A Plea for Embracing Failure

As a recovering perfectionist, I know all too well the plight of "Get it Right". I yearned for A's in school as if my life depended upon it. To ensure that sweet peaked shape on my report cards, I would spend more of my semester trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to see in a paper than I did actually learning. Perhaps that got me through school with a relatively high GPA but it robbed me of the curiosity and exploration that lead to real learning.

In Alexander Technique, a somatic movement practice, they call this end-gaining- "The tendency to keep our mind and actions focused on an end result whilst losing sight of and frequently at the expense the means whereby the result is achieved." In Short, we lose the beauty of the process and what can be learned from it, by being focused on the perceived goal.

Once I recognized this tendency, I began to see it everywhere, especially and unfortunately in my own and my students' practice. We stop breathing and grit our teeth in order to conquer an arm balance. We ignore acute pain in our lower back to make a backbend we think others will deem Instagram-worthy. We have a silent tantrum to ourselves when we fall out of tree pose.

Here's the thing, It's natural to feel adverse to failure. Our lizard brain aka the autonomic nervous system perceives failure as a threat to our safety, so giving yourself permission to explore and try things that are most likely to result in a few or more mess-ups is something we are hard-wired to avoid. In order to combat that well-meaning, but often not necessary desire to just get to the goal, we have to reframe with our intellectual, reasoning brain. We can choose to ask questions in our arm balance. "Where is the weight in my hands?", "What happens when I widen my back?" "Am I breathing?". We can forsake the external shape of that Instagram backbend by building the pose from inside the body. We can choose to celebrate when we fall out of tree pose because being off-balance and learning how to fall have far more to teach us than getting it right every time.

For a practice aimed at combatting the comfort zone join me on Monday's at 9:30 am and every other Thursday at 6:15 pm for Dynamic Flow a class that challenges brain-body connection with fun and new movement patterns, exploration of theme, and lots of opportunities to intentionally and safely fail.

Here are some incredible upcoming events to enhance your month:

September 15th 7-8 pm New Moon Yoga Nidra w/ Sound bath hosted by Helen Downing

September 16th 6-7 pm Introduction to House Dance hosted by Alexandre Beasley

September 23rd 5-7 pm Sensual Yoga hosted by Desire Lott