“Sit with your heels on the black line and reach for your toes,” the gym teacher barked, without looking up from her clipboard.
I did as instructed and tried to ignore the group of onlookers from my third-grade class. It was the President’s Fitness Test in gym class and I had already failed miserably on the sit-ups portion.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, wiggled my toes for good measure, and then reached forth for my toes with every ounce of flexibility I could find within me.
“I said reach for your toes!” the gym teacher barked again.
I looked up from what I thought was a completely bent forward position to realize that even with all that effort, I was still sitting straight up with my hands on my knees.
“I am,” I mumbled back with my face to the ground.
I just hoped the president wasn’t too disappointed.
I started doing yoga in my early 20’s wherein I discovered there was hope for me and my hamstrings yet. I learned I could build up my agility very nearly to an acceptable level. During a particularly enlightening yoga session, the instructor said something that started me on a journey toward another kind of agility—
She said, “this pose shows us the true nature of balance—it is not fixed, but constantly responds and adjusts to the moment.”
It is not fixed, I remember repeating to myself.
I guess it was around that time I started to reflect more on my fixed and rigid beliefs: the automatic thought patterns and resulting emotional cycles that were not conducive to a life of balance at all, but quite oppositely, had me toppling all over the place ungracefully.
In the book Emotional Agility, Susan David writes, “Being emotionally agile involves being sensitive to context and responding to the world as it is right now. “
And this right-now-ness, I’ve realized, is everything. It’s all we really have.
David went on to explain that, “When we become too comfortable with rigid, pre-existing categories, we’re using premature cognitive commitment – a habitual, inflexible response to things, ideas, people, and even ourselves.“
I hate that those words take me immediately to my response to politics in recent years. As a tight emotional hammies kind of person, I can easily fall prey to the political narratives created with the sole purpose of inciting anger and division—our media outlets are saturated with it on every side. Social media platforms have become a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and half-truths that lead to misinformed decisions. It’s a lot to navigate for anyone, but especially for the impulse-driven individuals among us.
The categories we have chosen to unswervingly align with, be it liberal or conservative, republican or democrat, or something classy in-between, these alignments can easily lead us to premature acceptance of misinformation and an even quicker condemnation of any opposing view.
Very recently, in fact, I shared a post in which I raised my font at all of my two or so followers because I was infuriated by an article that came across my screen at 7 am. I jumped out of bed with a racing heart and shaky-anger hands to tell the world about JUSTICE and the TRUTH!
Something one should never do before their morning coffee.
One of my friends was quick to point out that the article I’d posted was only telling half the story and it turned out the other half was a lot less infuriating. Did this new information change my opinion? Not entirely. But did it make me feel like an idiot for impulsively jumping to such a capital-lettered response?
VERY YES.
What makes matters even more complicated is that the more we attempt to educate ourselves about the topics we are passionate about, the more prone we can become to rigid thinking and an inflated self-confidence.
David points out, “Inflated confidence leads [one] to ignore contextual information, and the more familiar an expert is with a particular kind of problem, the more likely he is to pull a prefabricated solution out of his member bank rather than respond to the specific case at hand.”
It turns out that the way in which we seek to educate ourselves also requires us to do a great deal of stretching beforehand. When we read opposing views, we often do so in search of untruths, or for anything that might prove us right—rather than fully taking in the information, sitting with it, doing a few vinyasa flows, and allowing it to give us a greater spectrum of responses to choose from.
Our emotional ties to these preconceived ideas or categories are much like tight hamstrings. They jerk us around, limit our openness, and probably cause us a great deal of pain. We hurt others and ourselves when we deny realities that make us uncomfortable and are unwilling to consider whether we might be wrong. It is especially dangerous when we cease to examine our hearts at all.
Rigidity always leads to destruction—be it our emotional health, the damaging responses to our triggers, or the vertebrae in our lower backs.
We have to break free from the affiliations we are married to if we have any hope of truly responding in context with the present…if we have any hope of responding out of love. We have to choose to value our emotional health above our illusion of control and we have to protect it more than we do our deep-harbored pride.
Viktor Frankl emerged from years in a concentration camp with a heart that, miraculously, was still soft and open—still able to love. In this, he showed us the incredible power of choosing how we want to respond to the things we can’t control.
Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space… in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”
I still can’t touch my toes without bending my knees a little, but I can get into yoga poses that were once impossible, and what’s more, is I can run 3 miles without putting out a hip. I’ve further become convinced that with practice, I can learn to encounter and fully digest deeply opposing viewpoints, I can tolerate the discomfort of being wrong, and even endure an election-gone-wrong by finding the space to truly, fully, and lovingly choose my response.
Namaste.