Mind Body Mama: Beginner's Mind
A Unitarian Universalist I love posted to her Facebook page a few weeks ago, “I hate how I make mistakes when I’m doing something for the first time.”
“Beginner’s Mind, Grasshopper,” I quipped.
At the School of Love—the feminist karate school where my spiritual home, family-of-choice and fierce movement discipline come together—we just love beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is free of expectations; beginner’s mind is open to all possibilities. Beginner’s mind is not clouded by prior experience; beginner’s mind is not attached to outcomes; beginner’s mind is in the here and now.
Beginner’s mind is a hell of a lot harder than it looks.
The Small One mastered the fork this week, to the great relief of her parents. It was not that long ago that we realized that we had completely forgotten to teach her how to use a fork. In our defense: not every kid needs fork handling broken down for them. A good number figure it out by mimicry; one of our sweet friends had it nailed at age two. But Small squandered her precocity on reading. I have no idea how she did it but she taught herself her letters at two and by four she was plowing through Little House on the Prairie and leading dinner time discussions on various textual themes. “Did you know that it was very different for boys and girls in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s time?” she might ask. “For example, girls could not wear pants and boys could not cry.”
Having plucked the skill of reading out of the ether, seemingly without effort, Small continues to excel at all things word-related. This apparently includes the bulk of the kindergarten curriculum. “What is work-time?” I asked her recently, demonstrating appropriate, if belated, interest in the K-kids’ daily schedule. “Work time is when they hand out papers that I already know the answers before I even glance at them,” she told me wearily. Despite an incredibly fabulous and responsive teacher Small is getting reinforcement for the fact that a lot of things come easily to her.
We know that Small is not good at everything and we’ve always talked about how everyone has things that they’re “good at” and things that they’re “working on.” Recently we realized that she was not really “working on” her fork handling—she totally sucked at it and required a hard-core intervention. This was after she nearly drew blood biting herself, finally bringing Sweetiebaby-honeylicious’ and my attention to her incredibly maladaptive hand position. Mealtime occupational therapy immediately ensued, replete with lots of bargaining: “You can eat all the green beans with your fingers if you eat all the tofu with your fork.” And also lots of tears.
One day Small just looked at us and said, “It’s not fun to practice something you’re not good at.”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” is what my parents would say to such truth-telling. It was one of those statements that should be accompanied by the ping of the meditation chime: “Pay attention to this one, it will come around again and again if you open your eyes to it.”
And that has been the case. In the same week I had a streak of personal training clients who refused, or forgot, or just didn’t feel like doing the exercises I had prescribed to strengthen the weak muscles in their bodies. Each cheerily reported practicing their favorite exercises instead—naturally, those that worked the the already strong parts of their anatomy.
Life Coach Jillian—one of Small’s godmother’s and one of my favorite people in life—offered me some coachy jargon on the same topic, which came down to this: it’s easy to have beginner’s mind when you don’t know that you’re clueless. You don’t know what you don’t know, so you don’t care. And it feels great to to have such mastery of something that you don’t even have to think about the skill. For example, being able to think about dinner at dinner-time, instead of thinking about how to not bite or stab yourself. Or being able to teach a kick-ass karate class at a moment’s notice because you have a black-belt – or two – and teaching has become as familiar as breathing over a decade’s practice.
But what feels crappy is knowing that you don’t know something: practicing something you’re not good at. We were straight up with Small that everyone has “working on” things, but we didn’t exactly say how scary it can be to work on them, how little and unsure and uncomfortable you can feel, and how much easier it can be to retreat back to your comfort zones.
And you know I didn’t say anything about making mistakes. That’s not somewhere I ever want to go. I was proud when one of my business advisors recently told me, “You are the most risk-averse person I’ve ever met!”
This whole blogging exercise I’ve set myself upon feels like an opportunity to practice beginner’s mind. My risk-averse self is freaking out at having been launched into something without complete control and mastery. What if I make a mistake; is it OK to forge ahead without knowing everything; can I put myself out there without being perfect? And in fact, I’ve already made a mistake. Close readers will notice that the original title of my column was going to be Black Belt Mama—until the brown belt who blogs under the name Black Belt Mama smacked me down and asked me to back off her territory. I had discovered her a while back, when I was securing the domain mindbodymama, but I forgot about her when I moved along to this project. So I had to concede that she was right; I had to admit that I had made a mistake when I was doing something for the first time.
I hate that.
The great thing about beginning something new at midlife is how it much bigger it makes your life. The passions of my middle life—mothering, my second career of personal training, and now writing—were unimaginable a decade ago. It is as if I am a new person and that is exciting and joyous. But the hard thing about starting something new at this advanced age is that I have lots of experience at being good at things, so I feel the difference acutely.
To keep myself from going crazy, I have to give myself lots of breaks to rest in the things I do well— like kicking practice and menu planning— the way Small spends a portion of every day visiting Laura Ingalls in the pages of her nine-volume memoir. The sanest path tiptoes between risk and comfort, between white belt and black belt, between awkward and awesome. Between the fork and the fingers.
“Beginner’s Mind, Grasshopper,” I quipped.
At the School of Love—the feminist karate school where my spiritual home, family-of-choice and fierce movement discipline come together—we just love beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is free of expectations; beginner’s mind is open to all possibilities. Beginner’s mind is not clouded by prior experience; beginner’s mind is not attached to outcomes; beginner’s mind is in the here and now.
Beginner’s mind is a hell of a lot harder than it looks.
The Small One mastered the fork this week, to the great relief of her parents. It was not that long ago that we realized that we had completely forgotten to teach her how to use a fork. In our defense: not every kid needs fork handling broken down for them. A good number figure it out by mimicry; one of our sweet friends had it nailed at age two. But Small squandered her precocity on reading. I have no idea how she did it but she taught herself her letters at two and by four she was plowing through Little House on the Prairie and leading dinner time discussions on various textual themes. “Did you know that it was very different for boys and girls in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s time?” she might ask. “For example, girls could not wear pants and boys could not cry.”
Having plucked the skill of reading out of the ether, seemingly without effort, Small continues to excel at all things word-related. This apparently includes the bulk of the kindergarten curriculum. “What is work-time?” I asked her recently, demonstrating appropriate, if belated, interest in the K-kids’ daily schedule. “Work time is when they hand out papers that I already know the answers before I even glance at them,” she told me wearily. Despite an incredibly fabulous and responsive teacher Small is getting reinforcement for the fact that a lot of things come easily to her.
We know that Small is not good at everything and we’ve always talked about how everyone has things that they’re “good at” and things that they’re “working on.” Recently we realized that she was not really “working on” her fork handling—she totally sucked at it and required a hard-core intervention. This was after she nearly drew blood biting herself, finally bringing Sweetiebaby-honeylicious’ and my attention to her incredibly maladaptive hand position. Mealtime occupational therapy immediately ensued, replete with lots of bargaining: “You can eat all the green beans with your fingers if you eat all the tofu with your fork.” And also lots of tears.
One day Small just looked at us and said, “It’s not fun to practice something you’re not good at.”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” is what my parents would say to such truth-telling. It was one of those statements that should be accompanied by the ping of the meditation chime: “Pay attention to this one, it will come around again and again if you open your eyes to it.”
And that has been the case. In the same week I had a streak of personal training clients who refused, or forgot, or just didn’t feel like doing the exercises I had prescribed to strengthen the weak muscles in their bodies. Each cheerily reported practicing their favorite exercises instead—naturally, those that worked the the already strong parts of their anatomy.
Life Coach Jillian—one of Small’s godmother’s and one of my favorite people in life—offered me some coachy jargon on the same topic, which came down to this: it’s easy to have beginner’s mind when you don’t know that you’re clueless. You don’t know what you don’t know, so you don’t care. And it feels great to to have such mastery of something that you don’t even have to think about the skill. For example, being able to think about dinner at dinner-time, instead of thinking about how to not bite or stab yourself. Or being able to teach a kick-ass karate class at a moment’s notice because you have a black-belt – or two – and teaching has become as familiar as breathing over a decade’s practice.
But what feels crappy is knowing that you don’t know something: practicing something you’re not good at. We were straight up with Small that everyone has “working on” things, but we didn’t exactly say how scary it can be to work on them, how little and unsure and uncomfortable you can feel, and how much easier it can be to retreat back to your comfort zones.
And you know I didn’t say anything about making mistakes. That’s not somewhere I ever want to go. I was proud when one of my business advisors recently told me, “You are the most risk-averse person I’ve ever met!”
This whole blogging exercise I’ve set myself upon feels like an opportunity to practice beginner’s mind. My risk-averse self is freaking out at having been launched into something without complete control and mastery. What if I make a mistake; is it OK to forge ahead without knowing everything; can I put myself out there without being perfect? And in fact, I’ve already made a mistake. Close readers will notice that the original title of my column was going to be Black Belt Mama—until the brown belt who blogs under the name Black Belt Mama smacked me down and asked me to back off her territory. I had discovered her a while back, when I was securing the domain mindbodymama, but I forgot about her when I moved along to this project. So I had to concede that she was right; I had to admit that I had made a mistake when I was doing something for the first time.
I hate that.
The great thing about beginning something new at midlife is how it much bigger it makes your life. The passions of my middle life—mothering, my second career of personal training, and now writing—were unimaginable a decade ago. It is as if I am a new person and that is exciting and joyous. But the hard thing about starting something new at this advanced age is that I have lots of experience at being good at things, so I feel the difference acutely.
To keep myself from going crazy, I have to give myself lots of breaks to rest in the things I do well— like kicking practice and menu planning— the way Small spends a portion of every day visiting Laura Ingalls in the pages of her nine-volume memoir. The sanest path tiptoes between risk and comfort, between white belt and black belt, between awkward and awesome. Between the fork and the fingers.
Labels: beginner's mind, karate
posted by Lynne Marie Wanamaker at
9:24 PM
2 Comments:
yes, just loverly. thank you for writing this, sending it out to the universe, and to my in particular. please keep making mistakes, it helps ME grow, ME be braver.
Fight it like hell and procrastinate! That is what helps me with trying something new and hard. It doesn't get me anywhere, but it makes me feel better for a moment, until I must dig in and I must....
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