For almost 20 years, I’ve trained in the circus art of flying trapeze. In connection with this sport, to work on aerial skills, I also train on trampoline.
Learning trampoline as an adult has been an interesting journey. Movements that a young child might try without a second thought can be scary as an adult.
My body doesn’t move as fluently as it might have if I had started this when I was younger.
But perhaps the biggest hurdle I face is that too often, I seek to understand how a movement works instead of trusting my body to figure it out.
In other words, I try to accomplish movement by understanding the movement, rather than by executing the movement.
I try to move with my mind rather than trusting my body.
This is the pattern that I trained in for most of my life.
For as long as I can remember, I was fed a narrative that my value and worth are tied to what my mind can do.
My intelligence.
My ability to understand things, to think, to reason, to form thoughts and arguments.
But placing so much value in the mind came at a cost:
I never developed a good relationship with my body.
I never learned how to trust my body.
In fact, quite the opposite: when feelings and emotions became too much for me, I escaped into my mind.
I’m often trying to understand something, under the belief that understanding it cognitively will help me put it into action.
This turns out to be a false belief; a belief that actually can keep me stuck.
Thinking often leads to overthinking. Overthinking often leads to paralysis.
One of the big lessons I’ve learned from trampoline and flying trapeze — as well as in weightlifting — is that it’s possible to accomplish something even without fully understanding it cognitively.
Learning to Trust
Recently, I was practicing a trampoline skill called a back pullover, which is like a dynamic backwards roll. I have always trained this skill in safety lines.
My coach has told me repeatedly, for months (actually stretching back years), that he’s not actually doing anything to help my hips come over my head, or to keep me safe.
I believed him, but I didn’t feel confident to do the skill without safety lines.
I didn’t feel confident because I don’t fully understand — cognitively — the mechanics of what is happening.
I didn’t trust that my body could do it unless my mind could understand it.
Last week, as I practiced the skill in safety lines, I reminded myself that my coach wasn’t actually doing anything. I tried to feel the movement in my body, rather than thinking about it in my mind.
Then, in a moment of bravery, I decided to take off the safety lines.
And I did a back pullover. Safely.
It turned out that I don’t need to understand it cognitively in order to do it safely. I needed to do it enough times in lines to let my body get the movement down, then I needed to trust my body to do what it knows.
Our minds are powerful. More powerful that perhaps we give them credit for. That power can get in our way.
The body is equally as powerful. It has its own intelligence, sends its own messages, and can help us do great things if we allow our mind to get out of the way.
I’m not giving up on curiosity or a desire to understand how things work. But understanding how to do something doesn’t always lead to doing it.
I’m learning that to get out of my own way I must trust my body over my mind.