The book "The Jew in the Lotus" by Kamenetz has been inspirational and affecting. It lead me to "Your Body Knows the Answer" by Rose, which reminds me of "Your Body Keeps the Score" by Van Der Kolk. The Rose book seems to be about a combination of Eastern-type meditation and the program developed by Eugene Gendlin called "Focusing".
I am somewhat familiar with that program and I thought I had written about it in this blog. There is a search window in the upper corner of the main web page for this blog "Fear, Fun and Filoz" and I put "focusing" in it. Turns out I use that word rather often and several posts came up. One was about visiting a medieval battlefield in Scotland while reading "All the Single Ladies" by Traister.
So, what? What is the point of all this? What the heck [just barely avoided the use of a bad word right there] does single women in America have to do with Scottish battles in the 1300's? The point is backgrounds, contrasts, associations. I may be the only male to have ever stood on that ex-battleground with the Traister book in the back of my mind. Sure, I could see the deeply aroused warriors and the fearful ones, too, charging each other with blood in mind. But I could also picture the sick fear of the wives and daughters, hoping that maybe their brother, their husband, their son would not be killed. Or, even wounded, since infections, though not understood, were often fatal.
Our minds are association machines, connecting this to that. We today are often in a situation of new backgrounds, new stark contrasts. Combinations that have not occurred before, maybe ever. I do the dishes and wipe down the stove while Mozart plays. I am not seated in a concert hall at the time. I take a phone call from a relative in a place and at a time we have never talked before. He has never been in the store while I am driving to a meeting and that is our first use of that combination. Naturally, new things to look at and new places to be while listening in, provoke new ideas and links between this and that. No wonder we keep getting so many rich new ideas!
