New hunter/gatherer theory on why men love watching playoff sports

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

Kopitar’s got the puck, passes to Carter for a sweet little one-timer – Elliott never had a chance – Kings score!!

The man beside me explodes off the couch with a terrifying “YAAAAAAA” Viking battle cry of testosterone madness that shoots me straight into an adrenaline panic. Fight – give him hell for freaking me out? Or flight – escape to the kitchen and (relative) safety of doing the dishes? Or try a new game this playoff season and turn this moment into an impromptu anthropological study…

Note: I love sports… PLAYING THEM! Don’t let my blonde ponytail and figure skates fool you, I’m competitive as hell and I’ll battle you into the boards until I get the puck or until one – or both of us – is bleeding. But men seem to get the same high from just watching tiny figures frolicking around on a screen. Ya, I know there are some women who get off on it too, just like there are some women with gigantic natural tits who authentically enjoy the taste of beer, but those genetic hybrid freaks should stop reading this and go out and mate with the head honcho at the local pub and leave the rest of us to our jolly gender generalizing.

Ok, so for men to get so passionate about playoff sports, two things must be happening in the brain:
1) Ongoing sensory engagement
2) Ongoing emotional involvement

I get out my notebook (once a nerd always a nerd…sigh, and to take a picture of said nerdiness is, I suppose, taking it to a whole new, almost scary, level) and ask my male specimen some very scientific questions about his hockey viewing experience – on the commercials of course! In contrast to my own ever shifting tunnel vision, he describes being able process the entire screen’s on-ice action as a whole, while keeping track of who’s who and what they might do in present/upcoming plays. He also has the rules and play history on automatic recall. Hmmm.
It’s generally accepted (because what’s any theory without some good healthy generalizing) that for hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in small groups, with men mostly chiefing, warring, and hunting for meat, while the women gathered edible vegetation, reared the children, and maintained the social structure of the tribe. Starting with this evolutionary background, let’s identify the commonalities across three similar planes of ‘man reference’ that could produce the two brain prerequisites noted above and account for our test subject’s (ok, my test subject because I’m sure not sharing him, not even for science!) qualitative viewing experience: the plains of Africa, a medieval battlefield, and the LA Kings slaughtering the St. Louis Blues in game five…

Man reference plane commonalities:
1) Ability to track herd/army/team as an entirety while picking out weak links and anticipating individual/group behaviours
2) Sustained sensory/emotional involvement to maintain motivation towards final kill/win/goal
3) Death (or death of team’s season by elimination) must be risked for brain to warrant such high caliber emotional/attentional involvement/payoff
4) Strong allegiance to specific tribe/king/team through shared history and/or ancestry – loyalty engages emotion and motivates risk taking
5) Auto recall memory for history of success and specific rules of the hunt/battlefield/game help ensure repeat kill/victory/win
6) Short term goals (emotionally and physically) important to overall victory: multiple spearings lead to enough prey to feed tribe, multiple skirmishes/battles lead to overall war victory, multiple goals lead to ‘best out of 7’ and next playoff round

Thus, the mystery is solved. Men love watching the playoffs because they are men, evolutionarily speaking. We can now apply a similar formula to explain to my horrified man specimen, why, as a woman, I’m helplessly unable to change the channel whenever I ‘accidentally’ click myself into The Real Housewives of Vancouver.

10 things I learned about being human watching Jurassic Park 3D with my 10 year old self

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

1) Twenty years ago, I entered Jurassic Park with a child’s imagination. There was no separation between theater and jungle world. It looked real. It felt real. Two decades of memory and dreams recorded the story as a fully dimensioned sensory and emotional immersion. As an adult watching Steven Spielberg’s 3D redux, there is no flattening, no muting of the experience. This is time travel. This is magic, because I’m watching my favourite movie again for the very first time.

2) John Williams’ musical score sends me soaring with an emotional rise heightened by layers of memory… It’s 7:30AM at an Ottawa high school band practice, and I’m playing the flute part of the score. With sudden joy, I realize I’m learning to take myself, with my own hands, to the same peaks of pleasure I’d thought only others could carry me.

3) Malcolm’s musings, mere gibberish to my 10 year old self, now echo my own hard-won philosophical conclusions. Shit, taking him at his word could have saved me 20 years! But no, I’ve worked even harder to preserve (and integrate) Grant’s knee-weakening wonderment at seeing the brachiosaurus. Malcolm and his pessimism can stay in the Jeep. True wisdom can only be found off-road, when you follow your imagination into the fresh cool grass beyond.

4) Watching Nedry’s embryo shaving cream bottle buried in the preserving mud, my 10 year old self was ecstatic. The story wouldn’t end with the movie! Here was a way to more, and more, always more! And there was more, but like The Matrix, the two sequels blasphemed the original. I know now that life is a moment, one breath, one bag of popcorn – by the bottom you’re parched and your lips are chapped, and you wish wish wish you had savoured every kernel with the same exaltation of the first buttery bliss.

5) Muldoon and his knee socks will ever and always be one sexy beast.

6) Nestled in the theatre – like Grant, Lex, and Tim in their tree – with my own younger brother and hero father, I felt the same comfortable confidence in the safety of our eternity. I feel a pang of grief for my 10 year old self. She had find out that Lex was right, that sometimes our heroes leave us and fly to head new stories. And we must learn to rescue our own. Because, ultimately, ‘happily ever after’ is a dynamic state of being.

7) After watching Jurassic Park countless times and reading Michael Chrichton’s (masterpiece) book twice, enough time has gone by to corrupt source memory and the 3D version is a 3-dimensional conglamorate of present experience and two mixed/matched histories. The archtypal characters critizied in the first movie suddenly become fully fleshed internally/eternally contradicting human beings. Male/female (Lex/Tim) complexities and layers of interwoven alternate plot points transform the experience into a dream-like back and forth between conflicting realities. Like Malcolm, Carl Jung was a fool. Categories are butterflies pinned under a frame. “Life finds a way”, but only as undulating change through time.

8) I feel a certain envy for my 10 year old self. Her child’s brain easily gestalted over any breaks in continuity and plot/character inconsistencies. My adult brain, so trained and practiced in picking through patterns, finds suspended disbelief harder and harder, especially being a writer. I can’t help missing my ability to commit to flowing through a story purely by faith.

9) To my 10 year old self, Laura Dern’s Ellie was the epitamy of womanhood: intelligent, beautiful, funny, and kind. As I fell in love with my husband 10 years later, to Laura Dern’s husband Ben Harper’s song “When She Believes”, it was a reawakening of eternities. When my ideal woman’s love story fell apart with Harper, I was forced to give up another grasp at idealist innocence. But watching this movie reminded me of all I’ve gained. I may not have Dern’s legs, but I live, then and now, by Dr. Satler’s optimistic curiousity. I own the power to create my own stories and sustain them through time. I will never stop believing, in my loves, in my heroes, and in myself.

10) Ritual, by definition, strengthens through time. A movie theater, a bag of popcorn, my escape into another world for a full (if quantized) lifetime, gives as much pleasure to my 30 year self as it did when I was 10 years old. Though the intellectual experience has evolved, the emotions are as rich and savoury as ever. So get yourself a center seat, turn off your cellphone, and keep close your own most precious rituals. And don’t ever be afraid to give yourself over fully to their magic. Your inner child will thank you!

Schopenhauer’s morality argument crippled by vegetarian violence

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.” –Arthur Schopenhauer

Sharpen blade. Slice pepper straight through. Rip out reproductive organs. Throw away mangled innards – thereby destroying the only chance this sweet, ripe, living system ever had to fulfil its ‘Wille zum Leben’. Another life sacrificed for one glorious, throbbingly vibrant… snack.

It’s one of the raw immutable truths of our existence: something has to die for us to live. While Schopenhauer should be applauded for trying to make this transition as humane as possible, his philosophical drift into humanism is a bastardization of his adopted Hindu principle of ‘universal compassion’. “Hindus believe that consciousness is present in all life forms, even fish and plants. However, though the soul is present in all species, its potential is exhibited to different degrees.” For him to exclude from moral embrace all life that does not share our five, exquisitely limited, senses, is only an extension of the hypocrisy against which he rages.

If morality, evolutionarily and sociologically speaking, is concerned with the preservation of life and reduction of suffering, ‘universal compassion’ necessitates extending our morality beyond the selfishness of its inherently humanist coding. Babies call forth our ultimate moral care, but yet are stationary expressions of life that reach out for the warmth of a mother’s arms the same way young green shoots stretch out searching for the sun. A baby’s face and irresistible scent elicit an advantageous response from its environment the same way the rosy pink and perfume of petals help ensure the world comes in close to help it achieve its goals. Empirically speaking, a baby can easily be found to have far more in common with a plant than an enemy soldier has observable differences from his mortal moral foe. Who are we to disrespect all life that uses means outside our five senses to calibrate its reality, when our own perception is so often metered by other less measurable, yet equally informative forces?

History has proven that morality is an extension of ourselves at one moment, in one life. Schopenhauer demands that morality be rooted in ‘universal compassion’, then uses an essentially Western, humanist definition of ‘universal’ that contradicts his Hindu sources. His moment, his morality. Our own moment in time culturally frees us to extend our personal moralities beyond our five senses, and out into an ever expanding world of complexities.

The moral of this story? Next time you eat a salad… show those veggies some f-ing respect!

The ‘I want sex tonight’ steak sandwich

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

This sensory loaded sandwich is more than food porn come to life, every bite subliminally suggests what’s on the menu for dessert. And this meaty, two-hander recipe is no one night stand! Mushrooms (vitamin D), olive oil (monounsaturated fat), cauliflower (indole-3-carbinol), and beef (zinc) are all foods known to increase testosterone levels in men. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a sandwich is so much more.

To make two sexy steak sandwiches…
1 baguette
1 large hefty steak
2 cups sliced mushrooms
2 red bell peppers
2 large jalapeno peppers
olive oil
salt/pepper
Note: no garlic or onions for obvious reasons

Cheese and cauliflower white sauce…
2 tbs butter
2 tbs flour
1 cup milk
1 cup cauliflower (steamed and puréed)
1 cup of your favourite white cheese (grated)

Prepare classic white sauce – stir in cauliflower and cheese. Roast and peel peppers to add colour, heat, and a fleshy, oh-so-slippery, subliminally suggestive mouth feel. Sauté mushrooms in olive oil for rich earthy taste/texture. Grill (leaving a hint of pink in the middle) and slice steak. Divide baguette and spread wide open to receive layering of deliciousness. Slather indulgently with cheese and cauliflower white sauce. Devour, and be devoured. Then read the inspiration story below…

“Got a man?” My question catches the fuming redhead off guard.

“If you can call him that – and do you know what shit he pulled just…”

Pandora’s box is opening right in front of me – I jam the lid down with what I say next: “Wait, just wait, hear me out. We can sit here and you can unload all over me and maybe you’ll feel better, but I sure won’t. Or, you can shut up and we can get at the truth. When we stripped down just now, I couldn’t help noticing your bra and panties, pink lace – hot stuff. And there’s only one reason why a woman with such sexy underwear would be so absurdly angry and frustrated – you were gnawing on a chair leg when I walked in for goodness sakes! Obviously, you’re not getting laid.”

She grunts, nods slowly, and grunts again. My mind is racing; the idea is taking on a distinct shape… and flavour. Talking won’t fix anything here. Telling her that ‘when you do nice things for people they tend to do nice things for you’ would probably earn me a punch in the face. I’m just thankful her arms are still tied behind her back! I can let her in on a basic human logic, that ‘if you act like a psycho black hole of negativity people most likely won’t be jumping up and down to have sex with you’, but her level of bitchiness is most likely genetically encoded.

I’ve got it! A way to get that woman some lovin’ without destroying my soul in the process. It’s subversive, sure, but show me a psychological intervention that isn’t. She’ll be doing something caring and personal for her man (under the guise of subliminal science) and strengthening him to deal with her insanity at the same time. Perfect.

“Ok.” I say, with renewed authority. “We’re going to change back into our own clothes, and then I’m going to do some field testing. There will be an envelope with the results waiting for you in the Blank Canvas lobby tomorrow morning. Follow the ‘recipe’ for success inside – exactly – and you will get action tomorrow night. I guarantee it.”

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How to survive a woman who threatens your universe at the atomic level

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

“I’m pissed off.” The red haired woman states the obvious, with equally obvious venom.

I think I hate her. The realization is sudden, visceral, and acute. My stomach has made up its mind. She presents as an archetype I’ve spent my life avoiding eye contact with in high school hallways and grim office elevators. Not that I can’t come around – I’ve done it before – but the photocopier she did battle with earlier has my sympathies. And now that I’ve sacrificed the sleeves of my sweater to her jury-rigged straightjacket, there’s no turning back.

“I can see that,” I say. “Three minutes, will you give me just three minutes?”

“You’ve got a captive audience, girl.”

Swallowing her ‘girl’ with quiet martyrdom, I take her ever so gently through a 3 Minute Sense Scroll Mindfulness Meditation – my go to innovation that has helped my own brain rewire to focus its attentions, engage with the environment, and emerge from internal constructs/conflicts.

“There.” I breath deeply, feeling quite relaxed myself. My perception of my client is momentarily softened and compassion is awakened by my reconnection to self. “Are you feeling a little more grounded now?”

“No.”

The word is spit with a certain – yes I’m certain – gleeful malice that hits me right in the gut. How could any brain resist such a powerful tool? Must be out of spite. But why would any mind fight its natural craving for balance and peace? Her death stare is unrelenting, and now she’s fidgeting in her straightjacket and stretching my sleeves more and more by the second. I’m appalled by her total disregard for another person’s property. The photocopier becomes personified in my mind, poor thing. I empathize with its jamming now that the gears in my own head are locking up. And here she is traumatizing something else that doesn’t belong to her. Bitch.

“Shit.” I say. To which she looks triumphant. Drawing a blank in the face of such hostility, I reluctantly serve the cat her cream: “So why don’t you just tell me what’s pissing you off.”

I see her mouth open as she sucks in not only all the air in the office, but all available energy too, extending her vacuum to rob our oxygen atoms of their very spin as they’re drawn into her black void of negativity. I swear my eyeballs bulge and the overhead florescents flicker and dim as their photons are stretched and dragged screaming, tearing, into the abyss. Only a black hole or an angry woman can disrupt the space-time continuum – I know this, just ask my husband. But I could never match this wild haired force of nature. Sleeve assault aside, this woman’s utter disregard for the room’s atomic balance leaves nothing even remotely sustaining for me. Bitch.

“Wait!” I cry out, all hard-won professionalism abandoned. “I have a better idea.”

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Recover from a bad first impression using only the clothes on your back – and someone else’s!

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

When I get off the elevator Tuesday morning on the 6th floor, I find Dr. C talking to my boss, who looks quite overwhelmed by the white haired 10th floor phenom.

“Cymbria!” Dr. C turns and greets me with neon pink lips spread wide. “Paper’s got to roll itself for a few minutes. I’m borrowing you for an emergency.”

She doesn’t say another word as she leads me up to Blank Canvas Living’s offices, despite all my questions and panicked pleas for training, something, anything, Aaaack! We get off the elevator and she takes me down a bleak, almost institutional, hallway without giving me the tiniest hint of what to expect. Not even when she opens a green glass door, about halfway down, and guides – who are we kidding, shoves! – me through. The door clicks shut behind me and I’m in a small white office with silken green carpeting that looks suspiciously like-high end Astro Turf. There are two chairs, but their purpose is lost on the fire haired woman who, I’m assuming, is my first ‘real-time’ creative counseling client.

It’s my turn to be speechless. A faint scratching, grinding sound is coming from under the opposite chair. That’s right, under. My client, a well-dressed 30-something businesswoman, is curled up in the fetal position gnawing on a chair leg. No joke. What the hell?

I wait for an opportune lull in the gnawing. “Are you Ok?” I ask.

“Do I look Ok?!” she snarls. “I’m gnawing on a f*&^^*ing chair leg! I hate my job. I hate my life. I hate my hair. And I hate the *&^^%&*((* photocopier that jammed and made me crazy this morning!”

“I like your hair.” My voice is so meek, even I’m not sold.

“Whatever. Who the hell are you anyway?”

“I’m Cymbria. It’s my first time.”

“Dr. C had better not be charging me for this. And seriously, why would I take advice from someone wearing such an abomination of a sweater?”
She’s right. Dr. C may have helped me burn my ugly pants, but the sweater she met me in still haunts my closet, its ease too easy an argument on so many grey/black branded mornings. I take it off and toss it on the grassy floor between us.

“Oh sure,” she says, letting go of the chair leg, “like that ratty old tank top is any more professional.”

“Fine.” I take that off too, and let it drop like a limp white flag of surrender. But this is no resignation. I’ve got her full attention now that I’m down to my bra and jeans. It’s my turn to call her out: “And I don’t know how I can listen to someone bitching about their life when they’re wearing a fresh-pressed button-down and Christian Louboutin heels!”

“Fine.” The woman picks herself up, strips off her shirt, and kicks off her shoes. She stands her ground with arms crossed and jaw set, challenging me.

“You want professional?” I say, as I take her white oxford from the top of our laundry pile and button it over my bra. It’s a tad loose, but the more like a lab coat the better. Off go my jeans and I make an improvised matching skirt from my repurposed ‘ratty’ white tank top. Recovering from a terrible first impression demands high risk creative problem solving. “Now hand over the tights. You came here wanting to expose your brain for someone to poke around in. Hosiery sharing isn’t anywhere near as intimate and you know it.”

She gives me her tights and lets me dress her in a true tickle trunk representation of how she says she feels. I tie my sweater sleeves (so what if they stretch – t’is a noble sacrifice) behind her back for a straightjacket effect, then get her to put her feet in the wrong end of my jeans to trap her legs. She draws the line at letting me hood her with her black gabardine pencil skirt – “can’t wreck the hair,” she says, which I take as a possible sign of improving moral.

We sit facing each other, transformed. “Now,” I say, as professionally as possible, ignoring the pain of her glorious but too-tight Louboutins, “how can I help?”

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Make love to the world or make the world’s perfect salad?

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked jobs in both industries, but there comes a time when a girl’s got to break free and make the choice to say THIS is who I am…

This brain is blessed with the genetic trick to be able to translate the raw violence of our humanity into short black strokes on a page. Words. I’ve teased them, held them, rolled them around in my mouth until they’ve begged for release. But it is never enough.

The same brain, the creator of worlds, demands a physicality. I have clothed my body in my own designs, used objects and images to pull people into exotic, intoxicating paradigms – where I’ve teased them, held them, rolled them around in my mouth until they’ve begged for release. But it is never enough.

The same brain, the woman, craves the deepest connection. Love. Faith. Family. A loyalty and consistency so in conflict with the gnashing Rimbaud mind. Love. I tease him, hold him, roll him around… But it is never enough.

I live for ideas, and for story. I am an exploration, and I am a woman. There is no ‘happy middle ground’. So what then? Be Lee Miller? Blaze through my own physicality, run a bath at the high point, then submit to decay? Be Terry Richardson / Olivier Zahm? Run around with a camera in one hand and my manhood in the other? Flash a nipple once every dozen posts or so, just to keep my audience hooked? No.

Do I blog my way to the world’s perfect salad? Harness my creative intellect and train it down, tame it down, to service the ultimate temporal/individual subjective? Just to make everybody else happy and safe? No. Not when the perfect salad is a frank impossibility, especially when compared to the tempting universality of the perfect blow job. NO.

Take ‘time’ out of the equation and the ‘world’ disappears. There is only this moment of interaction, you and I, giving and receiving. What if I told you I’ve found a way? Not to straddle, oscillate between, or deny these conflicting extremes of existence, but a format for their expression and a place to mediate alternative, individualized, solutions? Would you believe me? Would you dare? After a dedicated program of study in current brain science and the historical evolution of ideas, the time has come for me to say: “Let’s both have the balls to find out.”
If the only way to draw instant creative success in our current cultural paradigm is for me to dance naked down the street with BlankCanvasLiving.com plastered all over my body, then no. So it might be just us for a while. That’s fine with me. I’ll do my very best to tease you, hold you, roll you around in storied ideas until you beg not for release, but for permission to take our warm, close world into your own.

The exact moment I realize I’m wasting my life

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

Spinning with the Earth at 1675 km/h, we humans are always and only ‘falling through time’. We feign power and control over our most precious, non-renewable resource with an abuser’s vocabulary – using, taking, spending, wasting… killing. In contrast, the words associated with our time efficiencies and generosities have somewhat religious overtones – saving, making, creating, giving. We express love through the valuing and sharing of time. And if we love ourselves, deeply, truly, is killing time the ultimate betrayal?

Slow day at work… do I write my future or stall it through distraction? The word search is almost too easy to rationalize. The 60 words are 60 novelists, so I’m not killing time… I’m learning. Ya, that’s it! Schooling myself for writer street-cred name dropping with a two-birds-one-stone pleasant pastime, the very essence of intelligent efficiency.

ALCOT, AMIS, AUSTEN – there’s HEMINGWAY in the middle there – BAINBRIDGE… BUCHAN is taking some time, no matter, I’m leeearning. Oh, there’s ORWELL along the top, but where’s BUCHAN? I dedicate myself to BUCHAN with full intensity pattern recognition/scanning, picking out all the BU’s and CH’s. Minutes pass… I start to get the same sick feeling in my stomach I used to get after too many Saturday morning cartoons (and still get after too much celebrity gossip). Screw it, we’re going old school here, line by line…

I do this twice. There is no BUCHAN! WTF?? This is so wrong it hurts. But just as stubborn as Rihanna going back to Chris Brown (don’t get me started!), I deny the atrocity and jump right back in. Sometimes the universe sends you a message, and sometimes that message is ELIOT with one L in the list, but two in the grid!?? This is officially BULL! with two Ls anywhere you find it!

I sit staring at the word search in numb disbelief. This is against all the rules! The contract of trust is broken. How can I ever commit to a word search again? Maybe crosswords aren’t even sacred! Two more go-to distractions tainted. But this is a wake-up; I can feel it in my bones. I can’t waste any more time.

I do the only thing that’s ever made my stomach stop churning. I put the story into my own words.

Humanist Public Restroom Architecture – How to design a toilet for ‘actual human beings’

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Cymbria Wood

After the glacier floored, architectural dreamscape of Blank Canvas Living’s Antarctic inspired public restroom, I have no idea what to expect from the offices’ West corner facilities.

“You’re certainly dressed for it,” says Dr. C, as she leads me through the maze of corridors on the 10th floor.

I know this detour is making me late for my own job rolling paper on the 6th, but the anticipation of adventure is too strong to resist. We stop in front of a solid metal door, painted army green and accented with row upon row of rounded rivets.

“There’s only one toilet in this one,” Dr. C explains, “and no windows. In the midst of the collaborative madness of war and industrialization, we can forget who we are – one human, one moment in time. Our processes are not mechanized, nor should they be. Our bodies are sacred and should be celebrated. Take your time, I’ll be waiting right here.”

The door takes all my strength to open, then slams shut behind me with a BANG that jolts my nerves into combat readiness. The room is small and closed, a tight box of ridged green metal with artificial light coming from bare humming tubes wired (crudely) into the ceiling. To my left, near the back wall, is a strange industrial object – all gearing and quietly rotating circular components – which spins slowly to reveal a hidden sink, like the prize in a Chinese puzzle box.

And to my right… is the most human toilet I’ve ever seen! It’s curves are unexpected, fleshy, and warm, despite the smooth, cool porcelain. I can’t stop myself. My hand involuntarily reaches out to touch the molded torso that extends seamlessly from the tank back. The seat swings open, invitingly, and I take my place beside the lovely bum. Drawn by an urge even more primal than my body’s function here, I draw my fingers down the shallow dip of her spine and follow her curves with the caress of one human exploring another for the first time. Nobody’s watching; I smack her lightly on the cheek.

This is intimacy. This is indulgence. Heck, this is fun! My mind begins to churn. If this is really possible, really happening, what other processes can be transformed? Suddenly, for the very first time, pants down and mind spinning, I know exactly who I want to be.

I heave open the heavy door and relish its BANG behind me. “Dr. C! I want to do it. I want to be part of this! You don’t even know it, but I was born to work here.”

“Of course you were.” She doesn’t seem at all surprised to see me so red cheeked and excited. “I knew it the moment I met you. Well, my dear, welcome to Blank Canvas Living.”

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Sense Scrolling – 3 minute blank canvas mindfulness meditation

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Cymbria Wood

Our brains process reality through a filter of attentions and associations (eg. chair, building, tree, etc.). These filters, developed over time through culture, coding, and experience, can limit our freedom to explore and evolve our internal/external lives. Sense scrolling is a insight mindfulness meditation designed to loosen immediate associations, heighten senses, and give our filters the flexibility to deepen/change the way we experience our world. This insight mindfulness meditation can be performed in under 3 minutes, anywhere you can be still with your eyes closed.
Step 1 – Smell: Close your eyes (for steps 1 – 4) and focus on your breathing. Take 5 deep nose breaths and concentrate on the smell and temperature of the air. Your entire world is limited to that smell. Define it’s layers and overall character.

Step 2 – Taste: Focus only on taste. Explore your mouth with your tongue and define the current balance of salty/sweet/sour/bitter. This taste is your world – hopefully a minty one. (note: this step, combined with step 4, can also be performed during any meal to focus and enhance the experience)

Step 3 – Hearing: Your world is only the surrounding air vibrations. Try to differentiate all distinct areas of sound and pinpoint their locations, moving clockwise from back left to center front to back right. Separate the layers of sound from low frequency to higher pitched vibrations. You’ll be shocked by your acuity!

Step 4 – Touch: Your body becomes your world. Is there any air flowing across your skin? What is it’s temperature? What is your temperature? Pick 2 or 3 parts of your body and focus on them one at a time. What are the internal/external sensations. Are your toes touching the end of your shoe? Are strands of hair blowing across your face? Are you putting more of your weight on one knee?

Step 5 – Sight: Starting with only a dark empty world, open one eye. Concentrate on colour contrasts (yellow leaves against a blue sky), shapes (single leaf), highlight/shadow, and repeating patterns (building windows). Now open the other eye to experience the wonder of full depth of field. Look for motion patterns and perspective distances. Now add your other senses. This is your world – and it’s magical!

Note: Over time, besides giving you greater freedom of perspective and attentions, sense scrolling mindfulness meditation will actively heighten your senses and give you the ability to focus acutely on any of the five in almost any situation. You’ll be able to walk familiar route as a soundscape, smellscape, coulourscape, rather than just a landscape. Trying a new food will become a fully engaging adventure. And sex… well, let’s not even go there~wink.