I had an amazing yoga class yesterday. For the first time in my years of yoga practice, I did a one-legged wheel. But what was amazing was not that I did it, but how I came to do it.
It was towards the end of Wendy's yoga class yesterday. We were doing wheel (a backbend pose where both hands and feet are on the ground and the rest of the body lifts off the ground forming an inverted "u"). Normally, this pose puts a lot of pressure on my wrists (probably because I'm not grounding through my feet enough) and I can usually only hold the pose for a few breaths. While I'm coming down, the more advanced yogis in the class are usually going through other variations like lifting one leg or arm off the ground or standing up from the pose. Yesterday, as we were in our first wheel, Wendy, in her usual soothing voice, tells the class: "Sometimes we can't do something, because we tells ourselves that we can't. If we stop believing that we can't, we just might do it." Or some variation of the same theme; as I can't remember her exact words. As I heard those words, I decided to stop thinking I couldn't do it. Once that decision was made, I felt like I was somehow on auto-pilot observing myself. I observed my feet to moving closer together (normally, teachers only tell us to move our feet closer towards our hands). In that moment of shifting the feet towards each other, I suddenly felt that one leg could hold the weight and I lifted my right leg up. I got as far as getting my leg half way up. But as soon as I registered surprise and disbelief that my leg was up in the air, I panicked and tumbled down from the pose. But in the second set, I started first with my left leg and then right leg and managed both times to lift one leg up completely without falling out of the pose.
It was interesting to observe that once I stopped believing I couldn't do the pose, my body revealed the solution, which was to move my feet closer together. In hindsight, it's an obvious solution, because that's how one does a one-legged bridge. So essentially, the body knew what to do all along, only the mind was not ready.
We hear it all the time -- the power of positive thinking. But it seems we can cognitively agree with something without really believing in it. So perhaps the phrase is incorrect. It's not so much positive
thinking, but positive belief. I'm not sure how much of yesterday's achievement had been primed by my dim sum chat with AS about
vipassana meditation.
I have always been a bit of a meditation sceptic; wanting to believe yet not really believing that meditation is useful (I mean, how can sitting and doing nothing be useful?), at least not enough to give up 10 days of my life to it. Ever since AS went on the 10-day meditation retreat in 2007 and raved about it though, my curiosity about it has been piqued. AS only told me yesterday what prompted him to go on the retreat and the effects therafter. It had been a very stressful period in his life and he had started noticing that he was suffering from memory loss. He would wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom and walk out wondering whether he had brushed his teeth or not. His doctor suggested that he get tested by the specialists at
UCSF's Memory & Aging Center. There's a long waiting time to get an appointment there. It so happened that he completed the vipassana retreat the day before flying off to UCSF. Once at UCSF, he was put through a series of concentration and memory tests (In one exercise, he would be told a series of numbers and was asked to recall them in reverse order. He managed to go up to 17 digits!). The tests revealed that, far from suffering memory loss or deterioration, AS was actually scoring off the charts! Of course, he acknowledged it could have been akin to the placebo effect. But nonetheless, it illustrates the power of the mind to manipulate itself into doing unexpected things if we just let it. And my little one-legged wheel moment on the yoga mat further confirmed that. All of which is convincing me to put a 10-day vipassana retreat onto my 2010 to-do list.
This point makes me think of my students as well. I've been grading their final exams and noticed that most had not been able to correctly calculate a per person cost when given total trip costs. It's a simple calculation, yet many ended up with a per person cost that was nearly as high as total trip costs for 25 people. As I graded the papers, I kept wondering why they would overlook/accept this obviously non-sensical number. I believe that most of the students, despite having previously done the calculations correctly in their own homework and group project assignments, continue to believe that they do not know how to do the calculation. I can only imagine that the belief in their own lack of competence clouded even their most basic common sense. I wish I could have taught them how to trust their own intuition and logic more rather than relying on standard formulas. But of course, I myself am still just a student learning to trust and have faith in my own intuition.
Labels: education, meditation, yoga
