Living A Loved Life. Dawna Markova, PhD
she’s talking about. Daddy pays tolls when he crosses the George Washington Bridge, but I’ve never seen anyone paying attention. To tell the truth, I don’t even really know what attention is, but everyone wants some from me. As I click the front door to her apartment shut behind me, I decide to ask Grandma. She’s standing in front of the old oak bureau in her bedroom. While I tell her about what the teacher said, she brushes her hair. It’s like a dense cloud of white silk and has never been cut in her entire life.
The only thing on top of the bureau is a small carved camphorwood box. She places her brush down next to the silver hand mirror my father gave her and puts the box in her palm, saying, “Your mind, like this box, can both open and close. Your attention makes both possible.”
She stretches the box out to me, and I pry the lid open very carefully with my thumbnail. Inside, there is a musty smell and a handful of dirt.
“Where does it come from, Grandma?”
“Home.”
I look around the apartment, but she shakes her head. Then I figure out that she must mean Russia, the old country. “What’s it for?”
She takes a pinch of the dirt between her fingers and sifts it back into the box. Her voice gets cobwebby as she answers, “When Grandpa and I fled from the old country, I had to leave so much behind, even my first two children and my brother. So I put a handful of home inside this little box to carry with me. We were on a boat crossing the ocean for so very long, but when we finally got off and I stepped onto Ellis Island, the first thing I did was to put a pinch of that dirt down beneath my feet. That made the foreign ground home. I had never seen an ocean before I got on that boat.” She wrapped her thin arms around me and rocked back and forth as she continued, “It was so wide and so deep, Ketzaleh. Who could imagine such a thing existed beyond the potato fields? I watched it day after day. Once, I even tasted it on my tongue. It was salty just like tears. Finally I decided that a person’s mind is just like that ocean. Some thoughts float and splash like waves on the surface, some things sink and go all the way down, deep, deep, down to the very bottom.”
“But Grandma, if something falls into the ocean and sinks down that far, can you ever find it?”
Her explanation comes very slowly. “That’s what your attention is for, Ketzaleh. Thoughts can splash noisily here and there on the top, pulled by whatever grabs them. But if you just let them sink down a little way, they float around. People call that daydreaming. At the very bottom of your mind, your attention is wide and silent.”
“Grandma, that’s just what happens to me in school when I stare out the window instead of practicing my multiplication tables! But why does my teacher say attention is something you have to pay, like when you cross the George Washington Bridge?”
She holds my hand ever so gently and leads me into the kitchen, where she fills up the big glass bread bowl with water. “Attention is the simplest kind of love, my darling. Maybe your teacher has forgotten how to float down into the heart of her own mind. A lot of grown-ups do. Maybe she’s afraid she’ll drown in all the feelings she’s dropped down there. I don’t know why people say you have to ‘pay,’ Ketzaleh. Maybe it’s because as your attention takes you down, down, down, it’s like crossing a bridge into a different world.”
“But what happens at the bottom of the ocean of your mind? What’s down there?”
“Oh, my darling, there are things called memories and feelings and possibilities and dreams and ideas, and even stories. Everything you’ve ever learned is down there, even if you don’t remember it when you are splashing up on the surface. And guess what? You can find the Promise down there. Some people call it your soul or spirit or wisdom. To me, it’s the Promise.”
Looking into her eyes, I can see it all in the ocean of my mind.
“And your attention will make your thinking very different down there. You don’t have to hold on to anything. You float around, and your mind opens to the whole, wide floor where everything falls eventually. The waves of thinking splash above you, but it is totally silent down there.”
I actually feel as if I’m floating while I watch her open the camphorwood box and listen to her whisper, “Boxes, hearts, and minds can be opened or closed. They’re capable of both, yes?” It takes me a moment to think about what she’s just said. “Let your attention open as wide as a wing. You may hear songs or see swimmy pictures or get ideas down there. Maybe you’ll come back up with an answer to a question you’ve been wondering about for a long time, or maybe a bigger way of knowing something will just pop up on the surface with you. Maybe you’ll just feel easier with a question that’s been bothering you.”
“Grandma, is that how you got so wise even though you never went to school or had teachers saying mean things about you?”
Her eyes sparkle stars at me and she kisses my forehead without saying a word. It doesn’t matter, though, because I don’t need to ask any more questions. In some way beyond words, I understand exactly what she means.
Argue for Limitations and They’re Mine
I was barely nineteen when I first met the pioneering hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. I was still a graduate student in New York City, and he had been invited by the school’s clinical supervisors to give us a lecture on medical hypnosis. I discovered, reading whatever I could about him, that he’d had polio twice and, as a result, had to use canes to get around. He was also completely tone-deaf and color-blind (with the exception of purple). Nonetheless, he considered every constraint to be an opportunity within which he could create a new possibility. When he went to a concert, for example, he rolled his wheelchair to the front of the theater, then turned it to face the audience and watched them throughout the performance. After the applause settled down, he told his wife Betty which instruments were off-key. He discovered simply by observing the reactions of the people.
Before the lecture, the clinical supervisors had written down a random number on a piece of paper. Each seat in the amphitheater had a small brass plate on it with an etched number. Their challenge to Dr. Erickson was to hypnotize whoever sat down in the seat with that number while simultaneously delivering his lecture on hypnosis. Up until that moment, I’d never won any kind of a contest in my life.
When Dr. Erickson had finished speaking, I noticed that everyone else stood up to leave, but I just sat there, my right arm floating in front of my face, my legs completely uninterested in moving. He approached me slowly, red rubber cane tips squeaking on the dark oak floor. Leaning over me, he said in a gravelly whisper, “There is a part of your mind, the unconscious mind, that knows everything you most need to know, even when you don’t know that you know it…and you can trust that part of your mind, trust it deeply.” After I left the amphitheater, I felt free in the same way I used to when leaving Grandma’s apartment.
I studied Milton’s work for decades after that day, not because I wanted to learn hypnosis, but because I wanted to understand how I could widen my attention and notice where I was already free. I learned more from him than from all the clinical supervisors in graduate school combined, who kept insisting I should constantly notice and classify everything that was wrong with every person I worked with, label it, and record the pathology on a standardized form. Dr. Erickson taught me one thing that was more important than anything else I learned in graduate school: he taught me that my role was to help as many powerful minds as I could to grow by focusing on what was right about what appeared to be wrong with someone. With him, I discovered that having an asset-focus—exploring a person’s history of health and sanity—was an important step to living a life I could love.
Milton’s teachings did more for me than I ever can say. My only regret was that I never hugged him. Hugging wasn’t “the thing” back then that it is now. Besides, I had no idea how you hug someone who uses canes or is in a wheelchair. Nonetheless, I always wanted to hug him. One day, decades after that first lecture, I was visiting his home office in Phoenix for what turned out to be the last time I would ever see him. More than anything, I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated what his teachings