The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (26 page)

Several years ago, Lonny Jarrett and I had lunch together at a café near his office. I asked Lonny how he got into acupuncture. In a leisurely fashion, Lonny laid out for me a riveting dharma story—a story that exemplifies many of the same principles we find in Corot.

Even as a child, Lonny had a gift. He was curious about the mind. He wanted to understand consciousness. (“Consciousness?” I thought. Did I even know the word when I was a kid?) Eventually, as part of his quest to understand the mind, Lonny had enrolled in graduate school in neurobiology—assuming that an examination of the brain would bring him closer to a grasp of the elusive facts of consciousness. He got himself far enough up to his elbows in neurobiology to discover that this science was not, alas, really about consciousness at all. He gradually began to see that consciousness itself was not actually located in the brain.

Lonny began to throw his net wider. At one point in his search, he took a ten-week course in Chinese medicine and diagnosis. In this course the teacher gave a brief overview of pulse taking, and began to teach about the energy fields of the body (those wall charts I see in Lonny’s office). One episode from this ten-week course stood out vividly, and Lonny brightened as he told it.

During the last week of the course, he and his classmates and their teacher sat around in a circle. Each student would stand up and talk for a minute or two. Then everyone else in the circle would diagnose that particular student—making an effort to describe his precise energy type and his probable physical strengths and vulnerabilities seen from an Eastern, whole-systems perspective. To his surprise, Lonny nailed every diagnosis—stunning the teacher and the rest of the students as well. He discovered that he could rely on an intuitive part of his mind—a gift he hadn’t even known he had. He found to his delight that this form
of medicine used all of him—all of his gifts. And he came to believe that Chinese medicine had everything that was missing from Western medicine.

“Sitting around that circle,” said Lonny, “something shifted in me.” He realized that while neurobiology sees consciousness as a by-product of neural functioning, Chinese medicine considers the entire material universe to be an outward manifestation of consciousness. He had finally found the domain in which he could explore consciousness itself. He soon signed up for a course in acupuncture, and eventually took the entire program. The rest is history. Lonny has gone on to write several important books in the field, and to become a master practitioner.

While he was doing his coursework, Lonny met Leon Hammer—a distinguished scholar and practitioner of Chinese medicine. Hammer, a psychologist, was teaching the first real psychological presentation of Chinese medicine in the United States. When Lonny graduated from the course, he discovered that Hammer lived just an hour north of him. He invited Hammer to be his mentor, and proceeded to work intensively with him for the next decade.

During this ten-year apprenticeship, Leon and Lonny saw hundreds of patients together. Sometimes they would spend two hours taking just one patient’s pulses. Then they spent another two hours discussing in detail what they discovered in those pulses—precisely
how
they discovered it, and what it meant. Altogether, these two men would spend an astonishing four hours on each patient. In the early phase, Lonny says, it required a tremendous amount of concentration for him to perceive the subtleties of the various pulses. In the process, he could feel himself learning, stretching, improving. It was intense. It was difficult. But it was at times exhilarating. There were plateaus when nothing seemed to be happening. And then there were moments of breakthrough.

I was fascinated to hear Lonny describe how, often, just when he thought he had reached a solid ground of understanding, some new insight would pull the ground out from under him—and he’d feel disoriented, as if everything he thought he knew was dropping away. In these times, Lonny would doubt himself: Am I hypnotizing myself into believing a complex metaphysic that is actually
baseless
? he wondered. (This, of course, exactly paralleled my own early experience of doubt
about acupuncture.) Then, inevitably, a bigger picture would emerge—more complete than before—and Lonny would gain higher ground in his practice.

Lonny described the way in which mastery begins to show itself. “You begin to study, and for a while you just don’t get it. You don’t think you know anything. And then one day, you get a whiff of something. There it is! You perceive a pulse. Then you begin to feel for it everywhere. On your wife, your kids, your friends. Then, after a while, your teacher points you to a deeper pulse, and at first you don’t get
that
. You’re frustrated. But you hang in there. Eventually you begin to get a glimmer of this new pulse, this more subtle pulse. And suddenly, you’re on a new plateau. And that’s how it goes.” Just so. This is deliberate practice.

7

The scientific investigation of deliberate practice began with the unique contribution of researchers K. Anders Ericsson and Neil Charness, whose article “
Expert Performance: Its Structure and Acquisition” is a standard text of the field. As it turns out, “expert practice” (or performance that leads to what Ericsson calls “eminent performance”) requires certain factors, all of which Corot and Lonny had stumbled onto—either through the course of formal instruction, or as a result of their own deep motivation to learn. These are the factors required for expert practice, paraphrased here from Ericsson’s work:

For Corot, for Lonny, and for all masters, deliberate practice is really about the
training of attention
. It involves learning to sustain attention on a complex task, and to come back to that task over and over again; to stay with it just a little bit longer each time. (Remember Corot’s telling comment: “How often I had wished I had stayed longer!”)

Most of young Corot’s contemporaries in Italy had not yet stumbled onto these secrets. They drew or painted views just once. They were under the common misapprehension that it is the sheer
volume
of practice that creates mastery. Corot, however, saw that it was not the volume, but the
quality
of his practice. He had to try to make every canvas better than the last—and he worked to understand
why
it was better.

Remember our friend Hokusai?
Every dot and stroke will be alive!
Hokusai did precisely this kind of practice in his masterful
Thirty Views of Mt. Fuji
, of which the aforementioned
Great Wave
is a part. Claude Monet was doing this, too, when he painted eighteen canvases of the façade of the Rouen Cathedral, minutely recording all its variations in color from dawn to sunset.

8

Deliberate practice is really a kind of sophisticated
attentional training
. It bears fruit when
attention begins to penetrate the object of its interest in an entirely new way
. With sustained practice, the master’s perception of the object becomes refined. Aspects of the object that had previously been out of perceptual range begin to come into perceptual range. Eventually, for example, Corot began to observe subtle aspects of color and light in the Italian countryside that others simply did not see. The quality of his
perception
was refined in parallel with his skill at capturing it.

This refinement of attention is a central component of mastery. Technically, it is called “the development of pattern recognition.” With practice, the master begins to see patterns that others cannot yet see. Lonny begins to see energy patterns in the pulse. Thoreau begins to see plants in the Concord woods that no one had previously noticed or cataloged. (The last great unfinished work of Thoreau’s life was a mammoth classification system of nature; he was seeing entirely new patterns of flora, of seasonal change, of fauna.) Beethoven—as we shall see in a forthcoming chapter—in his late work began to see patterns and opportunities in the sonata form that no one had seen before.

Experts gradually learn to see their object of study with something more than ordinary vision. They see the object, as it were, “fresh.” In contemplative practice, this is sometimes called “beginner’s mind.” This fresh seeing involves two related components: First, a master sees the
parts
of the object in enormous detail—in much more detail than normal. But at the same time—and most important—he sees these parts in their relationship to
the whole. He sees both the parts and the whole at the same time
. When a chess master looks at a board during a game, he sees hundreds of potential individual moves (many more than the average player sees) but more important, he sees them in relationship to the outcome of the overall game. This gives the individual moves heightened
meaning
.

It is well known that expert meditators develop the capacity to see life in slow motion, observing objects (including their own thoughts) in minute detail, as if seeing every individual frame of a movie. It turns out that masters in every field develop the same capacity. Master baseball players, for example, when at bat, see the ball coming at them as if in slow motion—even though the ball is actually traveling 90 miles an hour. Not only can the master batter see the ball in “individual frame” detail, but he can at the same time see the
meaning of those details
. How low is the ball to the ground? Over what quadrant of the plate will it pass? Is it spinning? In what direction? How will all of this detail influence my decision about how and where I want to hit the ball? This is mastery.