But I can tell I am slowly winning the war, be it at a snail’s pace. Despite the fact that success with this is still a long way away, I did wanted to make a journal entry about something that I’ve been learning through my struggling with this experience. You have to learn to be okay with things ‘not feeling right’. You need to learn to be okay with experimenting with things that don’t feel intuitive. I think part of the reason it has been taking me so long to develop muscle memory for the reverse two-beat wave is that everything ‘feels wrong’ and that leaves me overthinking every movement I am making.
I’ve been able to do a very wonky and unsteady version of the two-beat reverse weave and every time I start to get it down my anxious brain literally freaks out about the fact that the movement feels completely new and unknown and I’ll end up hitting myself in the head or the face because the poi will then collide in mid-air and fling back on me.
This has been both an interesting and frustrating situation. Part of the reason I chose to spin poi in the first place was as a type of somatic therapy because c-PTSD keeps me so locked in my brain.
Having to mentally make peace with things that don’t feel intuitive is a completely new experience to me. I think that when success with this finally happens it will be something that will end up being really good for me in the long-term but currently struggling my way through it right now is beyond challenging. I never realized previously how easy it was for me to want to give up on something that didn’t come naturally or feel familiar to me before now.