speculation, opinion, and theory are fine, but actual observation offers the richest resource.
Your list of a hundred questions, or the power questions, will provide plenty of themes for this exercise. Additionally, you can choose any of the following or make up your own. Some favorite themes include: Emotions, Seeing, Listening, Touch, Aesthetics, and Animals. Do this exercise on your own or choose a theme with a friend and compare notes at the end of the day.
CONTEMPLATION EXERCISE
In an age of sound bites, contemplation is becoming a lost art. Attention spans grow shorter and the soul suffers. To contemplate, as defined by Webster, is “to look at with continued attention, to meditate on.” It comes from the root contemplari, which means “to mark out a temple” (con, “with”; templum, “temple”) or “to gaze attentively.”
A Sample Theme Exercise
My friend Michael Frederick is a theater director, acting coach, and teacher of the Feldenkrais Method, the Alexander technique, and yoga. He has been doing theme work for more than twenty-five years. He graciously agreed to share the following unedited sample from his notebook:
January 10, 1998. Theme: Contact with Material Objects
1) 7:40 a.m. Noticed the quality and sense of my feet first touching the floor. That the contact with the floor was supporting me and allowing me to continue lengthening through my body as I stood up for the first time today.
2) 8:20 a.m. As I brushed my teeth, I saw how I was holding my toothbrush too tight in my right hand and this tension spread up through my arm and shoulder causing neck tension. Then I looked in the mirror and noticed I was slumping.
3) 11:30 a.m. Holding the telephone with a vise grip and with my head cocked to the right side causing a pain in my arm and shoulder. Similar to my toothbrush observation. Holding on to objects with an over-effort … “for dear life.”
4) 4:30 p.m. While eating a sandwich in a hurry, I saw how I would gobble the food down without paying attention to what I was eating. Speed was important and this made me lose contact with the taste and even knowing exactly what the sandwich consisted of.
5) 5:30 p.m. I also noticed the sunset today and the warmth of the sun contacting my face allowed me to slow down and see what was in front of me (i.e., bringing me more into the present moment).
6) 9:30 p.m. Sorting through today’s mail. Having to take time with the junk mail (i.e., junk material objects). Felt like my life was/is taken up with sorting & filing & fixing & handling material objects. I become a “caretaker” of these objects!
7) 10:30 p.m. As I hold this pen in my hand, I’m noticing how little effort is required to actually write. The pen works very well without the extra effort of pushing.
Choose any question from the previous exercises – for example: What people, places, and activities allow me to feel most fully myself? – and hold it in your mind for a sustained period, at least ten minutes at a time. A good way to do this is to take a large sheet of paper and write the question out in big, bold letters. Then:
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS EXERCISE
A powerful complement to contemplation, stream of consciousness writing is a marvelous tool for plumbing the depths of your questions. Choose any question, and working in your notebook, write your thoughts and associations as they occur, without editing.
Devote at least ten minutes to writing your responses. The secret of effective stream of consciousness writing is to keep your pen moving; don’t lift it away from the paper or stop to correct your spelling and grammar – just write continuously.
Stream of consciousness writing yields lots of nonsense and redundancy but can lead to profound insight and understanding. Don’t worry if you seem to be writing pure gibberish; this is actually a sign that you are overriding the habitual, superficial aspects of your thought process. As you persevere, keeping your pen on the paper and moving it continuously, you’ll eventually open a window through which your intuitive intelligence will shine.
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