In Favor of the New: Beginner’s Mind, Again
By: Cathy Huyghe
A few weeks ago I sat in on my very first meditation in the Taoist style. The meditation was led by my friend Grace, who at one point was a mentee and now has emerged as my teacher.
Grace talks to me about abundance, and keeping the doors open for abundance to flow in, unhindered. She teaches about the Inner Smile (here is an explanation), which was the template for the Taoist meditation in her class a few weeks ago. For the first time in my 20-some years of meditation practice, Grace invited her class (and me) to sense the emotional impact of joy on our internal organs, and not just in theory either. Actually, she prompted, how does joy feel in your liver? Your spleen? Your pancreas? Your heart? It was a navigation around our insides, with joy as the guide.
In the moment, I had no idea how it felt, to be honest, and my first tentative guesses felt anatomically incorrect at best. I wanted to know, though, and I wanted to learn by trying again and listening closely again to the prompts offered by someone with an understanding far deeper than mine. It was the kind of meditation that makes an impact, and it was the kind of impact I wanted to experience more often in my life.
Which brings me to another favorite teaching of Grace’s, and another favorite learning of mine: Beginner’s Mind. (Here is an explanation, from the Zen Buddhist tradition.) The idea surfaces in multiple other teachings, including this quote attributed to Marcel Proust:“The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same set of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.”
Seeing things you’ve seen before, but in new ways. Doing things you’ve done before, but differently.
It’s a compelling idea, and one I recommend absolutely. I’ve been following the thread of it through my day-to-day life these past few weeks. At this point, I can say confidently that seeing and doing “newly” takes effort, given how incredibly well-established our routines are. (I’m sure you’ve seen the statistic about how many of our daily habits have been done before, from brushing our teeth to commuting to work, hundreds if not thousands of times.)
How can we apply this to wine? And to our work in wine?
How can we “do” wine tasting differently? Think of other work in wine that we and our colleagues do and see. How could we see this work with Beginner’sMind? By now, you’ve probably done your tasks hundreds if not thousands of times. But what if you approached your next glass, and your next task, withBeginner’s Mind? For example, what if you taught someone to taste wine the way you wish you’d been taught when you began? What if we navigated our internal organs by following the joy of wine? What would we see differently?
I’d love to know. What tasks come to mind for you that you can see and do differently, and with Beginner’s Mind? And what happens when you do?
Give it a shot. Bonus points for smiling inwardly as you do.
Namaste,
Cathy
