Yikes!

Some more about Disgust, and a little about Fear

This is the second of perhaps 5 posts about the Five Basic Emotions portrayed in the Pixar film Inside Out.  To go back and read Part 1, click here.

I have some more disgusting things to say ( whoops, I mean things to say about Disgust!), and then I plan to move on to, perhaps, Fear.  I like what I wrote earlier about Disgust well enough, but I did find it challenging to try to stay on focus, as thinking about the role of Disgust and its counter-pole, which I would identify as Attraction or Longing, feels so fundamental as to render it hard to see.   (A quick interjection here is that Rudolf Steiner spent a lot of time talking about Sympathy and Antipathy in his work and I think of these as rough synonyms for Attraction and Disgust.)

If you’ve followed me so far, I’ve been trying to demonstrate for you my own realization that I can work consciously with my own sense for what is disgusting (and what is beautiful), and that this heightens my entire aesthetic sense rather than deadening it through exposure to constant glitzy advertisement, politicians, ugly buildings, ugly behavior, and ugly machines.

A way to work to train and hone one’s sense of Disgust is, as I said previously, through practicing the arts; and I would add: through developing one’s aesthetic palette.  We have to become a sommelier of sorts with our entire life.  After reading a lot of Charles Eisensteins’ work in the last five years, I went back and read what I think is his very first book, which is entitled The Yoga of Eating.  It was a great short read and, I think, cut right through all the confusing, body-shaming, body-despising, mechanistic pseudo-scientific material that usually fills diet self-help books.  The message of that book as I took it away was, Really Taste your Food (like how you really try to feel your body when you do yoga).  Everything else will work itself out.  One year later, having taken that to heart and also consulted some books about diets that are more friendly to Hashimoto’s (a condition that my wife has), I have never had better tasting breakfasts than I’m having now, and I’ve lost about 15 pounds so far.  Not that losing weight matters, because it doesn’t (unless you want to lose some weight, then it matters to you).  Letting your body experience the intense pleasure of different tastes while also eating really healthy food, that’s what matters. This for me is an example of developing my aesthetic sense, in this case through eating.

If all of this is true, then some quite interesting consequences come up.  Actually, there are so many interesting things that I still can’t fit them all here, so I will focus on things pertaining to education and schools.

Firstly, it becomes important that we are regularly exposing students to experiences, people and situations that disgust them.  You read that right.  I’ve actually given this advice more than any other in the last two years when I do mentoring and consult with schools.  Said another way, we need to make sure we are taking students to places that feel unfamiliar, uncomfortable, icky and strange.  We need to be giving them gritty, gut-wrenching experiences that feel gross, overwhelming, and taxing.  We need to be, in short, helping them stretch their basic sense for their own feelings of disgust.  A couple simple examples of such activities:  In thermal Physics, I have challenged students to plunge their entire arm up the elbow into a bucket of ice for one minute and then journal on the experience.  I regularly try to bring actual compost into classrooms and other spaces where I teach so people can feel and smell it (and I try to bring people outside to the compost pile as well).   I have advocated for a number of years now for taking long walks in the neighborhood for adolescents (like four hour long walks) to challenge their stamina, expose them to streets and neighborhoods where they’ve never been before, and demonstrate for them just how walkable their neighborhood can be.  A note here that I am not talking about fabricated false experiences of disgust, like mixing up some kind of “goop” (a favorite of some science teachers is corn starch and water) or slime.  This is a pale shadow of the real thing, which would be more like actually slaughtering and cleaning a chicken.  I haven’t been allowed to do this with students yet, but I hope to be able to!  Then we would harvest all of the parts, cook and eat them.  What a great experience that would be!

Another consequence of this insight into Disgust:  Because adolescents in their tender years of maturing sexually have so much difficulty with knowing how they themselves appear to the rest of the world (and often they feel very badly and ashamed about this), we should be giving them regular challenges to do art, service and performances. . . for neighbors and strangers.  This helps them get helpful feedback about what they are starting to feel are their artistic gifts.  If we keep them in the school all day with the same peers and teachers, they live in a bubble where they don’t know what parts of them are beautiful and could be appreciated by the wider world, and which parts are only their own fantasy.  I’ve advocated for things like: taking students out to do “flash mob” performances on street corners; inviting passersby to attend demonstrations of some kind performed by the students, and taking students on service learning trips where they are placed in situations that are entirely foreign to them and need to get to know people who are quite different from them.  All of these are real gifts we can give adolescents, who are quite tentative and fearful at first of trying any of this.  This is natural and normal for them at their time of life.  To me, this partly explains why adults of traditional cultures all over the world have initiation/coming-of-age ceremonies for adolescents.  It’s not just a recognition of the onset of their sexual maturity, it’s an invitation to train, hone and master their basic emotions like Disgust and Fear and become mature Lovers of the World.

This leads me to Fear.  In the movie Inside Out, Fear is the protector of Riley’s safety.  He very comically is also constantly getting himself hurt by his overdeveloped startle reflex.  Fear and Anger are the main ones who actually convince Riley to run away from home and board a bus out of town.  I find this combination interesting.  In fact, I find all the combinations of two of the five emotions interesting.  Fear alone and Anger alone won’t lead to action, but put them together and a person can do very wild things.  Adolescents have fears, everyone does.  What I think about a lot these days is how much we allow those fears to fester because we don’t take them out of the classroom and out into the world, the real world, nearly enough.  Fear and Disgust together are what I see as the emotions behind racism, any Fear of the Other, and nearly all of the political circus we are assaulted with each day.  If we are allowing our students and ourselves to stay in safe bubbles long after that is appropriate, we are contributing to the decimation of Neighborliness.  One only makes good neighbors by maturing one’s senses of Fear and Disgust, transcending them and making a person or situation that seems scary or weird, all of sudden familiar and even attractive.  The key to this, I think, is training ourselves where to place our attention, and attention is something I’ve written about a lot in the context of my work with Peter on School is Broken.  Giving attention to something one is at first disinterested in, or even repelled by, and then finding one has interest or possibly affection for it, is a deeply human gift. It’s the core of the fairytale of Beauty and Beast.  We should be training ourselves and training our young people in how to use this gift.

All right, that’s two essays down and I still only feel like I’ve scratched the surface.  I really ended up saying a lot more about Disgust, and only a little about Fear and Anger.  Next time, I’d like to focus on Anger and Sadness and the masculine and feminine.  Stay tuned for that.

To go on and read the third essay in the series, click here.