Last week I misplaced my iPhone. I thought I would be clever and use the Find-My-iPhone app to find it, but because the phone was turned off (which is how I usually keep it, since I have the luxury of loathing intrusive ringing or vibrating telephones), Find-My-iPhone couldn’t. If it’s not in my pocket, then the phone is usually attached to the charging cord on the kitchen counter. After looking in every pants and jacket pocket I’d worn during the last week, rummaging through the trash, tearing my truck apart, traipsing around the perimeter of the house, I finally gave in and asked my wife to bring new eyes to the situation. She found the phone in six minutes.
Separated From Sanity
While on the surface a lost phone might seem a pretty mundane incident, a bigger issue underlying the experience turns out to be me separated from something I’ve spent the greater part of my life trying to cultivate: Brilliant Sanity. Brilliant Sanity is a term rooted in Tibetan Buddhism described and practiced most elegantly by Karen Wegela, a contemplative psychologist who was kind enough to contribute a chapter to my Deep Listening anthology. The elements of Brilliant Sanity turn out to loosely mirror the cycles of the seasons. In her crystal clear account, How to Be a Help Instead of a Nuisance, Karen identifies five aspects of Brilliant Sanity. The first is The Cultivation of Openness.
Radical Openness
Openness is associated with the color white and invites us to walk through the world with a sense of sacredness and an unfixated, flexible mind. Losing my iPhone and then not being able to find it no matter where or how hard I looked, resulted in me increasingly losing the luster of Brilliant Sanity. Anything that might have initially unfolded as sacred and flexible in the search soon narrowed into frustration and fear as I began considering what important personal information was stored on the device. Whoever had the phone was surely draining my bank accounts and ordering every single brain science book on Amazon, while I frantically wracked my brain. But then I caught myself and moved in to …
The Richness of Experience
The second quality of Brilliant Sanity: Appreciating the Richness of Experience. This quality is associated with the color of pure gold. The moment I became aware of the crazy-fear thoughts arising in response to the missing iPhone, I was able to pause, lighten up and even laugh: woolly-bully left brain had caught me yet again with its penchant for spinning out endless stories of disastrous futures. All that I knew for sure was that my phone was somewhere and I knew not where. And that’s ALL I knew for certain. Paring back to that simple fact then quickly led me to …
I Can See Clearly Now
The third aspect of Brilliant Sanity: the Wisdom of Seeing Clearly. This aspect is associated with the deep blue of a clear sky. It arises out of left brain, right brain, mind, body and spirit all operating in concert to drive enthusiastic curiosity and inquisitiveness. As we well know, I am deeply curious about how my mind and brain work. I play an ongoing awareness game: doing what I can to catch left brain trying to drive me Brilliantly Insane. Left brain is a master at this game; I like to think I am a worthy opponent. Catching it clearly at work during the Great iPhone Search was encouraging. It also then allowed me to move on to …
Expressing Compassion
The fourth element of Brilliant Sanity: Expressing Compassion through Genuine Relationship. This element is associated with a warm, vibrant red color. One bit of compassion I am able to get in touch with and express is towards myself and the deeply disorganizing response my brain has to loss. Not only the loss of my iPhone, of course, but the loss of friendships, parents, idealized visions, the sweetness of my daughter’s infancy and early years, of my own youth and untold, unrealized personal promise. Loss undergirds virtually every element of human enterprise and if I don’t turn away from it, but instead do my best to turn gently toward loss with softness and compassion, it becomes workable. It also then allows me to move toward …
Applied Effectiveness
Archie and Gracie Lap-Chilling After a Day of Mutual Mischief
The fifth aspect of Brilliant Sanity – Taking Effective Action. This aspect is associated with the growthful color green. Recognizing how being emotionally disturbed distorts not only my capacity to think clearly, but also my senses of vision and hearing, I am able to tell my wife of my plight and ask her for help. The first thing she does is go online and look at the ATT call log. No calls have been made on my iPhone that I didn’t recognize. Next she asks me to think harder about where and when I had it last. Together we determine that the probability is high that the phone made it home with me the last time I was out. Next she starts looking room by room, leaving no covered surface unturned. In my office she lifts up a picture of Bodhi the dog that the cats have apparently knocked into an open carton of Neuro-bliss. And there, under the dog picture next to the bottles of bliss, sits my iPhone.
Thanks for taking us not somewhere over a rainbow but to the right here and now of compassion.
I totally agree with the left brain finding any opportunity to ‘take over’ if we should pause in the ‘awarness game”. Now as soon as I hear/feel the left brain’s persuasive narrative cajoling me, (particularly when i have lost something) I try to stop listening to the monkey chatter, and go right down into body awareness. Here in this non-verbal realm, I can conjure up a different way of knowing, and often, this non-verbal ‘clue’ leads me to the ‘lost’ article.It sounds hokey, but when it works, I am amazed that my body stores such knowledge. and I am consciously using this source more often.
And wouldn’t it be great Josefinka, to be taught to recognize and honor body wisdom from birth?!
This has to be one of the best titles ever…it made me think of Magic Crystals emerging from disappointing salt chunks. I cope with the same thunderstorms of verbiage everytime my keys, phone, purse, calendar take a vacation without me. I have learned that my frustration is only that of needing a vacation myself. Often, my cats or dogs are involved in the disappearances, which I understand as their call to me to wake up. My strategy now is to mindfully look at every surface in my house, as if these are the most sacred of altars. When critical verbiage emerges, I turn it into random poetry, saying something like every third or fourth word aloud until the process envelops me in the ridiculous which is a funnier state to be in than the frustrated. While family members dream of velcro vests for my belongings, I sing Monty Python’s “Destiny, Destiny, no escaping that’s for me” then often leave the phone (my fourth brain) behind until I can develop a clarity about its journey.
I appreciate being given these added tools of color and process, since it is virtually impossible for me to leave my house if I loose my keys. I now will look at these events as opportunities to practice deep listening and will tell the animals that they have mindful cohorts in the Northwest. It appears the animals know that when energy is too great, entropy is the perfect antidote for rest and digest. Thanks for this post, so funny and real, which also supports finding wisdom in loss.
This reminds me of one of the lessons of wisdom I learned from my father – humor, or an aspect of crazy wisdom. My father was a disorganized slob (I say that with loving appreciation, if you can imagine that), something that I also learned from my father, to the annoyance of women who have had the fortune of crossing my path in life. Anyway, back, way back to the lesson from my father… My father is an artist and builder of various things including houses and wooden boats, well… he’s gotten a bit old and doesn’t do that anymore. But, he used to, and I used to work with him when he could corral me. And he, and I, would lay down tools in the usual process, and they would disappear into the chaos of his workspace. Then we would spend a lot of frustrating time searching for tools, instead of getting actual work done. Eventually, we would consult with each other on where the dang tool could be, having searched everywhere it could possibly be. Then we would get to my father’s great lesson – if the tool couldn’t be found anywhere it could possibly be, it must be somewhere it couldn’t possibly be, as in some place we knew with absolute certainty we don’t use the tool and therefore it couldn’t be. Invariably after a few minutes of searching the places where it couldn’t be, we would find it, scratching our heads, wondering out loud, “how could it have possibly gotten here?”
Somehow, in our familial tradition, a smattering of those five principles of brilliant sanity entered into our experience of the creative and not so creative chaos that has made up much of our lives. Though, honoring the disorganizational principle, I won’t even try to figure out how, and leave it at that.
As always, thank you for your stories, insights and correlations.
Tonio, it’s called The Builder’s Clever Ploy: lost tools are the perfect excuse to hang out at the hardware store! Shhhh.