Consider two classes: in one, you spend a week, in silence, being led through the grand canyon. In the other, you spend two hours online learning about the grand canyon.
“What will I learn?”
The online class could have a long, thorough list of what you’ll walk away with. Geography, archeology, flora and fauna and on and on. If someone asks at the end “so what did you learn?” you’ll be able to tell them something, potentially a lot.
What could you say about the week in silence? Did you learn anything?
And yet, it’s not that wild of an idea that the week moving through the terrain, immersed, has an inherent worth to it, a “knowing” that is not well summarized in a list.
Intellect and artistry —— left and right brain —— knowing in the head and knowing in the body —— research-led and experience-led practices ——
We tend to get campy around this kind of thing, no? That one is superior. And honestly, if push came to shove for me, I’d take a week in silence any day over the two-hour class if my objective were to really get to know something deeply.
And yet — and yet — are these not both entry points to the same knowing?
ps these are the kinds of questions Mike Hamm and I talk about ad nauseam on the phone together, in an attempt to bring you only a refined version of this inquiry in our workshops — like our four-day immersion in August for people who work with the body — where we place great important in teaching and learning from both perspectives.