Practice
I love that Sri K. Pattabhi Jois quote about yoga being 99% practice, 1% theory.
Maybe he meant it in general: Stop writing or talking about yoga and get on the mat, idiot. Or maybe he meant it specifically for the physical poses: Get your thinking, theoretical mind out of the way while you just breathe during the pose, idiot.
Either way, it makes sense. It’s the practice, that descent and sweet diffusion of the mind from head into body that counts, that transforms.
I don’t have much of a self-practice. Fine, I don’t have a self-practice. It’s embarrassing. I’ve long blamed a lack of self-discipline for the problem. But on the other hand, it takes no effort whatsoever for me to show up at the studio every day to teach, practise or both. (It did take five years of practising for me to not hold on to a glimmer of hope, right until the last minute, that the teacher wouldn’t show up. Not once did this actually happen.)
So I’ve been wondering about how the presence of other people influences a practice. Does the distraction of people around make it easier for everyone to practise? Or does it make it more challenging to practise for some people, as you have to work harder to not allow them to distract you?
More specifically, I wonder how your position on the introversion–extroversion scale intersects with an ability to self-practice? When people talk about introversion and extroversion being all about whether you re-energise by being alone or with people, do they mean necessarily that you must talk to them?
Susan Cain’s book Quiet, which you are going to read at some point because I insist you do, has an informal and completely unscientific quiz to approximate where you sit on that famed personality scale. If 0 is introvert and 100 extrovert, I hover at around a 6. Even I didn’t think I was that bad.
And yet, there’s something about practising in a room full of people to whom I don’t have to talk that is profoundly energising to me—the more people the better. It’s a feeling I seek that is completely missing in a solo practice.
Maybe it’s not so surprising at all. The hot room may be the introvert’s ultimate fantasy: All these people and not only do you not have to speak to them, they are not even allowed to speak to you.
But here’s the downside. When it comes to expertise, Cain writes a little disconcertingly about how if one wants to attain true, top-level proficiency in anything, whether it be chess, a musical instrument or elite athletics, “deliberate practice” is required. And this requires solitude, she argues.
“When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress and revise accordingly,” she writes. Why is deliberate practice best conducted alone? “It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally.”
So you can spend an extra breath or two trying to get that bind in Marichasana C; you can hold half-locust and struggle a little harder if that’s the pose that’s hard for you.
She cites 37Signals cofounder Jason Fried, who not only advises companies cancel all meetings, but also hold “No-Talk Thursdays”, where employees don’t have to speak to each other. Swoon. The result, he argues, is paradoxically better collaboration.
Cain draws on Kafka, too. He wrote to his fiance, who wanted to sit with him while he wrote, that “in that case I could not write at all… one can never be alone enough when one writes… there can never be enough silence around one when one writes… even night is not night enough.” I started writing this in bed and indeed had to leave my sleeping husband to move to the lounge to really have the mental space just to tackle finishing this. Kafka’s right.
Presumably, Pattabhi Jois would advise just practising rather than thinking about this. But at the studio or at home?
Reading
The Machine Stops
“What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.”Woven coffins and affordable funerals
"We all have the feeling that music is a spiritual thing," Ms Phillis said. "It comes out of us, it's linked with the heavens, it's what fills in the gap in the air. If anything is going to reach our loved one, it's going to be music."Which reminds me of how much I loved Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, a mortician’s memoir (see more). If you haven’t read it, go on. (The other essential read when I went through a bit of a death-read-kick was Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.)
Germs in Your Gut Are Talking to Your Brain. Scientists Want to Know What They’re Saying.
“If you hold a mouse by its tail, it normally wriggles in an effort to escape. If you give it a fecal transplant from humans with major depression, you get a completely different result: The mice give up sooner, simply hanging motionless.”Let it go
“Just as I do not believe the word ‘relax’ holds any real weight or command, I don’t believe ‘let it go’ does either.”
(Click on the video to read the actual text, which is what I am trying to share.)