Balls

Reading time: 5:30 minutes.

He threw his plane while his friend shouted from afar, “don’t throw it too high, if it reaches the sun it’ll burn.” True story, Vélez Blanco, Spain

I always thought catching things out of the air was something I just couldn’t do. As a girl I was usually the last one picked for any team sport that involved a ball. The fear of not being chosen, plus my inability to catch, made a self-fulfilling prophecy. I spent my childhood and my adulthood unable to grab anything thrown toward my hands. If something similar happens to you, or to someone close to you, don’t worry: there’s hope.

For a while now I’ve caught myself catching, precisely, the balls my nephews throw at me. For some of you that might not sound like much, but given what I just told you, to me it’s incredible!

How did it happen?

Tim Gallwey writes, in The Inner Game of Tennis:

“In my best moments of play, I wasn’t trying to control my shots with constant instructions and evaluations. It was a much simpler process than that. I saw the ball clearly, chose where I wanted to hit it, and let it happen. Surprisingly, the shots were more precise when I wasn’t trying to control them… The critical inner dialogue produced a state of mind very different from the quiet focus experienced by the best athletes.”

The “inner game” the book means is the one playing out in the player’s mind. It teaches you to work around obstacles that come from habits like lack of focus, nerves, doubt and judgment. It says we have a “Self 1” and a “Self 2.”

“Self 1” is the voice in our mind that wants to control the experience, telling us how to do things and judging them once they’re done. It tends to be demanding and intolerant. Sometimes it tells me things like “you’re terrible,” “nothing is working today,” and other gems like that. “Self 2,” on the other hand, is the one that lets things happen instead of making them happen. A relaxed mind and a receptive body coordinate better: they read the space around you, the speed of the flying object and other variables, and bring your hand exactly where it needs to be to catch it.

I get that “Self 1” means well and wants the best for me, but now that I know it better, I don’t want to listen to it so much anymore. What I want is for each of them to guide me when it’s useful, without “Self 1” interfering in what “Self 2” already knows how to do perfectly well. These two parts are often fighting for control, when it would be lovely if they cooperated. Both add to the richness of the experience.

The key to getting better at catching balls, or at any skill, is adjusting the relationship between how “Self 1” talks and what “Self 2” can naturally do. But how? By learning to focus attention on something simple. That helps the brain take in what it needs and clears the interference, so “Self 2” can come through.

That “something simple” means being aware of the present moment, without judging it. Being here and now is something you have to practice, because the mind loves running back to replay mistakes, or forward to hunt for fears. Getting to presence, in my case, has been possible thanks to the Alexander Technique, because meditating was always hard for me.

The real change in my ability finally came because I practiced, a lot, letting go of judging myself, of controlling my experience, of worrying too much about the results. That’s what created the conditions for catching balls every time they’re thrown at me.

But I want to clarify one more thing. When I say I stopped judging myself, I don’t mean ignoring what goes wrong. I mean watching without evaluating, staying curious, seeing the facts without rushing to interpret them. Learning skills mattered in this process, but learning to trust myself, and to rest my attention on the now without effort, mattered more.

It’s beautiful to think of a person in constant evolution. When we look at a tree seed we don’t think, “what a pathetic attempt at a tree.” We understand that every stage of its process has value, and all we have to do is create the conditions it needs to grow. There’s no version better than the one before it. Just different expressions of the same thing.

I feel like my process with the Alexander Technique gave me the calm and safety to accept myself exactly as I am. And so trust kept growing, until my attention could finally rest, leaving behind the hypervigilance and the anticipation that were, in the end, what kept me from catching balls.