Campfire Story

Resonant Attention, Right/Left Brain, Complexity

Think about being outdoors, a pile of wood dancing with flames in front of you. You have a stick in your hand and you’re fully absorbed in tending the burn, gently poking here and there when you notice the logs shifting.

Suddenly, a cracking sound comes from the forest all around. Automatically, you drop into full bodily presence: Your ears become radars; your eyes widen and take in more information; and you’re ready to run if you need to. But you don’t need to. Actually, all is well. And for a while, you stay in that in-between space, where you’re both listening to the woods all around you and still poking that fire.

Not me. Let’s call her Flor.

That zero point place of simultaneous attending and allowing—listening and aware as you maintain focus—that is the attitude you can apply in your body to create major and micro miracles of healing. It’s not something that MDs are ever taught, though I’ve heard of surgeons chasing it. Not to mention high-level athletes of all stripes. It’s what is called ‘flow state’ and it happens when both sides of your brain are engaged in a coherent manner.

Arguably, humans used to be coherent in this way much of the time. When we spent our days in outdoor activities, we presumably used more of our brains coherently than today’s keyboard jockeys, who ghettoize themselves in left brain patterns of focusing narrowly, reducing information, creating short cuts, and getting the ‘correct’ answer. Normal schooling, which emphasizes left brain tool using and efficiency and dismisses much of the right brain’s attention to the minutiae, to context, to the felt sense, to individual uniqueness, and especially to the numinous, has pushed this pattern to the extreme. And it seems likely that these habits contributed to the greatly reduced ability to take in new information that we saw during the pandemic, when people were content to write-off crucial new information as disinformation—and even attacked people bringing in news from the edge.

The Campfire attitude, which we experience when we’re doing Resonant Attention and creating bursts of healing flow, can also be spoken about as full presence in the now-moment. It’s possible that stabilized form of this coherence is what we think of as ‘enlightenment.’ I experienced such a state years ago, after a difficult relationship forced me to seek refuge in meditation. After about a month of nearly continuous now-presence, I entered a samadhi state for about two weeks, in full flow with the world around me.

When I drove my car, it would stop seemingly of its own accord to avoid a fender bender. When I slept, my body would lie composed and resting, but I never lost consciousness. My scoliosis completely straightened, since what had been holding it in place were beliefs about who I “was,” but weren’t true now. In fact, all of humanity’s problems seemed to be memories or projections, because they weren’t happening right then. It made me wish that we could all enter that awareness together, since so much trouble would simply evaporate if we weren’t always siphoning events onto ontological platforms—right or left; good or bad—and instead became able to countenance complexity, nuance, and paradox.

This seems the way forward, what our information-dense times are nudging us towards. So practicing Resonant Attention isn’t just good for your body—it’s good for your soul, too!

Love,

Stella