For some of us,
the connection between mind and body comes intuitively. The rest of us need to work a little harder
to find it. Except that one of the best
ways to find the connection, I think, is through play.
We live in a
competitive culture, which has good points and less good points. One of the less good points is that many of
us learn that if we can’t excel at something, we might as well skip it. This limits our willingness to
experiment. One way of describing the
stages of learning moves from unconscious incompetence through conscious
incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. Those two middle phases contain the key to
connecting mind and body.
We’ve all had the
experience of trying a new sport and suddenly realizing we have way more body
parts than we know what to do with. We
focus on hand position and suddenly our left feet are out in right field, so to
speak. What we are doing as we learn is
training our bodies by focusing our minds.
We are building the pathways between brain and muscle.
All of this is
much easier when we take ourselves lightly.
Let’s give ourselves permission to be the worst dancer or snowboarder or
weight lifter in the history of the universe so we can see where we are and
then move toward something better.
