The added difficulty to life, is that the immediate experiences that we have every single day happens to us the way we want to see it. There is enough psychology to tell us about the apparitions we experience very often are the results of the decisions that we have made about what is important to pay attention to, how information are supposed to be categorized and analyzed, how people are supposed to be figured out and treated, and how things are supposed to be done for what purpose and results. Hence the age long wisdom that reflecting on our selves is like looking into two opposing mirrors projecting their ever cascading images of the same thing to forever. The deeper we try to press into and unravel our own world, the more layers we will forever find under the peeled layer, and unending more questions.
The advances of visual representations, sound recording technologies and moving images has done a lot to help us manage our reflections and evaluate our pasts and imagine our futures. However, what we still haven’t quite have, is a way to keep our experiences in complete packages, those memories that should have contained smells, tastes, senses and feelings so that we can come back to them in the future to relive them as a whole. We know enough about the human brain to know that our memories are more than incomplete, very often distorted. How then are we supposed to remember who we really are, or what did we really wanted, how things actually happened, why we were impressed, when did we begin to change, and notice the real difference of things or people? For those who are natural cataloguers, documentarians, and photographers of memories, i guess you are spared some of these challenges. But the rest of the average us, we know we have to live with this minor imperfection.
If faulty memory is all we can muster, then we need to do our best to cope with this human thing that we have.
Those whom have been through a time of indecision, who may had been at the pangs, grasping at a new sense of self, whom have fought imaginations of fears, whom have lived and repeatedly relive a distasteful event, whom had chased their own tails and thought they would never get out of the centrifuge, you would know, the greatest problem and difficulty was not that of changing a habit, putting down that ciggy, writing that letter, telling that someone off, quiting that job, getting that divorce, applying for that migration, starting that business or writing that paragraph. You, like me, would know that the real difficulty came from trying to think outside of that logic that created the situation of discomfort. It had seem that there was no other way to feel apart from that one. Nothing else made real sense. They may sound acceptable to the larger scale of society norms, but it becomes a splinter in your toe that only made you feel increasingly unsettled over time.
I find that many theoretical counseling strategies and self-help suggestions very often neglect this aspect of introspection. How are we supposed to believe that we can overcome a daunting self-doubt/fear/confusion, when the feelings of being in it is stronger than any other feelings, and envelops the stream of our perception? In mainstream counseling instructions and self-help guides, there will be mentions of “stepping back” and to “observe oneself”, but these words do not inherently effect a change in perspective created by experience-bound personal logic. Words by themselves do not transport a person to totally different system of thinking. It is like telling an untrained man that he could bake any cakes if he would just set his mind into baking it right.
A researcher of thought patterns and behaviors and the creator of Neuro-Semantics, Dr. Michael Hall reminds us that our psyche won’t yield to our examination if we prod it with judgmentalism and disciplinarian anger. For many of us, self-judgment, like judgment from anyone else incurs defense. And i believe it is this defense that prevents us from obtaining a humble understanding of what we are really going through inside. It prevents self empathy.
Now, what I want to get at is this. Think about our food and drink culture. We all have tasted all kinds of food and drinks and have experienced what “bitter”, “sweet”, “sour”, “citrus”, “tannins”, “smokey”. How many times have we commented, “Wow, this is noodle is awesome!” or “What is this gut twisting piece of roasted rubber?!”. Have you ever notice that we never ever feel guilty for judging what we feel about what we taste? We feel entitled to how we perceive a certain dish to be. We are never bashful or feel guilty for knowing that we don’t like a certain taste. We feel that some coffee is crap, we say it! We think it’s nice, we promote it, or keep drinking it. The point is this: there is no self-doubt in our judgment of taste. So why should we feel any different about what we think and feel?
This struck me hard, when my barista friend Trista kindly treated me to a private cupping session. Only then did I realise how significant this practice is. More than just an opportunity to critique coffee, and its technique of brewing, i find that cupping is a metaphor for healthy and constructive introspection. I will show you in a minute.
“Cupping” is a very simple idea. In a cupping session, the leading barista would first select the beans that would be tasted, then grind the beans in preparation for extraction. The methods of extraction includes dripping, pressing, percolating, syphoning, or pulling it from steam. Whichever method is chosen would reveal a different presentation of the particular coffee and hence also a difference in taste and experience. If you are not already familiar with the clanging of scoop-like metals onto a pail-like bin, if you have not already heard the fierce hisses of steaming jets ejected from a straight spout, if you haven’t had a sterling dark liquid served to you in sip sized portions, then come closer… you see the slow rising vapour coiling upwards and disappears?
Now, take a whiff…
What is the smell like?
What does it tell you?
What is it trying to say to you?
Now as you dip your tongue adventurously over the brim, your tongue gently tucked under for access, the warm stream of liquid passes through your teeth and glides gently, and floods the ceiling of your mouth, envelops the insides of your teeth and squeezes itself through both the inner side of your cheeks. Now suckle on the tiny stream.
Is there anything you like about the taste?
Could you catch the aroma that chimneyed through your nose?
How many types of flavors hit your senses?
The difference between drinking a cup of coffee by yourself, and sampling sips of coffee with several other people is dramatic. The idea is this – To overcome our impulse to react. Once the espresso reaches inside our mouth, there is an immediacy in reaction. The very instant we come in contact with it, we can’t help it but already in our minds form a judgment for the taste, texture and temperature that we received. In near automaticity, make up our minds about whether we like it or not. This thought process is reflex.
The interesting bit comes when we decide to talk about it. Not to express disgust or pleasure only, but to describe, to put into words what your taste buds received from the liquid. In this instance, we remove our imagination of how coffee is “supposed” to be, and allow what we taste to paint a picture for us. In doing this, we allow every single tasting to have meaning, and more importantly, we allow ourselves to create this process of understanding. This process is never passive, the act of understanding and perceiving is never only about the coffee, because how the coffee comes across to you, will tell you more about how you interpret tastes and aromas. It reflects to you, your taste preferences, habits and sensitivity.
So I’m going to suggest this: What if we engage in this process for self-reflection?
What might we get? What difference would that make for us as ever improving souls?
snout sniffer 