Opening to the Other

Lane K. Conn and Sarah A. Conn

 

Clinical psychologists and ecopsychology educators Sarah and Lane Conn developed psychological methods and forms that enable individuals to sense, think, feel, and act as interdependent beings. In a process that invites people to open themselves to the more-than-human world, they coached clients and students to set aside their typically proactive, time-dominated modes and practice a more receptive way of being. Sadly, Lane Conn passed away not long after this essay was written.

 

 

From our experience as teachers of ecopsychology and as psychotherapists who work with individuals and couples, we have come to believe that both individual distress and ecological distress in these times represent a distorted relationship to—and within—the web of life. The tendency in the dominant Western culture is to associate personal pain with individual or family pathology without attending to the larger context, or to view problems in the larger context without paying attention to individual consciousness. In other words, we tend to respond to specific symptoms rather than explore routes to transformative experiences that expand our sense of who we are as interconnected beings.

Ecopsychology, in our experience, offers a perspective that neither mainstream ecology nor mainstream psychology has addressed. In a recent publication, we describe ecopsychology as

concerned with introspection as well as inspection, contemplation as well as experimentation, quality as well as quantity. Cognitive understanding is augmented by intuition, resonance, and imagination, by spiritual as well as sensory ways of knowing. The interior, in-between and relational aspects of the world are the focus of attention as well as the exterior, discrete parts. Ecopsychology’s approach to phenomena is about opening to their manifestation and resonating with them, not just making them calculable and taking their measure.

Ecological health is the larger context of human health; they go together as outside-inside. Healthy human functioning in an ecopsychological context includes sustainable and mutually-enhancing relations not just at the intrapersonal level (within humans) or the interpersonal level (among humans) but also at the level of “interbeing”¹ (between humans and the non-human world).²

Individual health, in other words, is connected to the health of other beings and to the health of the Earth as a whole. To restore our own individual health, it is necessary to develop an ecological identity, a consciousness of one’s place within the web of life. As poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder reminds us, our task is to open ourselves to the presence of the more-than-human world:

After years of walking right past it on my way to chores in the meadow, I actually paid attention to a certain gnarly canyon live oak one day. Or maybe it was ready to show itself to me. I felt its oldness, suchness, inwardness, oakness, as if it were my own. Such intimacy makes you totally at home in life and in yourself.³

There are a number of ways we help students and clients awaken their ecological identity. One process that we call “opening to the other” invites us to step outside our habitual ways of being conscious.⁴ In our great haste to get wherever it is we are going, we ignore both the outer world and our inner sense of being. We are perpetually in a manic state, seldom fully present in the moment. To “open to the other” fully, you are asked to put aside your normal ways of relating to others, both human and nonhuman, and prepare to know yourself as part of other life forms. Begin by slowing down and stepping back from your usual way of interacting with the world around you; take what Heidegger has called a “step-back before the arrival of the other beings.”⁵ Being curious and willing to have unfamiliar experiences allows you to adopt a beginner’s mind, to give your habitual mind a “coffee break” that creates a space for you to experience other ways of knowing.

In order to open yourself to the direct experience of another being, you must shift from a precipitating to a participating mode of interaction, from making it happen to sharing in the happening. Usually we restrict our sense awareness through our intentions. We look for something, we listen for something, we reach out to touch something. We shape the meeting with the other. But suppose you try seeing instead of looking, hearing instead of listening, and being touched instead of touching? You can then experience the breeze touching your face. You can notice how it brushes against your skin, making its presence known to you. You can experience contact with the ground through your feet, reversing the assumption that you are touching the ground with the soles of your feet by instead experiencing the ground coming up to meet you. And you can turn your gaze toward a leaf or blade of grass and allow it to present itself to you, to imagine it coming over and into your consciousness instead of your going out and getting it. You can allow other beings to knock on the doors of your awareness, to visit on their own terms and in their own language.

To have the other as a guest in your house of consciousness requires that you attend to the other’s expression of itself. To do this, you must let go of the words and stories you have for the other. The words are mere symbols, not the actual expression itself, just as a map is not a place and a menu is not food. Instead of throwing out a net of words to capture the other, you open yourself and let the other reveal itself to you in its own way.

To build on this experience, we invite people to allow themselves to “be chosen by” a “natural being” who is part of their daily landscape. The primary instruction is to notice what being—a tree, a rock, a bush, a whole landscape—attracts the person’s attention. Then he or she is to develop a relationship with that natural being by spending time with it daily. The challenges and benefits reported by students and clients when they engage in this exercise are very powerful.

The first major challenge of this assignment is time. Students report feeling restless and worried about the time they were wasting and express concern that they may be seen as crazy for stopping and being still. This exercise asks them to master (to phrase it from the perspective of the dominant culture) the experience of “doing nothing.” However, they are actually being asked to do some very specific things: to slow down, to put aside their habitual ways of rushing through the landscape, to open themselves up to other ways of knowing. Spending time each day with a natural being allows you to experience time differently. Students report that when they have practiced this for a while, time itself begins to slow down and they can “appreciate each passing minute.” One student reported, “It seems like I spend hours with my being and only minutes at work.” Another reported that the assignment helped her be more patient.

The second challenge students face is that of allowing themselves to “be chosen” by a natural being, to open to the landscape in a receptive way that allows some being to attract their attention without their doing the choosing. In this culture, that is a major challenge. Students often do not know how to do this and feel very awkward when slowing down enough along their daily routes to allow it to happen. They report feeling very skeptical about the possibility of “being chosen,” finding themselves “analyzing” the process rather than stepping back and opening their senses. As one reported, “having a being choose me sounded really lame.” Initially, he resisted the exercise, but “for the sake of the class,” he walked around his backyard. Eventually he noticed that he “always wound up in the same spot.” He then recognized that the experience does not come from understanding or thinking about it, but from letting his emotions and his body direct his movement.

The third challenge of this exercise is to connect directly to the natural being, to move beyond the habit of anthropomorphizing, of attributing human thoughts and emotions to the being. When asked to develop such a reciprocal relationship, students at first find themselves looking for linear verbal communication. Instead, the process encourages allowing the being to relate in its own unique way. For example, when their attention was captured by the motion of the grass or of the tree they were spending time with, several students began to experience a unique form of communication with their being.

One student reported that she learned to rely on her senses in new ways, to admit unfamiliar feelings as her awareness heightened. In her words, “Presented with unseen complexity, a need for empathy, and the feeling of a greater energy at work, I felt a connection to the grass that encouraged me to give back.”

Another reported that he has learned a new way of entering a landscape, “as a listener.” “I have achieved a new sort of relationship category with this natural being,” he says, “one that I can now identify in many other natural beings with which I relate.” For another student, visiting her being at night allowed her to experience reciprocal dialogue: “The transference of information felt pure, simple and enlightening. My whole body would respond as if my entire being were an ear—passive, restrained, wanting to hear all.”

Many who spend regular time with a natural being experience an increased awareness of the world around them, enabling them to hear, see, and feel things that are new to them: “The being clued me in on the weather by moving its branches and making noises when I could not feel the wind on the ground”; “Being with the water allowed me to hear about movement, change, and constancy.”

In being with the other, the participants begin to recognize that they are part of a community. Many reported experiencing “an increased sense of being related,” a larger sense of self: “Most of all, it made me aware that we are part of a larger system.” As another student put it, “one thing to notice about inter-being dialogue is the recognition of the other as the all.” Solitude in nature enables us to communicate with ourselves and with the larger world in deeper ways. This is the experience of ecological identity mentioned earlier. Through this consciousness of our place in the ecological community, we widen the circles of our identification and extend the boundaries of our self-interest, enhancing our joy and sense of meaning in life.