Private Universe

Critic brain and creator brain

So as a follow-up to the last post, how can you tune into your body's feedback and make your yoga practice your own? It is difficult, because different people do this in different ways. Body feedback can be in the form of mental pictures or messages, or you might feel a particular body part calling for attention (with pain or tension), or you might just get a hunch or a feeling that the next posture should be this.

I asked my teacher about how I could explain this better, and she helped me develop these thoughts.

Writers know about having critic mind and creator mind. Critic mind is the mode of thinking that says this is good, that is awful, here's how it could be improved. Creator mind is the mode where you make things, write things, have new ideas. Writers know that if you accidentally turn on critic mind while you are trying to write, you get nowhere. Critic mind is fantastic when it is time for editing, and it is fantastic for reading other people's work and learning from it. But it stinks at creating. Critic mind is rational, clear-thinking, and has reasons for things. Creator mind is artistic and intuitive, and sometimes is comfortable doing things without knowing the reason.

Yoga practitioners have two mental modes too, a rational and an intuitive. So if you have a yoga practice that you do the same every day, and you designed it carefully to stretch and strengthen all the major muscles, that would be doing yoga in rational mode. If you have a practice where you listen to your body's feedback and improvise from one posture to the next, you are in intuitive/creative mode.

Our culture seems to place a lot of value on rational mode, which is why some writers get blocked. When critical/logical mind never shuts up, creative/intuitive mind never gets to talk. Creative mind is also the one that takes feedback from the body.

There is a need for both minds in yoga practice. If you get stuck in critical/rational mode, you miss one of the great gifts of yoga, which is the chance to work on your mind-body relationship. If you get stuck in intuitive mode only, you can fall into the trap of only doing postures that are easy and feel good, never challenging yourself with things that feel "hard."

This (my teacher explains) is why yoga teachers get so mixed up in front of class sometimes: can't remember which is right and which is left... or refer to the "palms of your feet" and the "soles of your hands"... can't describe a perfectly simple move like "raise your left hand off the mat." We aren't flakes (well, not all of us). We are trying to be in rational and intuitive mode at the same time, and that scrambles up your mind a bit. You have to talk the students into the posture, which requires rational mode (here's how you do it, do things in this order, and here are the reasons why) and then observe feedback from your own body and your students, which requires intuitive mode(how does this feel? will we need a break next, or a counter posture? are they stable and comfortable, or just being polite?) Then once you have the feedback, rational mode has to kick back in (my students felt some wrist pain in that posture, what should I do next and how should I adapt the rest of the class to take care of their wrists?)

So if you are stuck in your practice, this might be one way to determine what is missing. Are you thinking mostly in terms of "here's what I do and why" or mostly in terms of "listening," feeling, or intuiting your body's feedback?

Labels: yoga

posted by Jaime_sama @ 10:00 AM