ADVANCED POSE IV: BEGINNER’S MIND

The Beginner’s Mind is very important to how you play the games you are invited to play. The Beginner’s Mind is exactly what it sounds like. Showing up to life as if it is a classroom and you are it’s student. Every great person I have met in my life, has used this approach to manifest their accomplishments. Every single one.

And this is most challenging for those who are born gifted in some way. It’s also difficult for those who have had some level of awakening that has created an illusion of “arrival.” In other words, enlightenment is not a destination. It is a journey. And if you imagine yourself to be completely enlightened and awake, then you are not receptive. When we show up as something other than the student, we cannot be alert and aware of new lessons to be learned. Enter every game as if it is a classroom and you are there to learn. Knowledge is an infinite game. And some people have to learn this the hard way. My son is brilliant. He learned to speak at a very early age. He learned to read at a very early age. He was always a couple of grades ahead in his learning at school. School was always easy, and he would spend a lot of time in class being the one to answer all of the questions correctly, getting A’s on every exam, and being somewhat of a teacher’s pet. He was confident that he could effortlessly do the work and none of it challenged him... until middle school, where he was placed in gifted classes where everyone in the class was also very smart. He was still showing up however, seeing himself as the smartest. And expecting it to be easy, and wanting to show off what he knew. But you can’t learn anything new that way. All of a sudden he wasn’t the only smart kid. The work was harder. And because he hadn’t been pushed in the years before, he’d developed some laziness and so having to do more challenging work intimidated him.

And I’ve seen this time and again with students who show up to my classes, egos as big as the sun, speaking in contexts that are comparative with what they already think they know, showing off, not diving deeper to look for what they don’t already know, judging imperfections in the curriculum, and if I don’t push them, they miss all of the riches in the class curriculum because they think of themselves as above it in some way. In much the same way that you can watch the same movie multiple times and each time notice something new, life lessons repeat themselves on an ascending spiral. We have a limited number of lesson areas to learn in, and we come back to them repeatedly as different evolved iterations of ourselves, in order to take it on at the next level of mastery. Like learning to tie a basic knot, then returning to learn to use that knot to create more advanced knots. A Beginner’s Mind, or Shoshin as it is called in Zen Buddhism, is always questioning, curious, playful, and open. The concept is discussed in the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen teacher. Suzuki outlines the framework behind shoshin, noting "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."

In this advanced pose, we employ all of the previously essayed advanced poses: desire discernment, integrity, and humility. And in doing so we are perpetually capable of receiving wisdom and knowledge. Thus empowering ourselves for the art of manifestation.