biocognition : mackenzian

May 11, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Don’t shut down

New opportunities present themselves at every stage of life. Approach the aging process with courage and hope. Honor that which you have been, welcoming new possibilities for wisdom, objectivity, and greater knowledge of the Spirit. Realize that as time passes, new ways of receiving and reflecting God’s love will open.” —Intermountain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Advices and Queries

Jamaican culture used to include the convention that elders wouldn’t tell younger people their age. I’m not sure of the reason behind the rule, but Mario Martinez’ work on biocognition includes the advice that readers not to share their age no matter how old they are. People are easily caught in cultural understandings of aging.

And there are so many aging rules. If you’ve ever been told you’re “too young” or “too old” to enjoy an activity or make a certain decision, you’ve been subjected to social rules about age. It can be endearing to have elders want to include youth socially, and it can be frustrating to be rendered incompetent before you’re ready to wind down.

The last time I wrote about my grandfather, I said, “We need the long perspectives of time to learn well and take constructive action. And we need those who carry their wisdom in their bodies so it’s with them and of service to others wherever they might go.”

I still feel that way today, and Grandpa, in this post’s featured photo, is still one of my sample bodies!

Perhaps you too would like to enjoy and live well into your early 100s, hand-cutting sugar cane and taking walks around your yard in the sun. It’s not just length of life that Grandpa’s enjoyed; he also enjoys quality of life with the support of his local children and others. Overall, he’s is in better shape as a centenarian than some people thirty years younger than he is.

Bottom line? He isn’t meeting cultural expectations for people in his age group. He’s still active and social (and has all the same personality quirks he did as a younger man) and only convention says he shouldn’t be.

The Friendly advice to “approach the aging process with courage and hope” rather than fear is best applied when we’re young, just so we can keep practicing through the decades. As the Intermountain community wrote, “New opportunities present themselves at every stage of life.” That’s absolutely right—and it’s up to us to take those opportunities as they come.

April 10, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Contradicting our co-authors

I recently told a friend and client that we couldn’t afford to give up on people who’re different from us. Even if we don’t like each other, don’t understand each other, and our antipathy is entirely mutual, our destinies are tied and we can’t afford not to care.

We live on the same planet, there are no alternative planetary homes, and though we can vote each other off our social islands (and increasingly do), we can’t vote each other off our common rock except through the mechanisms of genocide.

I find that concept a lot easier to speak about and digest than the principle that we co-author one another’s identities.

This idea that I determine what I think of myself with others and not all by myself isn’t especially modern. But there’s some science in co-authorship. As Mario Martinez explains in his writings on biocognition, culture establishes meanings for common experiences and trains us in how to embody and live out those meanings.

For example, in this culture, many people pair phrases like “I’m getting old” with groans and complaints about creaky joints or reduced stamina. I’ve done it. The performance is based on an implicit belief that aging necessarily means losing physiological or psychological function and that pain is to be expected.

Such beliefs aren’t the whole story.

There is much scientific evidence showing that the perception of pain is strongly influenced by cultural contexts. For example, if you fracture your leg falling down a set of stairs that are badly maintained by your negligent landlord, you will feel significantly more pain than if you were to fracture it by diving off a cliff to save a drowning child.

Beliefs can wound, heal, and interpret pain based on cultural contexts.” —Mario Martinez

Our cultures teach us what to consider strange or painful. They teach us what to celebrate and when to mourn. As I shared in the last post, they also teach us how to interpret and value suffering—as discipline for a future blessing, perhaps.

Unlearning these lessons when they don’t support our health and well-being means that we have to contradict our co-authors: authority figures, relatives, religious instructors, and the cultures these and other figures represent.

Some people start contradicting co-authors as teenagers, but for others of us, unlearning and re-learning are processes that last much longer than our second decades. They can also provoke conflict, which makes sharing life on our social islands very challenging.

Martinez offers several questions to help his readers move through the processes of unlearning and re-learning unhelpful beliefs:

Identify your tribal and religious authorities to find the model of suffering you were taught. For example, suffering to reach success, wealth, wisdom, or heaven.

Observe what you feel in your mind-body when you discover how you were taught suffering. Was it a religious authority, a book, a teacher, a parent?

Who continues to remind you that you should suffer?

How do you punish yourself when you do something wrong?

Where did you learn [that you have to pay for your sins]? Is it affecting your health, wealth, or love?

Consider that rather than paying for your bad deeds or ‘sins’ with suffering, you can take corrective action.

Commit to applying your new corrective action next time you determine you have to atone for a bad deed. What authority must you defy [if you do that]?” —Mario Martinez

I appreciated reading these questions, especially during the season of Passover.

Buried in the story of the Exodus is the idea that someone had to suffer for Pharaoh’s stubbornness—many people, in fact. While there are many ways to interpret the other elements of this powerful story, there’s a sense in which the Hebrews’ freedom gets tied to others’ suffering.

That story is among the first cultural tales that ever taught me that eventual reward requires someone to suffer first. But all the better if that someone isn’t me!

I’m beginning to believe that this is a cultural belief worth defying. I’m also beginning to hope that as activists dream up major transformations in our social cultures on issues from climate change to capital punishment, we can learn to dream up freedom that doesn’t depend on our or others’ pain.

March 4, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Learning by accident

What was the last thing you learned by accident?

Biocognition specialist Mario Martinez gives a few examples of incidental learning in his book The Mindbody Code.

Children develop motor and strategic skills through a video game hobby. Adults build focus by way of tai chi practice. Daniel-san learns integrity, self-respect, and self-defense through car waxing and bonsai training.

There are other examples from the worlds of education and crafts: students who study both mathematics and music build their facility with space, time, and pattern recognition. Knitting and crochet seem to help practitioners grow more at ease with failure, recovery, and the principles of computer programming.

We can learn new skills and mature by building competence in different areas of our lives than the ones we think need change; zooming in on a desired ability and grinding at it until it yields isn’t the only way!

Increasing competence in an area of life also typically means building confidence life-wide. As competence and confidence build, fears decline. That’s a good thing!

Increasing your competence [gives] you faith to continue without any guarantees. No fears, including the fear of emotional wounding, can be resolved with guarantees or appeals to logic… Competence reduces fear.” —Mario Martinez

This is a concept that makes me read a part of the Sermon on the Mount in a new-to-me way.

Jesus advises his followers not to worry about the basics of survival: food, shelter, clothing, and longevity.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin… That is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire. Will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ …But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” (Matthew 6:25-34)

The last time someone told me not to think about a purple cow, purple cows were all I could think about. That’s what happens when you have a prohibition without a substitute.

At least in this passage, Jesus tells his followers not to worry but also advises them on what to do instead. His substitute for worry is like an incidental learning experience: as we collectively “seek kingdom and righteousness [justice] first,” he teaches, we find our needs provided for. As we prioritize just relationships and build the kind of community that holds in both sunshine and storm, we also stumble into a world where no one has to be fearful or hungry.

People thrive in a just world, not because as individuals they put a lot of energy or willpower into surviving, but because just relationships are the containers in which life and lives are respected and supported. Individual flourishing is a property of that container, but like focus in tai chi and strategic smarts in video games, it’s something that emerges, not something that’s sought out.

We don’t have to scrap around a disordered world to get what we need, and ultimately, even when we have promises to draw comfort from, we can gain a great deal from disciplined practice: we grow from the skills we’re focused on and benefitted by what we learn on the way.