A while back I wrote about studying a martial art and confronting my challenges in learning to fall safely. At the time, I’d had a personal discovery, realizing my lack of full commitment and daring was an obstacle. That, however, was not enough to move the story forward.

Five months later, I continued to struggle with thumping my low back or shoulder, neither of which are ideal impact points. My continued failures tested my will to continue. Each thump reinforced that moment of fear and intimidation when I was about to do the roll. I’d tense up, go into my head, worry that I was going to hurt myself, and then my tension would make me even less effective. I sought personal guidance and feedback from four or five of the teachers, and each had different pieces of advice that did not seem to cohere for me. I would try so hard to get my body in all the postures that each one independently suggested, and I’d still thump or flail.

After a while, I watched some of the peers that started studying around the same time as I appearing to progress in their practice and execute some beautiful rolls, while I flailed. For most of my life I’d thought of myself as “not competitive,” even a little dismissive of other people’s competitiveness.

Now I realize that was a defense strategy of denial and trying to make myself feel subtly superior. I didn’t feel competitive when I’d be doing really well. When I’m struggling and doing worse than others, especially when others can see me struggling, it turns out I am very competitive.  It would have been more accurate to think that I hate losing and thus avoided any competitions in which I might lose.

When I was younger, I was prone to giving up when things got tough. Any sign of struggle or failure was a confirmation to me that I’m not “supposed to” do this thing. Struggling with coördination in my body and with teammates, I determined athletics simply weren’t my thing, and did everything in my power to avoid them.

My late adolescent and adult life, however, thrust me into circumstances in which the real consequences of giving up were far worse than the feared consequences of trying to keep going. I started to find I could push through the doubt and failure and still do things. But a part of me always wondered, “When do I give up?” If things were tough, I’d wonder, “Can I give up now? Am I supposed to keep going?”

Moving through some significant adult struggles, my mindset has shifted. Now I’ve come to believe that I can accomplish many things so long as I keep going. That doesn’t mean I can accomplish everything. It requires that I have the resources and capacity to keep going. But now I can give up as an intentional way to re-evaluate my values and re-allocate my energies to what’s important. Not simply throw up my hands and believe an arbitrary deity was denying me this path forward.

So by the time I started studying the martial art and saw the advanced practitioners with their graceful rolls, I sensed that I wanted to be like that, and believed if I kept trying, I would get there.

A few weeks ago, though, with my frustrated competitiveness, I decided to try practicing at the level of my peers that were doing better than me—let myself be actually thrown—and nearly hurt myself. The teacher stopped me, and I felt humiliated.

All my childhood athletic “stuff” was up: That I’d failed in front of people. That I was holding others back by not being able to keep up. That I was embarrassing myself. The teacher was kind and skillful at acknowledging it, checking in with me and noting that everyone gets stuck. They also kindly reflected that they’d seen me have successful rolls in the past, but they hadn’t progressed with the rest of my technique.

Leaving the dojo, I checked in with my emotional self and had the image of a humiliated, angry, resistant younger part of me screaming, “I can’t!” It felt like that younger me that believed he was incompetent and afraid to try again for fear of humiliation or harm. I wondered if this was the part of me that tensed up before the rolls, trying to stop me from putting myself into danger. It would be dangerous to keep going without befriending this part, I thought, because his determination that he can’t was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pushing him to progress only means he would pull harder against me.

But neither was I willing to stay stuck and give up. On my own, I found video tutorials on the movement and discovered one that offered both a description of the physical mechanics of the movement and a basic, introductory roll that was very easy, gentle, and nearly impossible to hurt one’s self doing.

At the gym, I found a padded mat out of sight from most people and started practicing the baby rolls. In this way I was able to honored the scared part of me’s wish not to be publicly humiliated and not to put myself in danger while also pushing him to take a gentle risk. Those baby rolls went well, and sooner than I expected I felt ready to move a little further, take a bigger risk, with more success.

I did this for a week—starting with the really easy rolls, then moving to the more challenging ones and getting the feeling of it in my body. I arrived at my next class early to practice, and one of the teachers saw and came over to give me more advice. Instead of feeling embarrassed and defensive, I felt eager to hear the advice. Even though they’d given me some of the same advice before, this time I could hear it differently. I was able to understand what he meant and integrate it into what I was trying. Some really good, smooth rolls happened during that, and I felt really excited. And when I still lost the movement and messed up, I didn’t feel so discouraged because I felt I was making progress.

What I suspect occurred to me on the day when I felt humiliated and defeated was akin to the “prelearning temper tantrum” that Karen Pryor discusses in her book, Don’t Shoot the Dog:

For the subject, the prelearning dip can be a very frustrating time. We all know how upsetting it is to struggle with something we half-understand (math concepts are a common example), knowing only that we don’t really understand it. Often the subject feels so frustrated that it exhibits anger and aggression. The child bursts into tears and stabs the math book with a pencil. Dolphins breach repeatedly, slapping their bodies against the surface of the water with a crash. Horses switch their tails and want to kick. Dogs growl. … I have come to call this the “prelearning temper tantrum.” It seems to me that the subject has the tantrum because what it has always thought to be true turns out suddenly not to be true; and there’s no clear reason why … yet. In humans prelearning temper tantrums often seem to take place when long-held beliefs are challenged and the subject knows deep inside that there is some truth to the new information. The recognition that what has been learned is not quite true seems to lead to the furious comeback, to excessive response, far beyond the disagreement, discussion, or querying that might offhand seem more probable and appropriate. … I have come to regard the prelearning tantrum as a strong indicator that real learning is actually finally about to take place. If you stand back and let it pass over, like a rainstorm, there may be rainbows on the other side.

Louis Cozolino, in his book The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, updates and provides slightly more explanation when he explains that the brain requires a moderate amount of emotion to become “plastic,” that is, able to change and learn. He doesn’t specifically discuss a temper tantrum, but he indicates that a certain amount of discomfort and emotional activation is useful for the brain to learn new things.

Somehow that period of feeling all my childhood stuff, really letting it surface and acknowledge it in front of other people, helped me to begin to get distance from it. It also began a process of cognitive shift. Up until that point, I’d been following the literal guidance of all my teachers, trying to get my head in the right position and move my leg this way. I didn’t have an integrated sense of the entire movement, how each little behavior comes together.

It was like being in Elementary school and learning my “multiplication tables,” simple memorization of formulas like 2 X 2 = 4; 3 X 3 = 9. All of this was mere data to me until one day I began to think, “Oh, three sets of three things means nine total things.” Suddenly it wasn’t a bunch of disparate facts. I began to understand the deeper relationship between those numbers and formulae. When I got what multiplication “was,” I could begin doing my own multiplications without necessarily memorizing the result.

Getting a movement into my body is more challenging to me than learning an intellectual principle, but increasingly I notice those movements in the practice. First I try to get all the individual pieces right, and suddenly I have this flash of realizing how all the pieces cohere into one movement. When I sense how the movement in its entirety is supposed to feel, then refining those smaller movements makes a different kind of sense. I can feel how if I twist my hips more at this point in the movement, I’m better set up to turn and execute the throw in the next part of the movement.

Since those two weeks, I found myself having more and more moments of smooth forward rolls. And, furthermore, I was better able to understand for myself why I failed when I failed. Now I have a clearer idea of how the movement is supposed to feel, and what I need to do to get it consistently into my body. Perhaps in the future it will become its own instinct, one that does not require so much thought and effort, while I continue to develop more advanced and sophisticated movements. The story doesn’t end.

If you would like to support my work, you can get early access to my posts, including the opportunity to comment and dialogue with me, by becoming a patron on Patreon.