Embodying a New Thing
Another reason I wanted to shake it all up was because I’d got fed up. I’d been wearing the same glasses for too long. I'd got bored with the view of my front room.
So, this volunteering trip to Peru was an opportunity for many things. One of them was to learn a language, Spanish, and to get those neurones firing, to wake up cells that had nodded off, to allow those jellies in the brain to form new pathways.
Research tells us two of the best ways to keep our brains mobile and memory efficient is to learn an instrument or a different language.
If you’ve ever tried, you’ll know that doing a new thing regularly, is tough. We’re human beings, and programmed to opt for what’s comfortable, even if what’s comfortable doesn’t serve us.
And yet many of us do want to change, grow, and take those actions, or learn that behaviour, that propels us towards a better version of ourselves.
New Year's Resolutions, for example that fatal new gym membership, generally fail because the idea, the good intention, never gets into the body. That is to say, the idea never gets born, it remains in that often troublesome place of our monkey minds.
And why? Because we are generally weak in our commitment to the idea. When the going gets tough, say it’s cold and wet outside, we get knocked off course, and lying in bed for that extra 30 minutes at 6.30am wins the day instead of doing 30 minutes of the new thing.
In my class today I’m teaching around 23 Peruvian teachers, and I’m working with the sounds of the English language, the vowels, the dipthongs and phonemes; the complex shapes made by lips, tongue and mouth, via the breath, that form the words. While comically modelling the ‘p’ and ‘b’ sounds I ask the students,
“Can you feel the difference in your mouth?”
For many, this is a new feeling. Like breathing deeply can be, or taking on a yoga asana for the first time, or playing a musical scale. Their mouths, tongues and lips move differently together in a new little dance.. In fact their bodies are making a new shape, a shape that, if they practice making it daily, will access for them the authority that using a language skilfully will give them.
Doing a new thing often requires us to face a fear. We meet our own resistance, our patterns of thinking; the fear of looking stupid in a class, fear of getting it wrong, not being good enough, feeling unworthy, of getting a response from a partner we might not know what to do with, of letting go of control, of not knowing… etc etc.
Yet, if you practice your new thing regularly, it will slowly get into your body, in fact it’ll become part of your thinking, feeling and way of being. You’ll cease to ask the question “Shall I go to the gym today?” because the practice will become part of you, who you are, and what you stand for. The competency you’re learning will become unconscious and you’ll no longer struggle. You’ll have changed shape, just like the learners in my class will if they practice sounding the difference between the ‘p’ and the ‘b’, perhaps in a short daily practice.
Your behaviour will have become embodied.
Yet right now, I’m right at the beginning of a new practice. Learning Spanish.
Today I was in the chemist.
“Teine vitamin C por favor?”
She looks at me, and then gives me some zinc.
“No zinc” I say. “Vitamin C.”
I draw an elaborate ‘C’ shape in the air.
“Ah” she says, and whacks a bottle of 1000mg Vit Cs on the counter.
“Quanto Questa?”
“Cinquenta y siete” she says.
There, that wasn’t so bad was it?
