increasing flexibility
Since then, I’ve been improving rapidly, though it took 4 to 5 days before the swelling and sensitivity subsided. I’ve known for a while that I need to start stretching again, and have been fully intending to take up yoga again, since it’s been a year or more since I went to classes. I have accumulated some basic yoga material to read, and once I’ve worked through some of it and establish another habit or two I will begin my practice again. My practice will be different this time, since my aim is to eventually take some formal training and begin teaching a class. I will probably start in my sensei’s dojo, and if/when I open my own dojo, I will probably teach it there as well.
But flexibility applies to just more than muscles. A teacher I spent some time with recently told us as a class, that muscles are indicative of how flexible our minds are. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that, to grasp all the implications.
I have noticed over the last few years that as I get older, there are certain ideas I’m no longer open to, though I don’t exactly understand why. It’s almost as if my subconscious mind has taken all the programming from my conscious mind and synthesized new decisions and beliefs that I don’t consciously remember making. It makes me wonder if that’s why we become less flexible in our thinking as we get older – that on some level, our subconscious is continuously melding our experiences and thoughts into a single framework that at some point begins to constrain our thinking.
So what can we do to prevent this inflexibility from setting in without losing who we are? As the saying goes, variety is the spice of life. In the same way that our bodies require a wide variety of food to maintain itself, so our minds require a wide variety of stimulation in order to prevent rigidity fro setting in. Exposure to different people, experiences, and information, and a willingness to see things from other perspectives are needed. Nearly every experience we have is colored by our filters of reality – we don’t experience reality itself, but rather we experience what we think reality is. Something I’m sure you’ve heard before.
Hmmm. I have some more things to think about, but this isn’t the right post to do it in. Guess I’ll be writing some more quite soon.