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Patience is a key ingredient in mediation: Lessons from art appreciation and photography

Professor of the history of art and architecture Jennifer Roberts could be talking about mediation when she says in an article titled "The Power of Patience" (Harvard Magazine):

[T]his lesson about art, vision, and time goes far beyond art history. It serves as a master lesson in the value of critical attention, patient investigation, and skepticism about immediate surface appearances. I can think of few skills that are more important in academic or civic life in the twenty-first century.

Click to read the rest of the article.

Because of the word "patience" in the title, I was drawn to read the article. Over the last several months I have been developing a list of traits and states that indicate the level of cognitive development at which a person is operating, both as a party and as a mediator. If there is a mismatch between the levels of a party or parties and the mediator, the quality and productiveness of the conflict resolution has a good chance of being low unless the mediator recognizes and works with the disparity. One of the factors on my list is patience.

Appreciation of photography—and being a photographer—also require patience. That's one reason I sometimes blog about contemplative photography and about receiving pictures, not taking or capturing them. The processes of art appreciation and photography can be valuable lessons in mediation (and meditation). As anthropologist Catherine Allerton says, "Photography...is the result of a patient, observant process." Isn't reflective and effective mediation, too?

Worried about cognitive decline in yourself or clients? Learn to take a picture

From a press release about new research looking at cognitive functioning of older adults (Association for Psychological Science):

Older adults are often encouraged to stay active and engaged to keep their minds sharp, that they have to “use it or lose it.” But new research indicates that only certain activities — learning a mentally demanding skill like photography, for instance — are likely to improve cognitive functioning.

These findings, forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that less demanding activities, such as listening to classical music or completing word puzzles, probably won’t bring noticeable benefits to an aging mind. 

“It seems it is not enough just to get out and do something—it is important to get out and do something that is unfamiliar and mentally challenging, and that provides broad stimulation mentally and socially,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Denise Park of the University of Texas at Dallas. “When you are inside your comfort zone you may be outside of the enhancement zone.”

Click to read the rest of "Learning New Skills Keeps an Aging Mind Sharp."

Abstract from the study:

Is he talking about photography, or mediation—or life?

Denver sky yesterday morning (9/18)

I imagine there may have been a time when you heard someone talking about his art or her craft or his beloved undertaking of some sort, and thought to yourself, "Why that person could be talking about mediation!"

That was my thought when I heard Paul Caponigro discussing his feelings and attitudes about photography. Click here (The Online Photographer) to watch a short interview in which Caponigro says

 

• In order to be a good photographer you need to work more on your emotions than you do on your technique.
• He uses a lovely phrase which often describes a practice of very skilled mediators: stance of silence.
• I like surprises.
• I don't want to  repeat a formula over and over again. I want to be free enough to see every day with fresh eyes.

Here are a few more quotes from his son John Paul Caponigro; he too could be talking about resolving disputes instead of taking pictures. 

• We don’t have enough words for photography. Can you imagine writers having only one word for writing? [Or mediators having only one word for mediation?] 
• We are the strongest filter we can place on the lens. We always point the lens both outward and inward.
• It’s important that we regularly reconsider, revise, and expand our practices, as our capabilities and needs evolve, both to strengthen our understanding of them and to promote our awareness of new practices and their conscientious uses.
• Photographs are never records of the way things are; they’re records of the way things were.
• A photograph is an invitation to look – and to look at looking.

Click here to go to a post at his blog with more of his quotes. And here you can watch videos at TEDx and Google in which John Paul talks about the process of discovery.

I hope that my blog post above is an echo of one I posted a few days ago about the reflective perspective of mediation and moving past technique-driven dispute resolution. These important processes—reflecting, and advancing beyond the level of technique—apply to any art, not just photography or mediation, don't they?

What's your story, learner? Teacher? Trainer? Some reasons to write your memoir of learning

Photo taken in Annapolis, MD

If you are working with clients who are parties involved in disputes, writing or relating your conflict story is often very important to clear, conscious, and careful client service. Deep wisdom and finely attuned judgment are derived partly from self-knowledge, and writing our conflict story facilitates invaluable awareness.

And if we are working with clients making decisions about money, it is important to recollect our money story, our money history, too. As I wrote last year:

Most of us have strong feelings and attitudes about money. Some of us are very aware of those feelings; many of us are not. For those of us in the ranks of service professionals (e.g., lawyers, mediators, accountants) unawareness can impact how we work with clients who are making money-related decisions. Might part of excellent client service be our own clarity about the way we perceive money, wealth, and monetary earning? To have an unclouded view of our underlying assumptions? Our values? Our prejudices? Our biases? Our personal money stories?

The benefits of this degree of clarity applies to many topics. Even beginning or experienced photographers! In fact, earlier this month I recommended to attendees at a program that I presented on photography that they write their photography story. I gave them a long list of questions to help them get started and was pleased and admiring of their introspection as they applied it to the process of using their cameras in new ways.

I just learned of another use of this kind of themed memoir and doing so resulted in a slap-my-forehead-and-say-duh moment. Why wouldn't those of use who are interested in improving both how we learn and how we teach write our learning history?

The idea came to me from Well-Chosen Words. In this book, the author recommends to teachers that they recall report cards and other instances of assessments from their own schooling. This exercise can assist teachers in considering what might be helpful when communicating assessments of their students.

I began to think of my own learning history: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I revised some questions I use for money, conflict, and photography stories in my training programs (see a few below), and thought about my answers. Just as recalling and pondering my conflict and money stories have helped me in work with clients, I think the process of recreating my learning story will help me to be a more self-aware teacher, trainer, and adult learner. If you write or in other ways memorialize your learning story, I would enjoy hearing from you.

A dozen of the many questions I asked myself:

Photography as activism: If you want to change something, get out your camera

I don't like the word "activism." The people whom I admire most because they are facilitating change in this world would not identify themselves with the label activist, nor likely be pleased if someone else named them with that description. But this post is not about my reaction to and reflection on the word.

And in one instance it communicated a message well.

Today I saw Photography as Activism and the book's title immediately conveyed its topic and purpose. In fact, after doing some online research and concluding that the book is not cause-y or strident, I put in a request for it at Interlibrary Loan. Through reading the book, I am planning to learn how photography since its birth has been instrumental in social change.

Visual communication can be persuasive and convincing, often commanding thought and feeling followed by action. Sometimes the visual can communicate what words simply cannot. (I have written about the pictograph path, the use of visual communication here.) Photos are one method of visual communication, one with potentially strong and palpable influence.

Photography can be used in many ways to communicate. (For extreme and moving examples, read "Covering Atrocity in Image" from University of Pennsylvania.) Is there a change you want to make? In yourself? In a relationship? In an institution, business, system? One method is to use photography in combination with the system Robert Fritz explains in his Path of Least Resistance. He works with the creative tension between what is true now and what you want in the future. He says:

Lessons from a poet for lawyers, photographers, anyone seeking increased attention ability

Below is a passage from Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. The speaker is talking about his decision to be a poet and the changes that entailed. I post it here because he is talking about sharpening both his diffuse and focused attention, a skill and habit that would benefit any lawyer, photographer, or person seeking increased mindfulness.

Being now resolved to be a poet, I saw every thing with a new purpose; my sphere of attention was suddenly magnified: no kind of knowledge was to be overlooked. I ranged mountains and deserts for images and resemblances, and pictured upon my mind every tree of the forest and flower of the valley. I observed with equal care the crags of the rock and the pinnacles of the palace. Sometimes I wandered along the mazes of the rivulet, and sometimes watched the changes of the summer clouds. To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful, and whatever is dreadful, must be familiar to his imagination: he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little. The plants of the garden, the animals of the wood, the minerals of the earth, and meteors of the sky, must all concur to store his mind with inexhaustible variety: for every idea is useful for the inforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth; and he, who knows most, will have most power of diversifying his scenes, and of gratifying his reader with remote allusions and unexpected instruction.

All the appearances of nature I was therefore careful to study, and every country which I have surveyed has contributed something to my poetical powers.

Image note: Composite I created of several photos.

Flexible definition of meditation can include writing and photography

Photo I took of people heading for Rolling Thunder

I have long believed that mindfulness does not just flow exclusively from meditation. Many activities from fly fishing to client counseling to motorcycling to mediating, done in an attentive way, can increase one's state and trait of mindfulness. Therefore I was happy to see this exchange in an interview with Natalie Goldberg (Huffington Post).

Q. Your definition of meditation is more flexible than most. Besides sitting and walking meditation, you recommend writing, too. What's the difference between keeping a journal and writing meditation?

A. There's no difference to me. Whether you're keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it's the same thing. What's important is you're having a relationship with your mind. We live in discursive thinking, and what we want to do is drop below to first thoughts, which is wild mind and true energy.

Photography too can be a portal for that kind of relationship with your mind. Click to read past posts here on photography and mindfulness.

Med students learn how graphics can effectively communicate: Why not law students? Lawyers? Mediators?

Those of you who have been following with me the pictograph path (using images to communicate) may guess that I was happy to learn of a program at Penn State College of Medicine. From the Penn State Web page:

Since 2009, fourth-year medical students at Penn State College of Medicine have created comics as part of a course called “Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narratives.” The course was developed to show fourth-year medical students how graphics and text can be used to effectively communicate complex medical narratives, and to help students develop their own stories into graphic depictions.

...

Of course not all medical students are naturally gifted writers or artists, but as one can see from the following pages, everyone can tell stories and everyone can draw pictures. While this course is unlike any other in their medical school experience, the students rise to the task, sharing their reflections on becoming a doctor with honesty, wit, and creativity.

Enjoy the following Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narratives by the medical students at Penn State College of Medicine!

Click to see what the medical students created.

Because of the benefits of communicating with visual methods in addition to or other than the written word, I imagine the medical students learn much about their own stories and ways to communicate with patients, colleagues, family, and friends. Images are

Miksang contemplative photography: Meditation with a camera

Intention and discipline are required to practice meditation with your camera. To learn more, watch this short video of Michael Wood talking about what gets in the way of seeing in the moment and how to overcome those obstacles. He also describes the process versus the result, control, appreciation, seeing clearly, and discovery.

Note: If you can't read the haiku I put on my photo, it is below. Clicking on the image will make it larger, too.

this world of dew
is yes, a world of dew
and yet . . .
--Issa Kobayashi

(I first saw the haiku in Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart.)

Note (added later): Click to watch another video on miksang contemplative photography and mindful seeing.

Photography opens your eyes to a new way of seeing: Interview with Christine Valters Paintner

I am pleased to introduce to you Christine Valters Paintner and her new book Eyes of the Heart. I read the book because of my belief that photography can increase both our mindfulness and our ability to attend to ourselves, others, and our world. The book shows us why and how the way of seeing facilitated by photography can be valuable. I asked Christine a few questions that may be of interest to conflict professionals.

The law can be a very stressful profession. In Todd Kashdan's book Curious, he talks about the relationship between curiosity and anxiety: the more curious one is, the less anxiety he or she will be experiencing. In your book, you talk about the promotion of curiosity through photography. Will you say more about that, please.

Curiosity is a wonderful quality which promotes spacious inquiry. Rather than needing to figure everything out and extract the answers, through curiosity we can hold ourselves open to new possibilities.  To be curious means to let go of my own expectations about how things should be and discover what is really there.  It means softening my desire to be right and listen into new ways of thinking and being.

Since reading your book, I have repeated in conversations several of the points you made. People seem uniformly intrigued with the notion of receiving photos rather than taking them. Please explain that to readers.

This is one of my favorite aspects of talking about photography specifically as a contemplative practice.  Our favorite and common language for photography is “taking” a photo.   We use it all the time without much thought as to the deeper meaning of the words.  But we live in a culture of taking, where we often grasp at things we want, look for life to meet our desires of the moment, feel impatient when things don’t go our way.

To “receive” a photo means to shift our intention in the process of creating an image.  For me, receiving is about acknowledging that all of life is a gift.  When I go for a walk with my camera, rather than look around me thinking about what images I can take, what kinds of beautiful things I can record as a trophy to my experience, I try to cultivate this sense of receiving gifts.  I pay attention to moments that shimmer before me, even if I don’t understand exactly why.  Something calls to me, stirs my energy, quickens me and I create a sense of spaciousness to receive that through the lens of the camera to see what might be revealed to me.

Mediators and other conflict professionals often use the process of reframing. How can your approach to photography help a person to become better at reframing in other arenas besides photography?