Paralyzed by Movement Indecision

I was going to start doing yoga more regularly. I looked at the schedule of a studio nearby and scanned the class offerings: flow yoga, vinyassa yoga, yin yoga, flow heated yoga, mindful yoga with incorporated meditation. Then, I glanced at the list of instructors and their bios. There were women with body-work experience and men who had taken trips to India and spent years studying with world-reknowned experts. Even the timing of the classes left me with decisions to make: 45 minute power class, 60 minutes, 90 minutes with deliberately slow poses and holds. At the end of my 5 minutes of research, I felt overwhelmed by choices. I couldn’t for the life of me pick the perfect class out of this lineup: I liked the idea of yoga as exercise, so the flow yoga sounded good, but I also knew that the stretching and recovery of yin yoga would probably be good for me. But, then again, who can argue with a teacher who studied with the great yoga master who had mastered the most difficult poses by the age of 7?! I was stumped and my brain hurt and I decided to go for a bike ride instead.

Have you ever been in a place of indecision like this? Chafing under the multitude of possibilities and choices? Especially, when beginning a new activity it is often hard to not get caught up in the seeming pressure to choose the “right” class or form or timing or fit for your current habits and goals. But, I’m not so sure that’s a great approach to trying new things…

At about the same time I was having this yoga indecision, I was also having buyers’ guilt for this Groupon that I had purchased a couple months prior for a dance studio in town. See, at the risk of sounding silly, I have this idea that one day I’d really like to learn to break dance or even hip hop dance. If you have ever seen the TV show “Made” on MTV, basically my dream is to be “made” into a break-dancer. The premise of the show is that people who are not the best fit for a certain activity are coached up to be able to perform in this new role that they have chosen for themselves. Needless to say, I am a quite unlikely candidate for breakdancing competency and so I think I would be a perfect fit for the show.

I was inspired to try a new form of movement and after balking at the yoga class choices, I thought I might as well try this dance thing out (after all I had already paid for it!). So, I took that Groupon voucher that I’d been hanging onto and marched down to the dance studio….and took a beginner’s ballet class! It just happened to be the class that I could make it to without rearranging my normal activities. It was also a form of dance that was way out of my comfort zone, brand new to me, and I had a blast! I could feel the other movement knowledge that I have acquired from sports and other activities melding with this new way of moving. I could tell that it was opening up alternative positions and forms and grace through my body that I didn’t know I had. I am now convinced that with movement as with other facets of life, the key is not to find the perfect next step, the key is just to take a new next step. Try out something different. Try not to get bogged down by choice and just choose movement, whatever that may be.