More on "Tips for Transformative Learning"

In response to my recent blog on "Tips for Transformative Learning," one reader asked:

"Can you spell out some of the drawbacks/how learning is restricted when we approach learning with a more experienced mind, recognizing familiar material, and categorizing things into familiar cubbyholes?"

My response: 

While it obviously helps to simplify complex data --- insofar as our minds can so quickly analyze and sort incoming information into the familiar --- downsides, specifically in relationships and counseling, include the fact that none of us like to be seen as “nothing but,” or placed on the proverbial “Procrustean bed”* of another person’s reduction of us to only their theories about us.  We want significant others to see us through the eyes of “beginner’s mind,” on our own terms, not those accompanying pat prejudgment.

That, and the equally important fact that much of life, including counseling work, requires creative responsiveness; or what Harvard psychiatrist, Albert Rothenberg, calls “homospatial process.”  Understood most simply, this act requires our bringing into the same (“homo”) mental or imaginative space (“spatial”) at least two ideas or concepts that are not typically seen as going together.  Coping flexibly with life necessitates this ability to shed familiar, well-worn (if ineffective) “solutions” to our problems, our aspirations; and to integrate truly new combinations toward the goal of composing a robust and creatively responsible life.

If psychologists Rollo May, Carl Jung, and Abraham Maslow are all correct, and our needs for curiosity and creativity are in some ways as fundamental to our existence as air and water, then we do ourselves a disservice by seeing only “monocularly” --- where “X” equals “X,” and only ever “X.”  That is, our viewing new information only ever in terms of the familiar stifles a basic human drive toward always growing, deepening, expanding; all of which require an attitude of open-minded creativity.

Next question by reader: 

"Conversely, could you draw out the benefits of approaching material with a wide-eyed wonder?"

My response:

Psychologist Robert Sternberg has noted that the single highest correlate of passion in one’s life is “novelty.”  Approaching life from the perspective of beginner’s mind refreshes the dull, and with it comes a kind of internal, vital (even youthful)  radiance that is readily observable in those whose lives are in service of creativity and continual new learning. 

Further, if we can only learn to “decenter” from our own frame of reference --- our biases, our tried-and-true convictions about what is --- we then have opportunity to actually change or transform. 

In fact, in therapy and counseling, it is first incumbent upon the counselor to “decenter” (what Freud called “evenly hovering attention,” or psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, operating “without memory or desire”); then to aid the client move into a similar openness (“observing ego”) toward the whole of his/her life.  Stuckness in life is typically understood as an incapacity to imagine “outside the box” of what is currently not working well anyway.  Freedom to see with fresh eyes, beginner’s mind, is often more than half the battle won when it comes to personal problem-solving.

Finally, from reader:

"Any practical tips for achieving beginner’s mind when sitting down to study?"

My response:

In recent years, the psychological research of Daniel Siegel (UCLA), Richard Davidson (University of Wisconsin), and Jon Kabat-Zinn (Harvard) has made abundantly clear that one may cultivate creativity and “beginner’s mind” by mindful awareness practice.  Practically speaking: before sitting down to study, why not take just 5 minutes to quiet the mind?  Focusing on simply breathing is perhaps the simplest approach.  Move away from the distractions (in the East, “the ten thousand things”) of workaday brain, center oneself in a calmer, more open and fluid place within, and then set out in one’s studies with the intention to learn something new today. 

I also recommend very active reading.  By this I mean: move into an imagined dialogue with the material at hand, including writing notes all over the pages as you read (agreeing, disagreeing, looking up new words and noting them, connecting today’s concepts with other ideas you’ve encountered, notating creative inspirations or novel ideas [“homospatial process” again], etc.).  Don’t allow yourself to go on “automatic pilot” as you read.  Actively dig into the material.  (As I’ve stated elsewhere [see "Tips for Transformative Learning"]: read with the additional intention of teaching someone else, within 48 hours, what you’re reading today.)

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*For more on the "Procrustean bed," see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes