 Embracing Your Wobbles – Thoughts on Balance
The genesis of this blog post goes like this…
I read an essay out of “Embrace your Wobbles – Wisdom from the Yoga Mat” discussing the science behind physical and mental wobbles. Priscilla Shumway, the editor of this book, explains that wobbles are simply mental and physical challenges that are an unavoidable part of yoga practice and our daily lives. In some ways, delineating physical and mental is not necessary since the brain plays a starring role in responding to both mental and physical perturbations (wobbles). As part of the nervous system, our brain is directly responsible for receiving messages not only from the parts of our body overseeing physical balance, but also the environment that this balance occurs in. The brain takes these messages and formulates responses or reactions so that we are capable of staying upright even with our wobbles. Balance can be defined as the capacity to maintain the line of gravity (vertical line from the center of mass) within the base of support. We could also think of balance as the maintenance of our stability and the ability to return to that “stability” after perturbations (wobbles). This is an ongoing process for the rest of our lives because wobbles occur regularly in human movement from the time we are born through our aging process. But that’s great and we should fully embrace it! First of all, we’re aging and that means we are very much alive and secondly if we embrace the wobbles we acknowledge the choice to work with them rather than be afraid of or battle them. In fact, it is important for us to lose balance in order to continue to maintain balance. Read that again…our nervous system needs us to lose our balance in order to adapt and change and re-up on our ability to be stable. Those of you attending my classes know that I regularly work on balance activities and we add in things that I know will create wobbles for all of us… it’s as much a brain game as it is a physical game, but playing with balance is something I highly recommend if you want to balance better. And not just in tree pose, but walking on uneven surfaces, tripping over something and righting ourselves, carrying something up and down the stairs, the ability to reach for something and not fall sideways, and the ability to live independently and attend to activities of daily living. Again, it’s important for us to lose our balance in order to grow our balance skills. Babies fall all the time, and yes, they’re babies and they land differently than we do and they have big diapers on to pad their cute little behinds, but falling helps their nervous system learn what needs adjusting for balance. And you know what? They get up and keep going, and yep, they fall again, and then they try to climb something we absolutely think they shouldn’t and this is a vital part of developing the motor skills necessary to maintain their line of gravity with their base of support. As an aging adult, I don’t really want to fall. I am intelligent and experienced enough to recognize that it hurts. I may break something. It’s scary to consider falling and hurting myself. I may have a conscious or unconscious fear of falling that I allow to limit my movement and those fear wobbles may have created a mental wobble with a story that I am attached to. I watched my mental wobbles when I was recovering from breaking my wrist and found myself limiting behaviors and moving with fear, which I can tell you did not help me with the physical wobbles in the slightest. However…. The need to grow my balance capacity as I age is a necessary evil. Wait, let’s embrace that wobble… a necessary opportunity! When I challenge my balance system I create the potential for neuroplastic changes in my brain. My brain and body must be challenged to create responses to losing my line of gravity within my base of support. If you want a muscle to get stronger, you must challenge it to adapt to new and progressively bigger loads. So, too, with balance… our neuronal activity must be challenged in order to adapt and create new pathways (habits). “Neurons that fire together wire together”and yes, you have movement neurons….they’re called motor neurons and they are part of the motor nervous system. Things in the human body must be stressed to some degree and in new and varying ways in order to create neuroplastic changes. You can teach an old dog new tricks because neuroplasticity is possible in an aging body. You can bend the aging curve, but it takes embracing the wobbles and working with them to elicit change. Part of embracing the balance wobbles is our ability to practice a neutral mindset – not attaching labels or good/bad or right/wrong when we find ourselves putting a foot down in tree pose or some other balance activity. I’ve said this in class (a lot in fact)… when you put your foot down or lose your balance and adjust it’s a learning moment for all the things working together to help you in balance. You’re not bad at doing tree pose. In fact, tree pose doesn’t really matter. I know, I know, the yoga asana gods may strike me down right now… What matters is the story (yep, those mental wobbles) we have attached to doing it right or good enough rather than the fact that when that foot touches back down our nervous system is actively assembling a boat load of information to help us the next time. And we will do it the next time because that is what practice is, but maybe the next time we do tree pose we can do it without expectations that it will be good or bad or right or wrong… maybe embracing the wobbles has to do not only with creating neuroplastic changes physically, but also becoming more neutral in the “story” about it all. I felt myself take a deep breath after writing that last bit. It hit the spot and I feel emotionally less wobbly. If we don’t lose our balance once in awhile and touch our foot down or suddenly grab the wall for support, our nervous system won’t be tasked with creating new pathways, new strategies, new opportunities for change and balance. Wobbles are simply opportunities. How wonderful it is to have wobbles. |
