How to become Bendy

When I took my first boxing class, I was a disaster. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d set out to conquer something so completely unfamiliar. How was it that things that looked pretty straightforward when someone else was doing them were so hard for me to grasp? I felt like I needed to learn how to learn.

Adele Diamond is a neuroscientist and specialist on learning. She says that we learn best by doing. “The more of you that gets involved — the body, the emotions, everything — the more you get out of it in many ways.” We glean more from being dedicated to something challenging over a period of time than we do only participating in those things for which we exhibit insta-aptitude (i.e. something we find easy). Plus, physical activity is beneficial to brain function (another reason to do our asana). And, perhaps most important of all, we have to want to learn something new.

We get attached to what we think we already know — the ‘right’ way to do a yoga pose, ‘our spot’ in the yoga room — that we become unwilling to bend, even just a little. Stuck in this insipid, unoriginal loop we become even more inflexible and find ourselves susceptible to the trappings of comparison and competition. To become truly limber we need to shift our perspective from contest or performance to laboratory experiment. When we ‘lose the competition’ we’re no longer burdened by ‘success’ or ‘failure’, we’re just observing and learning.

I call this becoming bendy.

As we become bendy we start to understand that ‘mistakes’ are an inevitable part of learning. It’s what we make of our mistakes that are key. Miles Davis said: “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” And some of history’s most innovative and brilliant inventions and advancements were initially deemed mistakes by the conventional wisdom of the time. Missteps often lead to far more interesting terrain. To become bendy is to hang out in the ambiguity of a question long enough to enjoy the ongoing rewards of unfinished business — to be pliable enough to appreciate that being a disaster in the boxing ring, or anywhere else, is actually part of insightful discovery and growth.

Our progress is uniquely our own, not a contest with someone else. When we lose the competition mistakes become an exciting part of what we’re learning instead of a reason to feel defeated. Our boxing stance and our yoga poses are simply metaphors for how we step out into our lives — and there’s more out there to learn than we even know. Learning isn’t about chasing achievement. It’s about bending our inner control freak in new and inspiring directions.

From yoga philosophy, sankalpa is setting an intention with the understanding that we are perfect and whole already, even as we work towards something better. San (connection with Source, highest Self, truth) – kalpa (resolve, vow) provides an encouraging declarative platform to stand on as we bend and learn. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a gossamer excuse not to try. It’s the understanding that no one is a louder, more disruptive critic to our learning process than we are — until we aren’t anymore.

As sankalpa suggests, we have to meet ourselves where we are in order to move forward. On our mat, yoga allows us to learn using a synthesis of body, mind and spirit. We acquire skills through experience and expand on them as we draw them back up and work on them again and again. When we’ve previously been exposed to stimulus, even if we are not consciously aware of it, we are faster to recognise it the second time around. As we learn, we’re essentially creating new memories — replacing some old notions and building upon others.

Over the years there have been people who’ve come into my classroom with the most amazing ability. They glide like swans through their standing poses and float as if levitating in mayurasana (peacock pose). Certainly, there’s an elegance that cannot be denied and an ease that it is hard not to lust after and compare ourselves to. They have a sheen that makes us think that life must be so much better over there than it is over here. Over here, where we reach out with our strap as if casting a fishing net, trying to wrap it around our foot and pleading with our hamstrings to let us in.