Passionate Learning :: Philosophy Psychology Education Essays

Passionate Learning To lack self-respect is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of each love or indifference.....It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stage, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something that we could say no without drowning in self-reproof is an idea alien to this game.-Joan Didion, On Self-RespectLast Spring, as part of a senior project, I took Tai Chi classes and researched how meditation is used in mind/body medicine. I read several books by doctors who use meditation as a form of healing, in stress-reduction clinics and as treatment for community suffering from severe disoblige and panic dis modulates. One doctor in particular, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches a method he calls mindfulness, in which he has his patients meditate in order to achieve total mind/body awargonness. Zinn instructs patients to focus on their pain and to become aware of it. This often helps them realize tha t they can reside with their pain. No pain is too extreme, he says, in the same way that no emotion is a wrong emotion. Awareness is the only absolute, and the only thing that allows people to live in the moment. Not live for the moment, but live in the moment.I left that project feeling extremely aware and extremely at peace. subsequently three years of struggling to find answers, happiness, and a sense of purpose, I began to appreciate my present state of mind. I began to revel in the struggle, confusion, and push of non knowing. And as I approached graduation, my high school experience suddenly made sense to me. I understood life as a system of games. juicy school was simply one of them. I came to realize that playing games was both understandable and necessary as long as we are aware that we are playing them. I realized that a major struggle throughout high school had been my struggle to resist playing its game. I spent my three years at boarding school governed by my passi ons rather than playing by the rules of the institution. And in refusing to play by its rules, I made it increasingly more difficult for me to function within its realm.By rules, I do not mean the actual dos and donts, but rather, I am referring to the prompts the school sets up in order to fulfill its goals as an academic institution.