Seeing is Believing

Right there in yoga class, my mind and body formed a conspiracy against me. For thirty seconds, I held plank pose in what felt like a perfect imitation of a yoga master. I felt the straight line of my back and long neck, the open spread of my chest and shoulders, palms pressing firmly into the ground yet not straining. It all felt correct and effortless, maybe even graceful.



Then I glanced to the right at a mirror next to me. Whoa, was that hunched up, straining figure ME? My rounded back looked like a turtle shell; my shoulders slumped and chest collapsed. That girl in the mirror couldn't possibly be me. Where was the grace, the long straight spine? That girl looked like Quasimodo crawling up the steps at Notre Dame.





I turned away so I could focus on feeling my body again. Wiggling a little here and there, I fixed the problems and knew that surely now I was close to perfection. For validation, I turned again to the mirror. WHAT?! Nothing changed from before. A lip-biting, sloppy hunchback gazed back at me.





Obviously, my body was betraying me. How could something feel so different from the way it was actually happening? Initially, I thought this trickery might be karmic payback for the lessons I've taught in which I end up being the equivalent of the yoga mirror for students. A common exchange goes like this:



Student: But my leg IS back.




Me: No, it's not. It really is not.




Student: It MUST be. It feels so far back.




Me: No. It's not even close.





These exchanges, while indeed necessary for a student's learning, leave me feeling like a buzz-kill. I end up being a messenger of negativity at the moment someone thinks she is doing really well. Everything feels great, her body is giving feedback that she's succeeding, and then I come along and tell her that her body is lying.





Too often, I deliver these bubble-bursting tidbits into the gaze of a wide-eyed student, whose blank expression says "but...but... how can that possibly be?" Their innocent stare wonders for a moment if perhaps I am lying. Maybe I just want to deflate their egos and make them work harder. Or I'm just a mean person. Let me assure you, devoted students, that I had similar thoughts about the cruel mirror in yoga class. Was this some kind of prank?, I pondered. Did the mirror need cleaning? Or maybe it was foggy.





No. It was the age-old curse of being human. I call this flawed human reality the curse of being deceived by our bodies. Thus, the events we are certain we've created have not actually happened. So, even though my spine feels long and straight, it is not that way at all. It is, more accurately, slumped, hunched, compressed.





Dispelling my belief that this disparity was due to karmic payback, I read the scientific explanation behind it last week. As it turns out, human brains are wired for eternal frustration, at least in the case of learning motor skills. The region of our brains that know how to perform a physical task differs from the region that signals neurons to create movements for tasks. The part of your brain that tells you how to perform sitting trot, for example, is different than the part that triggers impulses to get the job done. You can tell yourself to stretch thighs down and back, keep your eyes up, elbows at your side, and so on. But this does not, unfortunately, translate to the right results.

This mis-wiring of brain and body certainly monkey wrenches our attempts to learn technical sports like horseback riding, where so much depends on the feedback of body sensations. It's just plain unfair, in fact. On my bike ride home from yoga class, I contemplated this. I wondered what good could possibly exist in this way that our brains work (or don't work) with our bodies. It definitely impedes our learning process. And it can wreak havoc on our notion of progress, not to mention the demoralizing of our egos.

Then, I remembered watching a video clip from a recent schooling session with a young horse. The schooling session had felt okay but not great, so I got home expecting I already knew what was on the video my student shot. However, her video clip revealed a much better session. My horse LOOKED a lot better than he FELT. I watched the television pleasantly surprised. As footage reeled, my smile grew. A genuine contentment claimed me. Instantly, I was thoroughly satisfied with the horse's schooling, even though moments before watching this footage I felt nagging discontent.

Moments like these, I realized, make the mis-wiring of our brains and bodies not only tolerable but preferable. Like an unexpected gift, these moments tell us that we're doing a whole lot better than we thought we were. They change our reality from usual self-bashing "This is not going well, I should quit while I'm ahead" to a self-congratulating "Hey, look at me, I'm pretty awesome!"

What's better than that? I argue that few things come close in terms of delivering happiness. The sudden surprising evidence that, no, you are not doing a terrible job but are in fact excelling, deserves our appreciation. So, to the Gods of evolution, I would like to say thank you. Thanks for our flawed human creation, for our strangely functioning brains. Thank you for bodies that defy our commands and for brains that can't tell when they do. But most of all, thanks for when this works in our favor and leaves us feeling awesome.