Living From a Sense of Call and Response
As I reflect on my practice of mindful awareness in my daily life, outside of formal meditation sessions, I have come to realize the importance of living from a sense of call and response. This concept developed from my mentoring work, personal reflection, and background as a musician.
While I tend to follow a more traditional Buddhist structure in my formal practice, my mindful awareness in my informal practice plays a significant role when I am in the world, communicating with others, walking in the neighborhood, going to the store, traveling, etc.
I have come to recognize that much of my daily mindful awareness involves deep listening. This means listening with my entire being, not just my ears. It involves being present and attentive to what is happening within me and around me, noticing my reactions, emotions, and thoughts, and being open and responsive to the world. It is a way of being that is alive, dynamic, and engaged. I believe that this sense of call and response is essential to living a meaningful and fulfilling life.
As a musician, I have had some experience with call and response. The idea of call and response is an essential part of many forms of music, where one musician plays a phrase, and others respond to it in their own way. This helped me to realize that this sense of call and response is also present in our lives beyond music.
I grew up with a father who was a touring jazz bassist, and he taught me a lot about music, the culture, and history of jazz. From a young age, I listened to the jazz greats and tried to understand the culture of jazz through the music. The first thing my dad and other teachers taught me was to listen. They emphasized that all forms of music require listening and a sense of call and response. However, music derived from the African subcontinent tends to have a much stronger call and response dynamic to the exchange with other musicians. Traditional African music often involves dancers and other elements, so it's not just about the music alone but the community as well.
As I continued to learn about the tradition of jazz, I gained a passion for it, which led me to explore other forms of percussion. While I mainly played the drum set, I eventually became interested in forms of African percussion and music. I discovered Afro-Cuban music, Afro-Brazilian music, and other styles that originated from Africa and evolved in the diaspora. When studying these styles of music, there's a heavy emphasis on call and response. It's based on this exchange between the musicians, and you can hear it directly. Singers respond to rhythms produced by the drummers, and vice versa, creating a beautiful and energetic connection that draws you in.
What we're talking about here with call and response, bringing it from this kind of analogy, especially jazz and anything deriving from the African diaspora, is that it embeds in it, in my opinion, a sense of curiosity, openness, generosity, and empathy. Within a music group, we're recognizing immediately that we're in a community, and in order for it to work, it's not just about my greatness or my goodness as a musician, but the cooperation and joy of the whole.
So there's automatically this sense of generosity, and, as I said before, connection. I would say that it's the antithesis of individualism, which often creates a lot of emotional problems for us these days. A lot of our isolation is derived from hyper-individualism. Now, we are all individuals, that's fine too, but we also need to learn to work together, listen, and be open, curious, and generous with one another. Otherwise, we're going to be quite lonely, quite isolated, and actually, if you just study the history of humans, we probably won't be able to survive that long. None of us are completely disconnected, even if we'd like to be.
It's interesting how the concept of call and response can be applied not only to music but also to meditation and our daily interactions with others. It's understandable that initially, meditation can be a selfish pursuit as we focus on developing our own mindfulness and awareness. However, it's important to recognize that this is not the ultimate goal of meditation. We don't want to become cut off from the world or isolate ourselves, as that would defeat the purpose of meditation.
Instead, as we cultivate our mindfulness and awareness through meditation, we can apply these skills to our interactions with others. When we encounter challenging situations or conflicts, we can respond with curiosity, openness, and empathy, rather than reacting from a place of fear, guilt, or anger. By doing so, we can establish a sense of connection and community with others, rather than becoming isolated.
As I reflect on what deep listening means to me, I have come to realize that it involves more than just using my ears. We need to listen with our eyes, heart, and body. As a meditator, I have also learned to listen with mindful awareness. Mindful awareness is a natural capacity of the mind to be watchful and bear witness, without judgment. As we strengthen our mindful awareness, we tend to see things more clearly, with less bias and judgment.
However, it can be challenging to apply mindful awareness in our daily lives. We need to remember to use it and have enough formal practice to be able to bring it into our daily lives. Nevertheless, going back to the sense of listening, we can use mindful awareness to listen because it is the mind that knows what is happening around us and within our own mind. It is essential to note that the judger or the commentator, the one who always tries to control the situation, name it, or put it in a box, can hinder our ability to listen deeply.
As we learn to let go of the judger or the commentator, we can listen to the raw sound of our experience, whether it is internal or external. We can be more attuned to people around us, the energy in the room, and the body language of people. This deep listening provides us with more agency and efficacy in how we respond to a particular situation, whether we are alone with ourselves and a thought or emotion or with others. Therefore, this practice is essential to finding more joy, connection, and harmonious relationships in our lives.
So, what I'm saying is that when we engage with the world, we're not just reacting out of fear or anger or any other automatic response. Instead, we're learning to view our actions as part of a larger interconnected whole, where we're aware of the responses we're getting from the world around us. These responses could be in the form of body language, silence, or overwhelm that has nothing to do with us, but we get caught up in it nonetheless. This isn't just about our interactions with people, but it can also apply to our relationship with work, money, body image, and anything else we experience.
Through mindfulness, we're learning to tune in to these responses and strengthen our awareness so that we can bear witness and be watchful with our minds. We first listen to the response before we take action or make a call, and this helps us engage with the world in a much more connected and open way. Instead of just reacting, we become curious, generous, and even compassionate, as we're not just interested in yelling out our thoughts or opinions, but rather, we're interested in making a genuine connection with the world around us.
