078: Cosmic Breath Meditation

Dear listener,It’s been quite a while since I’ve written. I think I’ve been preoccupied with the stages of healing, which include gaining enough strength to walk again, wound closures, adjusting my nutrition to support the healing, and implementing ways to improve the quality of my sleep- one of the cornerstones of the repair process.When the body is in a state of stress, it operates as if there is an emergency. And emergencies take priority over standard maintenance issues. For example, if you have a fire in the kitchen, you’re probably not going to focus on the small leak under the sink. The leak can wait. The fire takes priority.Having said that, someone I know recently asked me to comment on the intersection between meditation and psychiatry. I have a topic in mind based on a recent verse of the Bhagavad Gita. However, I want to finish the verse and consult a expert teacher, if I can, before I attempt to make what I hope will be a well-informed exploration of the topic. I might need another month for that- I’m still taking time off to digest the past three to four months. The end of the summer is a good time to rest then shift gears before the uptick in professional activity in the fall.In the meantime, I’d like to comment on some films I watched at the Middlebury Film Festival in Vermont. They were surprisingly moving, creative, and thought-provoking. If you ever get a chance to see these films, I highly recommend them, particularly for someone who is facing :* Headwinds, whether personal, financial, or social, which appear to blow against a creative, professional, or personal project.* Actions that aim to defeat the odds .* Hurdles- which can be overcome by a strength powered by the love for a projector craft.* Negative thought that your work doesn’t matter, wont have an impact- which is a derailment from that each person and their contributions DO MATTER. * A crisis of faith- and need to witness what might be called divine guidance or intuition in action.* Struggles with isolation, and can benefit from remembering how connection catalyzes healing and persistence.* Mechanical or pressured living causes a forgetting of what it means to be human, and how divine creative expression is transformative. While the stories of the people featured in these films involve very different degrees of fame—some are virtually unknown, like the single woman living in Northern Vermont, another film reflects architects and designers whose work developed something of a cult following, and still others feature people like Billie Jean King and Billy Preston—they all have something to say about being human.I’m not a film reviewer. However, as a psychiatrist and fellow journey-woman, I found myself seeing the messaging in these stories through a particular lens. I could see how each of these stories can be transformative to the viewer, and for very different reasons.At the bottom of this essay, I’m going to provide the names of the films. I strongly recommend you view them—not simply to see the films themselves, but perhaps to understand yourself a little better. Each film reflects some aspect of being. I also suggest watching them with other people, because I think each of them prompts a discussion.A quiet woman in Vermont The film about the woman in the Northern Vermont, called Glorious Obscurity—struck me as a deeply spiritual short film. I experienced it as a film about a woman who interacts with nature, objects, and farm animals in an incredibly still way. A little spoiler alert: she created a museum of ordinary, commonplace objects. One of her installations, which features tea bags, might make me never drink tea in quite the same way again. When I saw the installation piece, I thought about all the cups of tea I’ve ever had. Tea alone. Tea with another person. Tea under different circumstances. My tea-drinking days. My abstaining-from-coffee days. My medicinal-tea-for-healing days. The days of experimenting with different herbs, whether North American, Ayurvedic, or just English teas. And then there was the moment when she talked about her donkey at the end. Personally speaking, that just broke me.I could feel her love for this animal. And I personally love donkeys, too. But there was something more to it—the stillness that this creature invited her to experience. That stayed with me. She had her own stillness as she spoke. Design/builders who play with form This design-build film was based on an architectural group that started near Sugarbush, Vermont, in what I believe was the late 1960s. They built some of the wildest, wackiest architecture. Some of the exteriors, I think, would take time to grow on me, while others I absolutely loved. The interiors, introduced the concept of living space as something playful and creative. The space itself became part of the creative process. And then there was the way they actually constructed the buildings.I’ve never seen a creative process quite like this because, normally, you have a plan. You make the plan, and then you build according to the plan. They didn’t quite do that. They figured it out as they went along. Innovation emerged from including what would normally be called mistakes. That was such a prime example of the artist’s process: experimentation, having some kind of vision, and then experimenting along the way—folding errors into the process as something to interact with and contemplate rather than simply something to correct. I personally loved how they took their time building. They would contemplate. Since their work was seasonal, they had the winter to pause work and contemplate the space and design as they returned to the site. The community evolved over time. The builders and designers initially lived in the spaces they created. Then people started having families. And eventually they were living in these spaces with all these children. They became something like a little village. I found that fascinating.Artists who think as one Three Is Four was another film about creatives which was filmed and edited by creatives, so the experience of watching it was more dynamic. It was about four avant-garde designers—eventually reduced to three—their trials and tribulations of their growth and creative process in the face of what looked like an inability, or perhaps severe limitations, in running a business. And how much that financial strain—this is my interpretation—handicapped them.But the three designers appeared to function as one mind, one unit. That was fascinating to watch. I personally want to follow their growth over time.For the love of sports The Billie Jean King movie, Give Me the Ball, is really important for any woman to understand or remember how much women’s rights have changed in the past fifty or sixty years. And how much Billie Jean King, amongst other trailblazers of her time, helped pave the way for equality in pay in sports and established women’s sports as an equally shared seat at the table, rather than an unpaid afterthought.I’m thinking about this in the context of my mother’s generation. It was not long ago women could not own property without a man’s signature. Nor could a woman have a credit card in her own name. I recall my mother opened a few charge cards at various stores in New York City, because that was what was available to her. Hers was the first generation in the United States that was able to have that without a man’s consent.For this reason, I want to highlight something that was said at the very end of the film. I think it was Coretta Scott King: Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.That idea stayed with me. What it means is that, even if a previous generation did legwork, time adjusts, cultures adjust and (now) technology adjusts- rights, thus they need attending to, like a garden. Music, God and the conduitThe final movie, about Billy Preston, is not simply a story about an extraordinarily talented young man with a deep love for God, which developed as he grew up in the Baptist Church. For those of you who don’t know, Billy Preston played with many hugely famous bands, including the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Ray Charles.And he had a magical presence yet lived with his own skeletons. He chose, for very understandable reasons, to keep them so private that even the people closest to him didn’t know. While watching the film, I found myself wanting to make note of the singers who were also highlighted in the story, to listen to their music as well as Preston’s - his piano and organ playing was just phenomenal.There is something else about his story that stayed with me. If you choose to ignore something that haunts you, you know, that energy winds up going someplace. And because it is packed away and covered over, it can take a person down.I will be honest: when I’ve witnessed my patients face their own demons, they are more liberated—mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually (which can be a connection with nature).For Preston- as a Black man, he faced incredible headwinds in bringing his own demons to light. Even today, those topics can be challenging to find safe, supportive environments in which to heal. I feel for him. He was such a light upon the world. His talent, gracefulness and ease—these remain gifts to humanity.And perhaps that is one of the reasons I found myself so moved by these films. They reminded me that healing is not simply about repairing what is broken. It is also about what allows us to keep going: creativity, connection, courage, love, intuition, community, and sometimes simply the willingness to face what we’d rather not face. These are, in their own ways, reminders of what it means to be human.The following meditation is a little one, please share it with anyone in need of a drop of calm, self acceptance and knowing they are not alone. As always, take care. SL * Prickly Mountain and My Design/ Build Life. director Allie Rood* Glorious Obscurity. director Ronan Future* threeASFOUR: FULL CIRCLE. director Sean Ono Lennon, co-director Brian C. González* Give Me The Ball! directors Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff.* Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It. director Paris Barclay This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit evolutionmedicine.substack.com/subscribe