Passionate Learning :: Philosophy Psychology Education Essays

Passionate Learning To lack self-respect is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.....It is the phenomenon sometimes called disaffectation from self. In its advanced stage, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone readiness want something that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game.-Joan Didion, On Self-RespectLast Spring, as part of a cured project, I took Tai Chi classes and researched how speculation is used in thinker/body medicine. I read several books by doctors who use meditation as a form of healing, in stress-reduction clinics and as treatment for slew suffering from severe pain and panic disorders. One doctor in particular, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches a method he calls mindfulness, in which he has his patients meditate in order to achieve total mind/body aw areness. Zinn instructs patients to focus on their pain and to become aware of it. This often helps them realize t hat they can pull through with their pain. No pain is too extreme, he says, in the same direction that no emotion is a wrong emotion. Awareness is the nevertheless absolute, and the only thing that allows people to live in the moment. Not live for the moment, nevertheless live in the moment.I left that project feeling extremely aware and extremely at peace. After three years of struggle to find answers, happiness, and a sense of purpose, I began to appreciate my present give tongue to of mind. I began to revel in the struggle, confusion, and push of not knowing. And as I approached graduation, my high take aim experience suddenly do sense to me. I understood life as a system of games. High school was simply one of them. I came to realize that playing games was both comprehensible and necessary as long as we are aware that we are playing them. I realized that a major struggle passim high school had been my struggle to resist playing its game. I pass my three years at boar ding school governed by my passions quite than playing by the rules of the institution. And in refusing to play by its rules, I made it increasingly more difficult for me to function within its realm.By rules, I do not mean the actual dos and donts, but rather, I am referring to the prompts the school sets up in order to fulfill its goals as an donnish institution.