Explorations of mind-wandering in Ljubljana

 Last week, I taught at the TECT (Training Embodied Critical Thinking) summer school, which this year took place in Ljubljana (Slovenia). Just like last year's summer school in Iceland, it was a treat to be there. What is cool about this summer school is that it is a very interdisciplinary place where students with backgrounds ranging from architecture and design to philosophy to neuroscience to artificial intelligence get together to investigate the mind and experience. This investigation is very much grounded in the body and uses techniques such as microphenomenology, thinking at the edge, and exploring the mind through meditation.

During the summer school, I was co-teaching the track on meditation with colleagues Urban Kordes and Toma Strle, and we alternated periods of meditation with a sharing of experience during this meditation to reach a better understanding of mind-wandering. During this track, we started by practising meditation, before everyone introduced themselves, with the reasoning that by practising meditation together, you get to know each other much better than by just sharing your biography. This was proven to be indeed the case, because at the end of the week, the group naturally started to feel very connected to each other during the meditation practices, wanting to hold hands in their imagination.

Probably quite critical in this process was a mid-week excursion to explore some of the beautiful nature of Slovenia, where we wandered around in a park with beautiful caves, springs and forest. We practiced among other things a "depth walk", in which we walked around in the environment with a companion, and traced a path driven by paying attention to subtle internal cues, while at the same time we verbalized what we noticed. It is amazing how much more you notice when you walk like this! Suddenly becoming aware of angular shapes in the natural environment, the springy nature of the ground, or the play of the light. It was also very interesting to notice how this natural environment shifted our thinking patterns.

Now back to our meditation course, exploring mind-wandering in the environment of the city, we ended up with very deep discussions about what is mind-wandering, with probably the most fascinating moment being a "mind-wandering meditation", where we asked people to mind-wander, instead of meditating, and suddenly all the thoughts were gone! We also deeply went into questions of why we mind-wander, whether there is agency in mind-wandering, and how mind-wandering compares to daydreaming and other mental processes. One interesting insight that came was of the parallels between wandering the city, and wandering in our own mind in meditation, and how good that feels when we can simply wander in a non-sticky way, which is the true definition of mind-wandering according to Kalina Christoff and Zach Irving. Yet, it is not so easy to get there, but I think the practices we did during the summer school helped us to tune into that.

This brings me to the point of other practices we did during the summer school: apart from my teaching about mind-wandering and meditation, I also taught movement practices, in which we explored the body through different kinds of dance movement, to tune better into our bodies. Not only was that a great way to start a long day of discussions and thinking, but it also was so cool to bring my dance experience into work at an academic context.

In a way, the summer school was like a retreat, where I got to connect back to my embodied experience, ask big questions about my research and life in general. This is quite in line with the next #lojongchallenge slogan, number 43, which says "observe the two, even at the risk of your life". Basically the two refer here to commitments of the Buddhist teachings in general and the Lojong teachings in particular. In this case, for me the most important lesson is to not forget about the importance of and the power of meditation and tuning into experience, rather than being occupied with things that are visible from the outside, but do not lead to transformation. I myself find it particularly difficult to spend more time on meditation when I have an endless todo list (so this makes it great to have a summer school where you meditate for your job!). And yet, when I practise, I notice just how much sanity it yields, and what better way to study mind-wandering than to observe your own mind...