Sister Cece Teaches Qi Gong: Intrasubjective Resonance and the Possible Function of God
It was 7 a.m. on the last morning of the retreat, and Sister Cecily, a 70-something Franciscan nun in exercise togs – Cece, as everyone called her – was teaching us qi gong. Though the retreat itself was sponsored by the integrative medicine department at UW Health, we were invited to participate in the regular morning yoga and tai chi sessions the nuns who live at the Christine Center hold for local residents. These were unquestionably the New-Ageyist nuns I had ever encountered, and they covered everything from Hildegard von Bingen to Native American dancing. I had contemplated skipping the session, but it would be one of the final times I would be with my retreat group, and Sister Cece had impressed me the previous morning with her yoga lesson and teaching us how to chant the syllable RAM from various chakras, all in that cheerful, no-nonsense way I remembered from nuns I knew as a boy.
I admit I was charmed. So I followed along as she demonstrated the various hand gestures for adjusting the energy field around the body, and explained that each movement had to be repeated to the sacred number nine. Asking her what kind of energy was in the energy field would have been too snotty, and besides the gentle movements were waking me up after I had sat in the meditation hall past midnight. After 20 minutes of qi gong and ten minutes of chanting, we sat down flor a half hour of silent meditation.
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I encountered many wonderful ideas this summer in the book, Teaching Mindfulness: A Practical Guide for Clinicians and Educators (McCown, Reibel and Micozzi, 2010), which I’ve been studying in preparation for the launch of the Practice Circle. One of the most interesting originated with Daniel Siegel, who proposed that mindfulness meditation involves a process of “intrasubjective resonance.” Siegel pointed to the discovery of “mirror neurons” in the brain which function to help us recognize the feelings, emotions, and even intentions of other people by reproducing them in our own awareness. For the neuroscience geeks out there, here’s how McCown et al describe the process of seeing your friend slam a finger in a drawer:
. . . [T]he mirror neuron system takes in and processes the movement of, say, finger-in-drawer, which is sent to the superior temporal cortex where the sensory consequences are predicted (sharp pain!). Then, this information is communicated through the insula to the limbic regions for processing of the emotional content (surprise, anger). This is fed back through the insula to the prefrontal cortex where it is interpreted and, finally, attributed to your friend. The circuit is complete. Your somatic and emotional states are now attuned to your friend: You tense your hand, cringe, and maybe even say ‘Ouch.’ The empathy you feel is based on perceiving your friend’s experience – with/in your own body.
This “resonance circuit” helps us feel empathy when we see someone in pain or sorrow; it’s how we predict what others will do without having to think about it.
Siegel proposed that the practice of mindfulness meditation brings the resonance circuit to bear reflexively to allow us to predict and attune to our own intentional states. Here’s a quote from Siegel’s book, Mindsight:
What is at first a form of interpersonal integration in the sharing of affective and cognitive states now evolves into a form of internal integration in the patient. With the entry of previously warded-off states of being in conscious awareness, the patient can now learn to develop enhanced self-regulatory capacities that before were beyond their skill set. It may be that as interpersonal attunement initiates a new form of awareness that makes intrapersonal attunement possible, new self-regulatory capacities become available. If the mirror neuron system were to be focused on one’s own states of mind, we can propose that a form of internal attunement would allow for new and more adaptive forms of self-regulation to develop.
An example from McCown et al:
Let’s start with the concrete, a meditation on awareness of the breath. You notice the in-breath. Your resonance circuitry predicts that an out breath is coming. It happens! And happens again. As you coincide repeatedly with your own intention, breath by breath you begin to resonate with yourself. This is a primal experience, like the infant and caregiver attuning in ways that help create secure attachment . . . And this same pattern is true for more abstract intentions such as the one in a mediation practice like choiceless awareness, notes Siegel (2007). In this case, the intention is to be open to whatever comes. While we cannot map the ‘whatever comes’ with the resonance system, we can, however, easily map the intention to be open. When our experience coincides with the map of being open, intrasubjective resonance begins.
As I read this, all kinds of sutta verses started coming to mind.
Irrigators guide water;
Fletchers shape arrows;
Carpenters fashion wood;
Sages tame the self. (Dh 80)
I also thought of the metaphor in Anguttara Nikaya 3:100 where Gotama compares the monk’s effort to purify the mind to the goldsmith’s process for removing impurities in ore, until at last the metal is malleable and strong. In all these comparisons, Gotama suggests that the practitioner stands in relation to an objectified mind or the self as the fletcher stands in relationship to the arrow; in the goldsmith metaphor, the process is one of introspection as the monk observes unskillful thoughts and nurtures the arising of concentration and tranquility in the mind.
In the Satipatthana Sutta, Gotama describes this training of the mind in detail, and again relates it to a work of craftsmanship, this time a carpenter with a lathe:
“‘Experiencing the whole body, I shall breathe in,’ thinking thus, he trains himself. ‘Experiencing the whole body, I shall breathe out,’ thinking thus, he trains himself. ‘Calming the activity of the body, I shall breathe in,’ thinking thus, he trains himself. ‘Calming the activity of the body, I shall breathe out,’ thinking thus, he trains himself.
“Just as a clever turner or a turner’s apprentice, turning long, understands: ‘I turn long’; or turning short, understands: ‘I turn short’; just so, indeed, O bhikkhus, a bhikkhu, when he breathes in long, understands: ‘I breathe in long’ . . .
Notice that Gotama isn’t just giving instructions here. He describes mindfulness practice as a kind of internal dialog wherein the practitioner sets his intention and then confirms the execution with awareness, “coinciding repeatedly with [his] own intention.” This is the self relating to the self – just as Siegel’s concept of intrasubjective resonance describes.
In another famous verse, Gotama comes up with a very personal simile for this relationship:
Neither mother nor father,
Nor any other relative can do
One as much good
As one’s own well-directed mind. (Dh 43)
This image hinges on the same parent-child resonance analogy McCown et al observe above. Through mindfulness, we can loosen our reactive identification with our thoughts and emotions, and learn to observe them as they arise and dissipate. We can learn to recognize the intentions behind our thoughts, words and deeds, and experience how unskillful intentions lead to unwholesome mind states. And we can begin to cultivate a compassion for ourselves that diminishes our aversion to seeing and embracing our lives just as they are. In short, we befriend ourselves. Siegel’s concept of intrasubjective resonance suggests a neurological correlate to what’s going on here. Meditation, he suggests, objectifies the relationship between bottom up and top down functions of the brain to permit structures that evolved to facilitate social relationships to be applied to the work of self-regulation.
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Sister Cece’s class was almost over when an idea arose as I meditated. What if practices like qi gong also accessed the resonance circuit, objectifying and projecting internal states so we can “work on ourselves”? What if religious practices such as prayer and ritual work the same way? What if God, rather than being a transcendental being or an empty myth, is instead a practice, a technology we developed to project an objectified self, to trip the resonance circuit, to enable us to better listen to and attune to ourselves? You may laugh, gentle reader, but at the time the idea seemed beautiful enough to send a tear rolling down my cheek.
It will take a fair amount of work to suss out this idea and its implications. I throw this out here in its undercooked state in hopes that readers may suggest fruitful lines of investigation, or, which would be nearly as merciful, to point out the gross flaws in this idea. If it holds any water, it seems to me it would put us skeptics in a different relationship to religious practices of all kinds, to help us explore the wisdom traditions with less trepidation, and to appreciate the continuity between traditional religions and secular dharma practice.
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That intrapersonal stuff sounds like scientific gobbledegook to my mind. I mean if it just happens why do we need to study it. I don’t think its something you can train up with a focus on that sort of thing. I think you’d do it by training up for compassion or goodwill or things of that kind. Its a naturally occurring phenomena.
Interesting you liked the qu chong. I’ve done it but can’t get into the energy thing and so i just do it as exercise – which is quite demanding enough despite its appearance of slow gentle movements.
Qi gong is useful as movement, as is tai qi, but it’s based on an unproven fallacy. And I agree that there is a lot of neurosciencegobbledygook above. Neurosinience has become the new snake oil, and I take a lot of that with many grains of salt.
It is certainly possible for us to have used techniques for generations that we didn’t fully understand, and only after the fact come to understand the science behind them. Water wheels are a real world example: we use the dynamics of the flow of the the water, and gravity to achieve our ends. An ancient explanation of why they worked might sound like gobbledygook but just might be trying to express something there was no elegant vocabulary for at that point.
I know I experienced that mirror reaction last night as I was watching a movie: noted the cringing feeling along my arm where a favorite character took a wound and someone else then poked them in that spot (I noted with interest that it was not the wound that made me feel the sympathetic reaction, but when someone was mean enough to aggravate it that I too experienced a shadow of the hurt) and thought how odd it was that the reaction happens even when it’s a fictional event, and happening to someone not physically present. All throughout my life I have had strong physical sensations when someone else was in pain and it never occurred to me there was science behind it — that this was normal. It never occurred to me that it was a *good* thing — I always labeled myself “a wimp” for not wanting to look at the screen when people got hurt. But now I can see it as a physical basis for what I label as “my higher nature” — an element of self that lifts me out of my own self interest and focuses my energy and efforts on helping others.
My compromise definition of God has long been that God is all the energy people put into doing good for others in the world — it is that “higher nature”; it’s good will — so why not include its effects and practices in the definition? Here I find language evolving back on itself here, where “goodwill” might have once been “God’s will” I see good will being each individual’s good will, flowing into what we have constructed as God.
I can see nothing wrong with discovering this has a basis in our genetic programming — if that makes it “mundane” instead of “holy” so what? I see holiness as a human construction anyway (it’s all mundane even when made up of our better natures).
I think it is a great idea to harness what we know of how these functions work, to better tune our skills. If it turns out to be “gobbledygook” — if we find in later centuries that we didn’t have a very good understanding of the mechanism, what does that matter? All our concepts are empty, just constructions, tools we use to get a better handle on how to live in the world — we shouldn’t expect them to be perfect renditions of reality. But we can use the tool — like the water wheel — without understanding everything about the way it works. If it gets us an improvement we’ll take it, and hope for more and better insights into the workings over time.
Mark:
I must be one of those “neuroscience geeks” you referred to, because I really enjoyed that section of your essay.
What’s more, I think it’s important that secular Buddhists become better versed in a naturalistic/science-based narrative like this one, as an alternative to the superstitious, “woo” narratives that we still hear too often among other contemplative practitioners.
And “contemplative practice”, I think, is the key word here, which encompasses certain kinds of yoga, qi gong, along with silent, sitting meditation. There may be some benefits to all of those forms, but I would try to very clearly distinguish between practice and theory.
For example, I regularly tune out my yoga instructor when he waxes on about “prana” and mind/body dualism (or perhaps it’s idealist monism, I’m not actually certain). I’m there strictly for the health benefits (i.e. both physiological & psychological), as I anticipate from reading more secular/rational/science-based sources on yoga.
I’m not suggesting it doesn’t exist. I am just saying that i find the language gobbledegook and that it seems irrelevant to the practice of buddhism. Of course there is a scientific explanation for it. There would be one for people who experience past lives as well. There is a scientific explanation for everything we experience and every type of phenomena. It would be a lot more useful to buddhist practice if neuroscientists could come up with a description of the processes that explained that.
Mark, I very much enjoyed and groked the mirror neuron system as the basis for empathy, how we perceive the feelings of others. I recently listened to a Brain Science Podcast on that very topic. You described it well. What I like so much about the neuroscience explanation is takes the woo out of it. It makes sense of it, and it makes sense of people who have trouble in this area.
I also like the way you pull it into resonance, and breathing meditation. Very nice tie in, and I thought it a rather helpful connection! It’s helpful to me, at least, to see how meditation can be one into resonance with the body, our environment, etc. I’m hesitant to use self here, but perhaps this resonance can help us release our grasp on selves, just letting go naturally through this resonance. Letting go is likely a byproduct of this resonance.
Perhaps yoga, meditation, tai chi, walks in nature, cuddles with the do tap into this resonance circuitry in a very real physical way, than the assumption, speculation that earlier people had proposed. It’s definitely worth investigating. I’m with Candol that the “energy” idea did not “resonate” with me, but I love yoga as a body meditation, and in that sense it does resonate with me. Linda made good points too about how something may work, but the interpretation of how something is working may not be quite correct, or they didn’t have the tools to know, or the language to explain.
To call it god? Well, than bangs into the bazillion definitions of gods we have out there. Sure someone can say that, but I like recognizing the process in a more natural, physical way:-) The word god is used in so many ways now it has no meaning, except for individuals who use it. I’ve had people say god may be physics, to which say, ok, but I’m going to stick with the word physics!
But I like the questions you proposed, including for those who make use of certain rituals like recitations, counting mala beads, etc. Perhaps there is something to that.
I really enjoyed this article! I hope you’ll write more about this retreat you were on.
Thanks, everyone, for your comments, and I apologize for the gobbledegook! It is important to note that Siegel is taking something generally (but not universally) accepted — the existance of mirror neurons — and extrapolating from it to speculate on the existence of intrasubjective resonance. It seems a wonderfully neat idea for me, because it suggests that meditation and other practices are a kind of technology that humans developed to enable the brain to use its resources in a new way. I also don’t resonate with “energy” in qi gong– I’m afraid I know better. But I also know that when I say to myself “May Candol be safe and protected from inner and outer harm”, I’m not really sending her some magic protective energy. I’m visualizing an intersubjective encounter to trigger an intrasubjective process of cultivating kindness and compassion. And when I send kindness and compassion to myself, I know there isn’t a separate sender and receiver — I’m imagining a social situation that doesn’t really exist, in order to be able to see myself from a distance and be able to care for that person as I would for a friend. So if these kinds of mental exercises — games, if you will — are capable of creating real change in the way I respond to the world, why might not other kinds of exercises, culled from the wisdom traditions of the world, be useful as well? We don’t have to believe in them to make good use of them.
Thank you for this personal article;
I resonated with a lot of what you wrote;
I was born in South Africa in a gastronomic Christain family;
I went to Israel to find god and not to India.
I wanted to read the Bible in the original so I learnt hebrew and converted to orthodox Judiasm. yeah naive. and young.
In my late 30′s i started to do a lot of energy work, I learnt reiki had my first introduction to meditation using body awareness and visulization, and learnt Qi Kung and Tai Chi all together.
Well I had a type of breakdown, some call it Kundalini arising long story that I wont bore you with gory details.
That energy is a real physical experience for me that is just as palpable as feeling a table.
My hands hum and buzz and burn like a force field when others feel my hands they can feel this too.
Is it in my mind or imagination?
or god forbid is it god?
I dont know, I just know what I feel.
That tear ,
I experienced something akin to that
and yes there was a tear too
with a so called unpronounceable hebrew name of god
it is written ya weh
but meant to be pronounced differently( could be gobbeldy gook.)
perhaps it cannot be pronouced because it is a breath and not a word.
in breath yah
out breath weh
BTW the Dao de Jing is in the Buddhist Bible by Dwight Goddard with a foreword by Robert Aiken
one of the first Buddhist books I obtained
Does anyone know how Daoism fits in with Buddhism?
If it does and why it would be included in this collection?
Chanting and beads may be related to the Nada Yoga where we create a resonance a force field
Not such a new thought that the word creates matter.
What I do know is there is lot I dont know
And then it may all be Mayko.
Coming back to body keeps me out of my head; fantasy and all those movies going on starring the monkey.
As does science and skeptical critical thinking.
may you be happy
may you be safe and free from harm
may your heart be open
may you walk in Beauty
Keren, “Well I had a type of breakdown, some call it Kundalini arising long story that I wont bore you with gory details.
That energy is a real physical experience for me that is just as palpable as feeling a table.
My hands hum and buzz and burn like a force field when others feel my hands they can feel this too.
Is it in my mind or imagination?”
Just to take a snippet of what you wrote but i’m really responding to the whole thing.
Yep, i believe its all got to do with your mind. The stimuli goes in through your ears and eyes and gets churned over by your mind. As you seem to be inclined to see things in a certain, it becomes somewhat self fulfilling. You might even have been able to generate physical effects this way through the power of your belief. Or maybe if your physical symptoms (of heat etc) were objectively assessed by say an independent doctor who knew nothing of what you were doing or what interested you, they might find that its all pretty normal what you’ve found to be unusual.
I mean a lot of people have hot hands. Some people have hot hands some of the time. Some people don’t have hot hands most of the time.
Nevertheless, no ones to say that what you feel is not real for you.
But let me tell you about an example which i find quite typical of people who are inclined to believe in all sorts of weird things. This person thinks she’s psychic. When i asked her to describe her psychic goings on, she just described to me what i would call events of ordinary imagination. I mean imagery came into her mind. But how is this different from images coming into my mind. The only difference is that she calls it being psychic.
I’ve experienced reiki. Its very calming to lie still on a table for an hour with people holding their hands around you. But its always calming to lie still on a table for an hour in a benign presence and if you are not feeling disturbed by anything.
Having a break down is also caused by one’s own imagination. We stress ourselves out. We think disturbing and distressing thoughts and we do it over and over and over again. I’m not sure what sort of breakdown you refer to but lets just say it was a non-psychotic kind brought on by stress and pressure and worry. These things can affect the brain chemistry so that you end up doing and feeling things that seem to be beyond your control. I know that when i’m depressed, i feel quite negative quite often. My thoughts are very negative. I’m very irritable and i tend to jump down anyone’s throat at the slightest provocation. I do other things too. I think these things are the result of changes in brain chemistry since i’ve noticed the pattern and how anger and irritation seems to come from nowhere without rhyme or reason and I often don’t care about how nice other people are to me.
There’s no god in any of this. I think people who believe in God tend to rationalise God into everything because its what they deeply hold to be true. On the surface it looks like the opposite with me. I can’t see god in anything because i deeply hold that God is not true. But the difference between the two positions is that there is non-god evidence or it can be demonstrated in the position i’ve stated. The god in things can only be asserted. It can’t be shown or seen.
Nevertheless, i would add, that for people who believe in God, they can turn that belief into real positive effect by the power of their belief. I mean you can’t make a prayer come true. You can’t heal me with your prayer but you can change the course of your own day and the way you handle situations by the power of your belief in god – usually from the comfort that God gives to people.
Keren –
Thanks for your metta wishes! May you too be happy and safe, and may your heart be filled with loving kindness. I honor your search — it sounds like you have dedicated much of your life to it.
The connection between Buddhism and the Tao I’m aware of is in the development of Chan in China, which became Zen when it moved to Japan and Southeast Asia. Buddha nature became a kind of equivalent of the Tao, a universal nature to which the practitioner becomes attuned.
As a lifelong skeptic and atheist, my tendency has always been to scoff at mysticism. I still believe that it’s important to maintain a skeptical attitude, because there are many charlatains in the world who will use our faith against us. However, I think I’m becoming less prone to scoff. Each of us bears our load of delusion. All we can shape is our intention; and if someone is cultivating an intention not to harm but to befrriend themselves and all beings, I think the net result will be less suffering, even if that individual’s beliefs may not withstand the scientific method.