Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Repetition and habits
While thinking further about my violin experiences early this morning, I am reminded again of how extraordinary it is that our fingers can become accustomed to movements after a few repetitions so they can do them 'automatically'. As children we learn to tie our shoe laces by copying our parents. It's a complex procedure which we eventually get the hang of. Muscles don't have a memory as such, although we talk of 'muscle memory'. The muscles record patterns of tension in relation to one another and so we develop skills.
It is in this way that we develop all sorts of abilities so it's important to choose a good example, as what we observe goes into our subconscious and informs our own attempts at the same activity. This could be swinging the golf club, tennis racket, in my case listening to Huberman and watching other violinists, or any other activity you care to mention. If we're not careful we can just as easily pick up their bad habits too, so we must be careful who we choose as role-models. Sadly as children we can't select our ideal parental influences, so we inevitably pick up many of their tendencies, habits and characteristics.
But these habits or any others are all things that can be overcome. We just need to give our conscious attention to how we are doing things, and we can over-ride our subconscious habits by choosing to do things differently. It takes thought. For instance we can choose to be free rather than stiff in our neck and shoulders. But the happy thing is, our 'muscle memory' helps us as we can again pick up new muscle patterns and these will become established as the new norm. Any habits can be changed. We only need to make the choices for ourselves. Watching experts provides information that goes into our subconscious that will help us when we want to do the same. Taking care 'not to do the wrong thing' is almost more important than trying to do the 'right' thing.
