Notice, Experience, Practice

My sons say that learning is a participatory sport.

We learn through experience.

Our learning experience may be through reading, or through writing down our thoughts, or by tracing letters in sand in order to fix in memory a symbolic shape (a letter) with an associated sound. We learn by sitting in the driver's seat of a car and putting hands on the wheel and feet on appropriate pedals and turning the key and putting a functioning vehicle into motion. We learn from being still and simply noticing (i.e. without trying to affect) what is happening inside our bodies. We learn from efforts and falls. Every experience can be a learning experience, a transformative experience. For once we have learned a thing, we are changed, transformed.

But in order to learn we must notice. We must notice what happened, or when, or how, or why, or all of those. If a thing went wrong or right, if we got what we wanted or got something else entirely, we must notice the experience of a thing in order to learn from it, to be transformed by it. And experience is not just a head thing, it is a whole body thing, head (mind) being just a part.

How do we experience life? Through our senses, though noticing our bodies, our environment, through our full range of senses.

In the present moment? How can we be anytime else? Perhaps we're in memory of the past in this present moment, or perhaps we're in hopes or expectations for the future in this present moment, but we are always in the present moment. It's self-evident, once considered.

But are we fully noticing this present moment, the experience of it, the range of it? Of course not. Who can be human and notice the entirety of any present moment? We can only feel the experience of the moment from within our own skins.

I have learned from my own experience with debilitating pain that the saying, "Breathe and everything changes," is completely true. Change happens in one breath. In my body, every single breath I take creates a change. Of course. It's keeping me alive. When it stops, I stop. It's the exchange that is required to sustain my life in this body, and my body carries my life.

Change is incremental. In the late 90s I was sent for physical therapy for the first time, and the first thing the therapist said was some version of, "You're not breathing right." It has taken me years of learning, of small, breath-by-breath, incremental changes, to learn how to breathe "right."

On my own, by searching, searching, searching, I have devised a practice that works for me, a practice of noticing breath that can control (not eliminate) pain and lower my blood pressure. I tried and could not sustain the formal practices of yoga, and tai chi and qi gong. I tried water exercise and could not bear the coolness, nor the contact with all the necessary chemicals. I listened to this lecture and read that guru. Now I could (haltingly) tell you about my practice, but if you, too, will control pain and blood pressure with breath, you must notice your full body, you must learn some techniques that fit you. You must practice. It's there, it's doable. If I can do it, anyone can.

Notice, experience, practice. It's your life.