When something is unfamiliar and contrasts with what we’re used to, then our conscious brain lights up and we start focusing our senses towards that new experience. The lesser spotted Present Moment Awareness.
We consciously take in the new experiential data, and if we feel sufficiently drawn to it, or emotionally invested in it, we will commit this new experience to memory, which is another way of saying we just learned something. This also explains why we have difficulty learning things we don’t care about.
In addition to introducing novelty to our yoga practice this month, how's this for an activity;
Open up a dictionary/ go back in time to when we owned dictionaries/ open up a web page to find a word you don’t know the meaning of. Read the definition and practice the word in a
sentence so you learn it.
Notice at the same time how your body is handling this activity. Is it alert, calm, hypervigilant? Notice what associations arise as you learn the first word. Now, put your body in a kind of goofy position, that you don’t normally put yourself in, whilst you find and learn a second word. Have fun putting your new word into a sentence while in your goofy position. Check back in a few weeks to see how you’ve remembered (or forgotten) the new words. What was the relationship between the regular and goofy position and the ability to remember the new words. Let me know how it goes!
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