A potent life and how to have one
Using movement, curiosity and learning
Does your definition of a potent life include the words adaptability and potential? Here’s why it needs to.
Adaptability, because we live in a world where chaos is not just a theory it is fundamental. Change, both disorderly and random, is ceaseless. That we believe anything different is an attribute of our extraordinarily busy, order seeking brains.
And though it might seem obvious that potential should be part of a potent life, it’s also a word that has been overworked and misrepresented in motivational circuits. Potential is not a fixed quantity allocated at birth and achieved by will-power. Potential, in humans, fluctuates.
If adaptability is responding to change, potential is generated by the variety of our responses. Adaptability and potential are in a spiral relationship that can expand or contract.
A potent life — a life with the power to move, create and fulfill — depends on an expanding relationship between adaptability and potential.
Movement, curiosity and learning
So what fuels this expansion that leads to a potent life? In the subtitle, I suggested it was movement, curiosity and learning. Here’s why.
Movement is how we live. The more variety in our movements, the more information available to our sensors and our never-sleeping nervous systems. Our nervous system’s entire role is to manage our responses to information streaming from internal and external sensors.
But information available, is different to information received. Our sensors are capable of detecting way more information than our conscious brains can utilise. Like filtering our junk laden inboxes, we sift available information through attention to what we want, need, can accept and can use.
Habit will dictate the vast majority of what we perceive — but curiosity? Well curiosity is a catalyst that lights up our brains, and literally gets its juices running. Chemistry is created when we get curious and act upon it. Curiosity directs attention and allows new information in, where habit had blocked it.
Learning converts the bounty from curiosity into new connections in the brain and new abilities in our behaviors. New abilities create new opportunities for new responses — this is the potent cycle.
Optimal conditions for the Potent Cycle
At the very centre of all this is neuroplasticity — the ability for our very complex nervous systems to make new connections under the right conditions.
For centuries the accepted doctrine was that our brains could not change. We now know, not just from millennia of anecdotes but through sophisticated 21st century technology that our brains are capable of substantial change at all ages. But there are conditions that assist and conditions that impede.
It took many men and women of intellect and rigour to change the accepted doctrine. People working without the current technology, but from powers of observation, trial and error. Moshe Feldenkrais was one of those people, often cited as an early neuroplastician.
Half a century before it was a recognised word, Feldenkrais was laying out conditions for stimulating neuroplasticity.
Experience is paramount. Further reading will not help with this. But a few minutes moving in a very particular way will.
Experiment: Can your foot inform your nervous system?
To start, it would be ideal if you could take off your shoes, but if not, do your best to experience the different sensations in this short experiment.
Stand for a moment and see if you can feel any difference between your right and left foot. Are they equal or is one heavier, lighter, larger or smaller in your attention? And if you lifted one foot and then the other, are you equally stable/unstable over each, or does one seem more capable of taking your weight easily? [use curiosity to direct your attention to the overlooked habits of standing]
Sit and cross one knee over the other in sitting.
Begin to move the toes of the upper leg in a circle. Make the circle slow enough so you can tell if it is a circle or is it some other shape, or collection of angles? Many will feel that the speed changes at different points, jumping bits, and quivering through others as you attempt a slow circular motion with the front of your foot.
Repeat the circling several times. Every time you hit a wonky patch see if you can slow down further to create a smoother curve. You might make the circle smaller — as small as you can while still recognising the shape — and see if that makes it smoother. These are all prompts for your curiosity — does changing size or tempo, change quality?
The jumps, and wobbles are from an incomplete map in your brain — the more information it can get about this movement the smoother it becomes. [paying attention, without ambition, to these systemic foibles is the exciting beginning of learning]
Reverse the circle and see if it is the same or different — try changing pace or size to feel the impact in this direction. [repetition with variation is important for learning]
How much of the rest of your leg is involved in making this circle? Is your knee moving side to side? Or are you keeping the leg rigidly still in order to only circle the front of the foot?
Let the leg respond softly to the foot’s motion. You can play with the magnitude of the response too. Does this change the size, smoothness or ease of your foot circle?
You may feel this all the way to the hip, which is surely also involved through musculoskeletal connection even if you cannot experience this presently.
Now keep the circle with the front of the foot going while you pay attention to your heel — the part of your foot that touches the back of your shoe usually. Is the heel also making a circle? Logic may say yes, but what is your experience of this? Some will feel the heel jerking up and down, or waggling clumsily side to side.
Can you begin to make a circle with your heel, while also keeping maintaining the circle at the front of your foot? If you can’t, does that make you more curious, or frustrated, or more likely to use force? All these can be habitual responses to challenge. [novelty, pleasure and a touch of manageable frustration, are important for neuroplasticity]
Make sure you are breathing. As crazy as it sounds many people will inhibit their breathing, and clamp their jaws, while trying to do novel, or challenging things. A held breath will not help you make a movement easy, let alone pleasant.
Find your way to curious, light, even playful movement. Let your attention shift between front and back until it can encompass both at the same time.
When you are either satisfied with your heel and toe circle, or when you have run out of curiosity for this movement, please stop and stand up again.
In standing, go back to those first moments of attention. Do your feet feel equally light, heavy, large, weight bearing? If you stand on one and then the other, can you feel differences in accepting weight?
Our feet do so much work each day, yet we pay little attention to them unless they hurt. Feeding new information to your brain about your feet and ankles, using attention and light curious movement with variation, increases your ability to cope with changing surfaces and unexpected events — greater adaptability, greater potential.
Moving On
That was a sampler. A very basic experiment in movement, attention and curiosity. It may even lead to learning, about balance or propulsion, if you playfully return to the ideas and movements a few more times.
Most of us would need more variations, more guidance and directed attention to leap from this experiment to fully understanding the power we have to fuel our own potent life.
If you want some help to make that leap there is a two day workshop in April addressing just this topic — A Potent Life and How to Have One. It will be delving in more detail into the conditions that stimulate our neuroplasticity, and it will be jam packed with movement to feed your hungry nervous system. You can find out more about accessing it in person, on-line or in your time zone by clicking here.
