What does you good? What feels good?
Here are my lists as seeds to start, cross out my words and add your own.
Yes
kind, strong, gentle, respectful, smart, fun, clear, skillful, joyful, playful, hopeful, stable, adaptable, creative, comfortable, smooth, supple, happy, friendly, helpful, reliable, patient, enjoyable, gradual, stimulating, progressing, satisfying, natural, relaxed, open, easy-going, personal, calm, questioning, exploring, feeling, sustainable, dynamic, vigorous, energizing, restoring, relaxing, laugh, … Let’s really enjoy this and get even better at enjoying.
No
uncomfortable, unstable, awkward, monotonous, impersonal, vain, dogmatic, pseudo-medical, pushing, frustrating, unsatisfying, … Some people do yoga the way Hershey does chocolate. We can have better.
Do
Doing ourselves good and feeling good is more than how we move.
We learn by doing.1 And more.
When we imagine ourselves doing something, we often have the habit of thinking of ourselves from the outside as if watching someone else or as if watching a character.
We live in a new era where from a young age we spend many hours watching. This trains us into the habit of thinking of what we can know by seeing and know by words.
And we get trained to think of ourselves this way too. Our vicarious thinking about ourselves gets trained into what could be seen and what could be expressed by words. That’s very narrow.
We all have the experiences of knowing something or feeling something which we cannot find words to express. That little frustration of inexpressible points at a large part of ourselves.
When I think of myself doing yoga or teaching or gardening or hiking, I do not think of myself from the outside, and I do not think of what I do in words and images. Some of what I do I could describe with words but not all.
Doing gives us ways of truly thinking about ourselves. We experience ourselves in doing. And we only think about ourselves without the limitations of words and images from what we do.
Scientific studies often confirm old wisdom. Eating a broad variety of vegetables improves our gut health. Eat a broad variety of high quality doing, the good stuff that feels good.
There are moments in the woods and moments in yoga and moments in the garden and moments together that are wonderful to be ourselves in, and teach us ourselves, and we’ll never have words or images to express them or learn them. We only know ourselves in them by doing. And we only think of ourselves fully by doing and remembering the doing and thoughts and feelings for which we can never have words or images.
How do you want to feel?
Do be do be do
Sinatra
And always laugh at ourselves.
- “[…] human learning is […] as much or more about implicit or nonverbal learning-by-doing in varied practice tasks where interactive feedback is available.”
— “An astonishing regularity in student learning rate” Koedinger, K. R., Carvalho, P. F., Liu, R., & McLaughlin, E. A. (2023). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(13). doi:10.1073/pnas.2221311120 ↩︎
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