More on reflection
I’m still reverberating slightly after a meditation retreat last week. It resonated on several levels, but what’s relevant here is that I developed a better understanding of reflection.
Based on the teacher’s instructions, it seemed that I’d actually been practicing reflection for a long time, before I ever started meditating. I described to her my process of lying on the couch and letting my mind sink, and she confirmed that this was indeed what she’d been talking about.
100-year-old water well in Argentina, lined with hand-laid bricks. Photo: Carlos Ponte
Reflection, at least in this sense, isn’t thinking. It’s like putting a question into your mind and then holding it there while looking down a well to see if anything floats up out of the shaft. The trick is learning to train your attention on the empty space inside the well, without letting your intellect fill
it up with a lot of ideas.
What eventually surfaces can be an image, a word, or a phrase. In the case of this blog entry, it was both. I sat down and reflected in order to decide what to say here, and what came up was the phrase “reflection isn’t thinking.” I starting writing that down, and the well image followed before I had finished.
Reflection is a powerful tool for me. I use it to solve all sorts of problems, not just writing problems—for example, to figure out what’s really going on when something upsets me, so I can respond effectively, or to make tough decisions. What I understand now is that although this process is related to meditation, there’s a difference, which has to do with intention. Problem-solving reflection is goal oriented. Meditation is not. I was concerned that the one might be contaminating the other. But the teacher gave me some advice that works in either case: don’t let the reflection tip over into obsession. The acid test is falling into repetition: the same thoughts cycle back over and over, and you can’t let them go. The well shaft doesn’t stay empty—it overflows.
The inside of my head
The graphic just below is not a tag cloud but a WORD cloud, generated by a site called Wordle, which is just amazing. Paste in text (or give it the url of your blog, as I did) and it presents you with a randomly formatted cloud of words sized according to their frequency in your text. Then you can redesign your cloud using the many available fonts, layouts, and infinite colors.
It’s like looking into the inside of your own head. You suddenly, literally, have a picture of what’s on your mind. How come I used the word “book” so much? Why is “really” so large? It was a surprise to see that “something” and “everything” appear a lot in these posts. I don’t like abstract words. Was I being lazy? Did I not have a clear idea of what I really meant? (Click the image for a larger, legible size.)
This blog as a Wordle
Though I initially saw Wordle as a mirror of my mind, when I looked through the gallery of clouds other people had posted, I realized that was only one possibility. You can create designs deliberately by manipulating your text, like the person whose “dog breeds” Wordle is dominated by an enormous yellow terrier. Some people make Wordle form whole sentences pointing in different directions. Others send a message, like this advocate for the food democracy movement.
After making my blog Wordle, I tried passages of work I’d done for clients, and saw that my notion of the mind mirror was actually quite limited. I’d been thinking just in terms of concepts. But the Wordle is also a graphic representation of your writing style. Some of my clients like long words, some short; the respective texts create different visual patterns.
Much meditation for me lately is about reflection—nonconceptual reflection, that is, as opposed to thinking. So here’s a completely nonconceptual way to reflect on writing.