I’ve always found contemplative practices to be a frustration that I endure rather than something beneficial. No matter how hard I try, I often can’t even fully register what is being said by the person guiding the practice, and my thoughts will jump everywhere except where I want them to be. I find myself having not a single helpful thought when it’s just me by myself trying to look inwards.

 For our contemplative practices specifically, I wonder if my lack of connection with them is my own personal TMT come to life. Our practices are often heavy and full of mortality and death. Perhaps I am subconsciously choosing not to engage with them so I don’t have to face my own death anxiety? On a similar train of thought, maybe I just don’t like being alone with my thoughts. Maybe the topics we cover in this class are simply too heavy and big to bear alone. By nature, we are social creatures, and I personally value group discussions and group learning when faced with the monumental challenges we’ve covered in class.

The one contemplative practice that did really work for me was one we did in a group of three taking on different perspectives (everything is great, everything is terrible, and everything is as it is). After each perspective we shared about what we were feeling. It was interesting to me how the thoughts that I was so firm on in my own head were drastically changed and shifted by my group mates when they shared their ideas. I discovered that we all have deep rooted anxieties and fears about death and the state of the world, but that we all think about them differently, and all come to the same conclusion: we want to do something about it.

This contemplative practice made me realize that we all inherently fear death and for the future of our civilization, but it’s not as heavy of a burden to carry when you talk about it with others. At the end of the day, it’s important to be able to sit with your own thoughts, but it’s equally, if not more important, to talk about them and experience them with others. We are a social species, and so contemplating the problems that we face shouldn’t be a solitary experience.

A rather cheesy, yet appropriate graphic from Ben & Jerry’s