Tag: ways of moving

Just tell your stories. That’s all.

The long version, after a morning workout before heading home:

On the treadmill (a metaphoric piece of equipment if there ever was one) at the hotel, I found myself looking at all the numbers the machine insisted on displaying: heart rate, miles per hour, distance gone, calories burned. And I thought: How did we get here, to this place where simply walking or running isn’t enough, where what we do doesn’t count unless our heart rate reaches the right levels, or a sufficient number of calories are burned, or a sufficient distance is traveled, where the joy of movement is reduced to–not true mathematics, which has a joy and playfulness of its own–but to a simple and unforgiving arithmetic? An arithmetic that we extend to all the joys of life really, one that makes it seem reasonable to say: I burned 217 calories today, so I can safely eat a 216 calorie brownie.

As someone who spent many years as a business communicator alongside my fiction writing, I understand the need for measurable results sometimes. But as I walked and ran today, trying to ignore the numbers the treadmill insisted on showing me, I found myself wondering: what if we got away from this attachment to numbers, with their absolute sense of Enough and Not Enough? What if we measured walking and running by the feel of limbs moving, the joy of strength, the pleasure of seeing our neighborhoods and meeting our neighbors, of climbing a mountain, of reaching places we might not have reached? What if we measured food by the joy of tastes mingling on our tongues, the fullness of our bellies, and again, strength that we gain?

And then I thought about writing, because it’s so easy to get so attached to numbers and results there, too. Yet what if our writing were not about number of words written or the number of pages finished, but about the arc brought to the surface, the character deepened, the catch of breath as the plot turns just so, the wondrous moment when we learn something new about our stories, about ourselves? What if our stories were not about the numbers set out in contracts and royalty statements, but about the reader we connect with, the letter saying, you gave me something I needed, the knowledge that lives are being touched in ways we can’t even see, let alone measure in any straightforward way, just as our lives continue to be touched by the stories of others?

Of course, it’s not as if we don’t remember moving and writing are about these things–we do, much of the time. But there are also those moments when we forget, when the instinct to fall back on simple arithmetic rather than looking to something more wondrous and complex, gets in our way. When that happens, we risk forgetting why we’re doing this thing that we’re doing, whatever it may be, moving or writing or something else entirely.

We risk knowing where we are, but forgetting why we’re on the journey.

So I dropped in on a second class, with a different instructor. Partway through, I reached for my water bottle. And the instructor–tried to stop me. Now, I’ve since learned there are indeed preferred times to drink water in bikram classes. And, if the instructor had said, “I’d prefer you wait if you can, but in the end it’s your call,” I’d have respected that. Instead, she tried to reach for my bottle–to make me stop.

And my inner voice shouted, loud and clear, “No. That isn’t right.” My outer voice said words to the effect of, “Please don’t decide for me what my body needs,” and I took a long sip of water.

For the rest of the class, every sip of water seemed like an act of defiance, and I knew, beyond doubting, that this wasn’t the right place for me. Because one of the things yoga has taught me is to listen to my own body. And the moment an instructor said, “Don’t listen to your body–listen to me,” I knew this wasn’t yoga as I wanted to be practicing it. I’d lost all trust in the class and the instructor, and I wouldn’t be back.

This got me to feeling thinky about lots of things, inner voices most of all. Because sometimes the “this isn’t right for me” moment isn’t nearly so loud and clear, but even so we know something isn’t right. We don’t always pay attention to those inner voices–I know there’ve been times that I’ve stayed in relationships (business or personal) or taken on projects (ditto) that I knew weren’t right. Because sometimes, no one reaches for your water bottle, but deep down you feel uneasy, just the same.

If that voice inside us says, “No, I shouldn’t be doing this,” then that’s a cue to sit down, look at what’s really going on, and figure out where that uneasy feeling is coming from. We all have instincts for a reason, after all. Women especially are often taught to ignore these instincts, but if something feels wrong–something probably is wrong.

There are people for whom bikram yoga is a wonderful, life-changing thing. There are also people for whom the other commitments and pursuits I’ve turned down have been wonderful, life-changing things–and I know my perfect things have been other people’s wrong ones, too. My inner voice–my inner self–isn’t identical to the next person’s. One phrase I’ve heard repeatedly in various sorts of negotiations through the years is, “No one else has had a problem with this.” Which is lovely, and I’m glad for those other people; but it does nothing to change the fact that I do have a problem with it.

When I thought about my two trial bikram classes afterwards, I saw other warning signs that it wasn’t right for me, personally. I realized I was lucky that that instructor tried to stop me from taking a drink. Otherwise, it might have taken me longer to hear what my own voice was telling me, especially surrounded, as I would have been, by classmates for whom that form of yoga was a right thing. (Was, well, a yoga thing, as for me it was not.)

Learning to listen to our own voices is as important as learning to listen to our own bodies, and as tricky. There are times to push forward, and times to withdraw, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which, but in the end I think we know what we’re doing more often than not.

Like many things, it seems to get easier with practice.