I woke up this moring feeling a lot of tension physically despite having a reasonable amount of sleep last night. I was really flat and bad-tempered. The feelings were a sense of feeling 'lack' and and not being able to move forward in a more positive light. To change that feeling I had to have a change in perspective to unblock this feeling so did some stretching. I felt a lot blockage in energy terms and I wanted a way to release physically to clear my head and dispel the negative chatter about feeling so tense and hopeless. Underneath the surface there was a lot to express but didn't know how. I needed to develop my vocabulary in physical as wel as writing terms and understand!.
Thinking about and writing my first draft RoL is by my own definition painful and extremely uncomfortable. I've been feeling quite blocked about it in my head and surprisingly (or not) in my body physically. A sort of resistance to change or stage fright to commit to paper my thoughts and words about areas of learning in my life that has led me to make choices and has meaning. I think it is about learning a new vocabluary from dancing to writing which I am struggling with and how to critically assess it. I read a short while ago Adesola's blog about 'drafts' posted months ago (March 2012) where she said that the process of writing is learning and she relates it to learning a new dance sequence and what our minds and body goes through in the actual process of learning a new step: putting the steps in some kind of logical sequence so that we know how to process the new information: how you organise the steps (in your mind and how to translate it in movement terms) and for me who learns kineaesthetically how my muscle memorises steps and where I am in the space create signposts or triggers for learning something new in my body. If the vocabulary is unfamilier I try to find a new way of understanding this new dance language in terms of what the sequence actually is and seeing if there is another angel to approach learning it (i.e. do I look at the whole phrase and or do I look at a particular detail or is the accompanying music/rhythmn a factor in learning for me?). I also found out that I get afraid of doing the step 'wrong' and if by doing it wrong I have failed. By contrast when I teach my young students a new exercise or dance sequence I always tell them there is no right or wrong way, its all about learning! So the question to myself is why can't I apply that mantra to myself?
Anyway back to the draft titles. Despite the painful and uncomfortable feeling of attempting to write, I've been collating evidence to support the claim and found an old box of evidence (books, documents etc). The more I read the more I felt queasey, and the more I uncovered about myself and how I learn, the more I am frightened or amazed but how to write it all down! There was also the quesion about now that I have the information to hand what do I focs on - it really felt like peeling an onion - layers and layers but what layer to focus on? I've also been writing some notes as a way to find a beginning and organise what to focus on. The notes were unconnected and depicted the mess of my mind what it was trying to process. On a recent bus journey into town to do some errands I had this rumble of thoughts in my mind and whilst the rhytymn of the bus drew my attention away from the jumble of my mind a thought popped into my head and asked the question "Apart from the experiences of the past to document and describe your learning experience...what was the process of learning for you? what are you trying to say? what did you learn? what is the question asking of you?' I decided when I got back home later to write at length whatever came into my mind and the writing became a series of streams of consciousness whether connected or not around the topic I wish to write. It was good because for a start I am beginning to organise and clear out the rubble and what's left hopefully will answer the question. Hopefully the draft title will evolve more fully. That's the stage I'm at and later I will revisit what I wrote and organise it. The bottom line for me is my fear of writing and the act of writing and learning a new vocabulary or style will help me to address my fear. By facing my fear and going through the uncomfortable feeling I hope will give me courage to write some more. It made me also think about teaching - in order to be a good teacher I have to go through a process of some bad teaching to find out and learn from the experiences to eventually become competent and good at what I do.
