I’ve always been a voracious note-taker, especially in class settings. In high school, I was infamous for my 4-color pen. Whenever people missed a class, I was the person they’d ask for notes.
I’m still a heavy note-taker. But I’ve realized that all those notes just create more clutter to sift through.
Last week, I participated in a 30-hour yoga training. I got a fresh journal for my notes. And although I wrote some things down, I mostly abstained from writing notes.
On the first day, the teacher reminded us that learning isn’t linear.
Once you understand something you can’t un-understand something.
She encouraged us not to learn to spit out the information. Instead, learn it to process it and really understand it.
That’s what I did. I focused on the experience of learning. I endeavored to understand. I trusted what I might remember.
It was a profound shift.
I realized that I actually paid more attention by not taking notes.
I was able to connect what I was learning to other things I had previously learned, because I was present in the moment.
I realized that by taking notes I was trying to record something that just happened, keeping me one step behind, in the past, while everyone else is in the present.
When I’m teaching a yoga class I’m not referencing my notes.
The result of not taking notes was greater integration.
The day after the training I had an opportunity to apply some of my new knowledge. The situation that presented itself wasn’t anything we had covered in the training, but I saw the opening to apply the concepts to facilitate a result based on the new philosophies and techniques I had learned.
My notebook from the training was not on hand, but it didn’t matter.
As I say often, true knowledge is embodied.
The knowledge I had gained was within me.
And as a bonus, there’s a lot less clutter to sift through.
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