Meditation 1: Listen for Where the Ringing Ends and the Silence Begins

 

Listen for where the ringing ends and the silence begins.

This will force your mind to tune into the present moment.  Be aware of the moment you are in; do not surrender this present moment to the past or the future. Let this remind you to turn off distractions that pull your attention from being in the moment. 

From Medium, 

Are you listening?
Do you take the time to simply stop and listen — to yourself?
Our world has so many distractions. Some are important. Most can be a total waste of time and genuinely rob us of who we are meant to be. 

Distractions rob us of our ability to be at our best. Research indicates that silence gives us the space to be creative and think deeply about what matters. And yet, where do we find silence today? And, do we even want to experience silence? Modern studies indicate we do not. Why?
Our brains are constantly seeking dopamine. These distractions can use up all of our time and keep us from knowing what we should spend our limited and precious time on. What is the solution? Silence is our best hope for success.

From Huffington Post Listening to Silence; 

Silence speaks the international language of reflection. In many ways, it allows us to become more self-aware, to think about profound and trivial matters. Lawrence Durrell, a British author, said, "Does not everything depend on the interpretation of the silence around us?" Most of us have experienced conflict that can arise from a lack of restraint in speech. Are there such faults associated with silence? Gandhi said, "It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart." If you see the wind in its calmness, it has a peaceful and pleasurable quality to it but the same wind once in motion can turn violent in stormy weathers. The same can be said of words.

 

From Time magazine,

Across disciplines—from neuroscience to psychology to cardiology—there’s growing consensus that noise is a serious threat to our health and cognition. And that silence is something truly vital—particularly for the brain.

“Noises cause stress, especially if we have little or no control over them,” explains Mathias Basner, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in sound processing and rest. “The body will excrete stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that lead to changes in the composition of our blood—and of our blood vessels, which actually have been shown to be stiffer after a single night of noise exposure,” Basner says.

From TED, When Did You Last Take Some Time to Do Nothing?

Fired up and ready to go!

Saint Ignatius Loyola encouraged his followers in Latin, "Ite inflammate omnia" or, "Go forth, and set the world on fire!"

And so, I like to begin every class with another reference to fire:

"Fired up? Ready to go!"

This is a phrase I like to ask students as they enter my class.  It is a way of both checking in with students and reminding them that they are in my class and I want them to feel fired up about it.  Sometimes, if you are not feeling fired up, all it takes is repeating this and it can make you fired up.

But the phrase is also a fleeting reminder that we all have an influence on our world.  Maybe that influence is just the room we are in, but that influence ripples out.  So that phrase is a reminder to be sociologically mindful.  It is a reminder that we are a participant in society.  Society doesn't just happen to us; we are participants in the process.  That awareness is what Michael Schwalbe talks about as "sociological mindfulness."  It can change how we think and act and therefore how we influence the world.  As Present Obama said,

"One voice can change a room. 

And if it can change a room, it can change a city. 

And if it can change a city it can change a state 

And if it can change a state, it can change a nation 

And if it can change a nation, it can change the world."

(see the whole story by clicking on this link)

Regardless of your political affiliation, I think the sentiment here is true. You can change a room and that can change a much larger group. There's no telling where your influence stops. So, what do you want your voice to be? How do you want to change the world? Think with sociological mindfulness about the impact you have on the world even though it is small. 

The last reason why I like to use that phrase is because, as the video shows, even if you are not feeling fired up, after interacting with someone and saying that you are fired up, it just might get you fired up!

Go Forth and Set the World on Fire!

I will often end my classes with this phrase.  Fire is energy.  It spurs a process of change.  And, as Fr. Mark Bosco explains in Ite Inflammate Omnia: Setting the World on Fire with Learning published by Medium, 

...just as St. Ignatius wanted everyone to be set afire with passion and zeal for the Kingdom of God, we continually exhort our faculty, students, and alumni to be agents for change in the world, men and women for others.

Whether you are Roman Catholic or Christian or neither, there is much room and benefit for you to embrace the Jesuit values.  We can find reverence and appreciation for creation in all things.  We can embrace our agency and awareness of our role in that creation.  We can acknowledge our shared humanity with a desire to affect that humanity with loving nurture.  And education can be our guide to each of these.

I hope that my class can contribute to that sentiment.  

Collective Effervescence

It is in our human nature to be nurtured, to connect with other living beings especially people.  Cathy Malchiodi explains in Please Don't Take My Collective Effervescence Away, a 2021 Psychology Today article how at a basic, physiological level humans experience entrainment and at a psychological level they experience synchrony which can lead to collective effervescence, a powerful shared experience with intense emotion. 

Rime and Paez's 2023 Why We Gather: A New Look, Empirically Documented, at Émile Durkheim’s Theory of Collective Assemblies and Collective Effervescence is a meta analysis of research of "conditions of reduced self-other differentiation. Abundant data support that each successive moment of collective assemblies contributes to blurring this differentiation. Ample support also exists that because shared emotions are increasingly amplified in collective context, they can fuel high-intensity experiences. Moreover, recent studies of self-transcendent emotions can account for the self-transformative effects described by Durkheim at the climax of collective assemblies. In conclusion, this century-old model is remarkably supported by recent results, mostly collected in experimental settings."

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center has studied the power of shared human emotion, especially compassion and awe, and how humans express emotion, and how emotions guide moral identities and search for meaning. Keltner's research interests also span issues of power, status, inequality, and social class. He is the author of The Power Paradox and the bestselling book Born to Be Good, and the coeditor of The Compassionate Instinct. His most recent book, Awe, is a national bestseller. Keltner explains collective effervescence here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOKedWZU_wY

The Beauty of Collective Effervescence, a lesson from Keltner and the Greater Good Science Center.

Exploring the Sources of Collective Effervescence; A Multilevel Study by Lasse Liebst from University of Copenhagen:

Creating the sacred from the profane: Collective effervescence and everyday activities (2019) by Shira Gabriel, et. al. available from APA Psychnet

Abstract:

The current research examines the hypothesis that collective effervescence—the sense of connection and meaning that comes from collective events—is not just useful for understanding rare, unusual, and intense collective events, but also as a framework for understanding how seemingly insignificant and/or common collective gatherings (i.e. ‘everyday events’) may give meaning, a sense of connection, and joy to life. We found evidence for our hypothesis across nine different studies utilizing eleven datasets and over 2500 participants. The first three studies found that collective effervescence is best understood as a combination of feeling connected to others and a sensation of sacredness. The next four studies found that collective effervescence is found in common, everyday kinds of events and that it is related to various aspects of enjoying group activities. The last two studies found that collective effervescent experiences are common; three quarters of people experience collective effervescence at least once a week and a third experience them every day. Moreover, commonly experiencing collective effervescence predicts wellbeing above and beyond the effects of other kinds of social connection. Results are discussed in terms of the human need for social connection and the importance of groups.

From Protests, Parties, and Sports Games All Fill the Same Human Need (2017), an article in the CUT explains the benefits of a shared collective experience such as a concert and the research that supports the idea that these shared experiences are healthy for us.

The Covid-19 pandemic made it abundantly clear how much we need these shared experiences as Adam Grant explained in this 2021 op-ed for the NYT,

Most people view emotions as existing primarily or even exclusively in their heads. Happiness is considered a state of mind; melancholy is a potential warning sign of mental illness. But the reality is that emotions are inherently social: They’re woven through our interactions.  Research has found that people laugh five times as often when they’re with others as when they’re alone. Even exchanging pleasantries with a stranger on a train is enough to spark joy....Peak happiness lies mostly in collective activity.We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence. It’s a concept coined in the early 20th century by the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the sense of energy and harmony people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose. Collective effervescence is the synchrony you feel when you slide into rhythm with strangers on a dance floor, colleagues in a brainstorming session, cousins at a religious service or teammates on a soccer field.

 

This 2022 meta analysis from Frontiers in Psychology analyzes the connection between individual emotions and larger collective behaviors.

https://hii-mag.com/article/collective-effervescence

Collins 2004 Interactive Ritual Theory