Yesterday, a wonderful thing happened: I finally was able to release my chronically tight muscles. It’s not just that- I was able to basically release the tension in all my body parts at will (except for the forehead).
How did this happen? Well, I was doing a nighttime Yoga routine from Yoga dose. During the process, I started to develop a keen sense of different impulses coming and going in my body. I started to be able to “identify” the tensing impulse, before it could take over. By identifying, I mean two things: I notice the sensation associated with “tension is about to happen” and the “thought” (not quite a verbal thought, more like a mental activity) that triggers that sensation. In other words, I noticed both the stimuli and the reaction. Notice here means I being able to find the corresponding blob, establishing an isomorphism.
This was like how Alexander fixes his voice. When reading about noticing the stimuli, I have always thought that meant the “external stimuli”. Now I realize that that should be the inner stimuli, the mental sensation/blob that triggers the impulse. And once I “find” the knob that turns on the impulse, I gain control over it. Not only can I turn it off, I can also adjust its intensity. This is the idea in TRIZ and Buddhism, as well as modelling curves, with enough data points at the extremes, we find the shape of the function (the knob) and thus can adjust the values at will. That is why it is better to experiment to see which input gives which output rather than aiming for one exact perfect output (cf. the story in Atomic habits about quantity over quality). Also, this is why, like Costa said, I should let myself fall. When I tense my body in order to keep balance, I block the sensory input to the vestibular system, so my body does not learn to balance (cf. Smart Yoga).
(I used to need to teach to generate ideas, but I guess now I can just write down my thoughts instead? The difference between this stream of consciousness approach and teaching is that without an audience to adjust to, I don’t have a way of eliminating and selecting optimum explanation. Without an audience, what would optimum mean- for what background? Thus I would skip steps in my writing, leaving holes undetected.)
Finally now I understood what that Russian book about stretch was saying. By understanding I mean now I could actually associate to the words in it a corresponding sensation, i.e. establishing an isomorphism between sensations and words. (Concretization) When I do I stretch, now I notice when the stretch impulse, i.e. the tension kicks in. At that moment, I will release it, and then continue to stretch deeper. This is similar to Amanda’s exercise with the feet crawl: crawl, notice tension then release, then repeat. The point is to break the process into many micro steps- micro in size to release tension before enough can accumulate. I think if I practice this enough to the level of conditioning and imprinting this in my memory, I will be able to release tension at will. Then I will be able to do split, yay! Would that help me with tension headache, singing and dancing too?
Why does my tension release so easily when I dance? Is that because it’s the music, not the conscious mind, that moves me? This is another kind of isomorphism, like the one in the treatment of the phantom limb.
My dream (maybe fantasy) is that once I have establish enough trust with my body that it will allow me to do these stretches, I can transfer that feelings to ask other things from my mind and my body. What other things?
The feelings I get from teaching for example, are very useful. They become analogies that I can reuse and apply to my other situations, include my own studying. “Understanding” is always about establishing an analogy, and isomorphism with some feelings/blob you already have or you just created. So it is good to have as many blobs as possible for things to link to.
I was very intrigued by the study of French nuns with Alzheimer’s. Though they had Alzheimer’s, there’s were no symptoms. The brain was physically deteriorating, but the mind wasn’t. The reason was that thei knowledge and memories were linked in my ways, so there were many ways to retrieve the same memories. The number of links and things being links also strengthen the weight/strength/durability of the memory. Thickens the memory?
Charly tennis/open can/David Lynch
Can I apply this to thinking habits too? It’s much harder to notice the initiation of a thinking impulse. And what for? Can I redirect my thinking- is it like meditation? Does this leads to complete attention? Does complete attention leads to childlike spongelike plasticity and absorption (e.g. learning language by immersion)
I probably should also write down thoughts about my thesis in the form of streams of consciousness like this.
Attention, in the usual sense, only involve pushing the tip of the mind to the object of attention. Usually the background is still working on something else- thus creating a struggle. We need to full momentum- all cells to work on the same thing, creating a flow state, so that there is no resistance. This reminds me of what my weight lifting coach at Uchicago said about how lifting will become easy once the brain cells learn to fire together efficiently all at once. To apply this to thinking, there needs to be appropriate priming. I need to be mindful of what I exposes my brain to, since every such topic will start a momentum of thoughts in the background. Soon enough, so many apps will be running in the background, secretly leaking and exhausting my mental battery.
Why don’t we have the ability to learn as fast as babies? Well, there is the plasticity problem and the basal ganglia problem. But more importantly, for the mind, there are two problems: attention and rounding. An example of rounding is accent. Another thing is how we interpret things in the way we think, or we only perceive, pay attention to what we care about. The stimuli aren’t fully perceived to begin with, how can they be store? Let’s talk a bit about learning next.
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