Over the
past two decades, I’ve been studying (both academically and popularly) the
intersection of science and spirituality. I’ve also been a percussionist for
about forty years. One clear conclusion from this combination of experience:
Life is best lived with the right rhythm.
It’s what
drummers call being “in the groove.” As a drummer, it’s when you’re feeling the
rhythm so deeply that you’re almost obligated to stay in it. Not too fast, nor
too slow. You’re “in the groove.”
In life,
it’s feeling “the unforced rhythms of grace.” Or to give a fuller context from Jesus’s
offer in Matthew 11:28-30 (at least when Eugene Peterson paraphrases it in The
Message) “Come to me. Get away
with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest.
Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of
grace.”
This
unforced rhythm of grace—the groove—happens when we find the right rhythm of
yes and nos, of notes and spaces. How does science describe the groove?
Psychologist
and researcher Mihaly Csikzentmihaly outlined it best in his book, Flow: The
Psychology of Optimal Experience: “when consciousness is harmoniously
ordered:” A flow experience is “so gratifying that people are willing to do it
for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even
when it is difficult, or dangerous.” Finding flow, Csikzentmihaly discovered,
arises when we live in that sweet spot, the “Goldilocks” point, between too
much stress (too many yeses) and too little stress (too many nos), or boredom.
Or, the right rhythm when we’re in the groove.
We start to
groove by stopping and listening to the ultimate space of silence.
One way to
summarize a large chunk of the history of Christian spirituality is two simple
words: Be quiet: I quote the Oxford literary professor and Christian
spiritual writer, C. S. Lewis, “The first job each morning consists in shoving
[all other voices] all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that
other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come
flowing in.”
But this is
so difficult. So how do we do it? Currently I’m co-directing a $2 million grant
from the John Templeton Foundation, Scientists
in Congregations, which looks at how science and
spiritual life come together in churches. More particularly at my home
congregation, Bidwell Presbyterian Church, we are doing a study of Mindfulness
Based Stress Reduction: In mindfulness, we observe experience as it unfolds,
and we don’t judge what comes our way. We receive and pay attention. Soon
we relax.
Does it
reduce stress? Can it provide for a more productive life? So far, the data seem
strong and the results are promising. When we are mindful, we become healthier.
Through this attentiveness and saying no to judgment, we say yes to greater
mental functioning. There we can say yes to God and begin to groove.
But, with
the onslaught of communications we all receive every day, we sometimes have to
work hard to make some more spaces in our lives.
Staying
“wired in” too much increases allostatic load, a reading of stress
hormones and other threat responses. We are ready with fight or flight
response—great in the past for running away form tigers, but today it creates
an artificial sense of constant crisis. So we are locked in continual partial
attention. Or continual partial inattention.
As a result,
I’ve learned that each day, we need time to return to the unforced rhythms of
grace. We need breakouts.
Contemporary
cognitive science agrees. Recent studies have proven that we are better off
reducing the amount of notes and noise in our lives. One University of London
study found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capacity
by an average of ten points on IQ test.
Herbert
Benson, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, has given a clear
description of why breakouts work from his research into the science of the
brain. Here’s an example: You’re sitting at your computer, pounding out what
you hope will be a hot new article on, let’s say, how to create the right
rhythms in life. But you’re stuck on one sentence and you keep plugging away,
but no word emerges. So you keep pushing. But the creativity never flows.
Using
research from neuroscience and brain mapping, Benson describes that up to a
point, stress helps us to think better. Beyond that, however, it frustrates us.
If you keep pushing yourself when you’re at a dead end, your “primitive brain”
(the deep core that drives basic functions and raw emotions) goes wild. That’s
when you feel fearful, angry, forgetful, frustrated, etc. Benson warns: If you
push on, you do it at your own risk. In other words, when you see these signs,
it’s time to switch gears.
So breakout!
Breathe deeply. Float in the pool. Beat a drum. Fold laundry. As the
12-steppers put it, “Let go and let God.” Find those unforced rhythms of grace.
Countless possibilities emerge, but the key is to do something completely
different. Then the stress function is relieved and creativity emerges. Imaging
studies suggest that deep meditation and creative activity lead to
“coherence”—a synchronizing of the logical left brain with the intuitive right
brain. There we enter into a cool Latin term, vis mediatrix naturae or
loosely translated “the power of natural healing.”
Often it
won’t be easy. String-theory physicists theorize that there are vibrating
strings of multi-dimensions at the heart of the universe. This, if nothing
else, represents a fascinating metaphor for the undulating unforced rhythms of
grace beneath all of life. May we all learn to groove with them.
P.S. An earlier form of this article appeared in the Huff Post.
