I've given myself a bit of a challenge this year, to read all of the books on my bookshelves in LA. It's not even a fraction of my total library, but still I have been feeling humiliated by all the many half-read and un-read books just languishing away in my little cabinet in the dining room. I am not allowed to buy another new book (um, except the awesome books I got for Christmas...thanks, family!) until I read every single book I already own. 2 down so far, about 40 to go.
What this means of course is that even those books that I would normally be tempted to put down halfway through, either from boredom or because of that sneaking suspicion that there's something better out there I could or ought to be reading, I now have to plod through until the end. It also means that I can't play that weird little game with myself where I just stand in front of my bookshelf hemming and hawing about which new tome I ought to start, creating more and more indecisiveness about which direction to go in until finally, fed up with the whole question, I end up abandoning the books altogether and picking up that latest issue of Vanity Fair that just arrived in the mail.
Yes, you can go ahead and draw a larger conclusion about my general disposition from this tendency, and yes, I know it's not very flattering.
Anyhoooo, so I'm reading this book right now...one of the aforementioned "I would normally have given up on this a while ago" books, and because I am committed to the completion of it, I've had to learn to overlook all of the things about the tone and dryness of the language (again, not something I would normally do), in service of the larger message of the book.
It's written by a former chess wunderkind turned martial artist, and it's all about the learning process and the idea of "peak performance"...i.e., how to get "in the zone". Much of it, honestly, is written in a kind of male super-athlete speak that I find a tiny bit aggravatting, but UNDERNEATH all of that, there is a lot of insight about how it is in that we learn, and in particular how learning turns to mastery and then to greatness.
There are a lot of things I could talk about in relation to this and to yoga...how it is that the magical process breaks down that goes, "I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it...I can almost do it...I did it! Oh wait, that was an accident...I can't do it, I can't do it...I can almost do it...okay, I can almost do it...I did it, I did it, I did it...I can do it!" (Which is a process that I LOVE, and which has been one of the greatest gifts of yoga, as there is nothing so wildly clear as the change in one's body from NOT capable to capable.)
But, what I actually want to talk about is a point that was made near the end of the book, when the author is talking about having gone as a young man to some kind of peak performance training facility, where a bunch of scientists had gathered a bunch of athletes to study them in the midst of training in order to figure out what is really going on with a gifted athlete when he's in that magic super-human place. And the big lesson that the author learned from being there, is that without fail, the athletes who were able to REST and really slow their heart-rate down between bursts of activity, had far more stamina and competed overall at a much higher level than those who were not able to do this. AND, that those athletes who had mastered this art of rest, were able to slow down their heart-rate and recover in shorter and shorter periods of time as they progressed. Meaning, that just 1 or 2 minutes of rest could do for some athletes what a less in-shape person might need 10 or 15 minutes to accomplish.
And what I loved, loved, loved about this, is that I have been thinking so much lately about the breath as a teaching tool...about looking to the pattern and rhythm and quality of the breath, not just as an indicator of what might be going on in a particular person, but also as a sort of instruction book for the human machine: This is how we run best: Inhale, exhale, pause.
Inhale, meaning action, inspiration, activity; Exhale, meaning release, surrender, letting gooo, and finally this Pause (I know, I'm hooked on the pause)--in which this two things seem to be integrated in rest. And then we begin again. This is the ideal operating system for the human body (and mind and spirit) and it is laid out in perfect never-ending example by the very thing that keeps us alive! But it's so easy to forget, because we live in a world that encourages a kind of productivity hyper-ventilation: Inhale! Inhale! Inhale! More! More! More! And the idea of a surrender and a silence are left only to the folks who subscribe to the OWN Network.
But if this performance model is true (which OF COURSE it is), then not only are we just stressing out our systems by not taking regular intervals of rest (and by rest, I don't mean watching television or drinking wine...though that's okay, too) we are also reducing our productivity and our ability to perform at our highest levels. One of the examples that the author gives is of the best tennis players, and how if you watch the true masters between sets, instead of arguing for a call or pumping their fist over a victory, you can watch them just picking placidly at the strings on their rackets. Resting. Breathing.
You can do and do and do and do and think and plan and fix and negotiate and action action action until you're blue in the face, but how is any of that ever going to take deep root if you don't every once in awhile, between sets, just...rest?
So, Shanti-Towners, today, if you're feeling stressed out at all...just take a moment, step back, and pick at the strings of your metaphorical racket until you're ready to get back in the fray. And then just notice if you feel better, more capable, stronger than you did before...
