I've been thinking about the process of learning a lot lately.  Partly because I work at a school, so it's a topic that comes up a lot anyway.  And I'm looking a lot at my own learning, particularly since I'm learning how to play the pandeiro, and also partly because I recently got a chance to sit down with my first drum teacher, Sango Muyiwa, which was exhilarating and humbling at the same time.  It made me realize how far I had come, but also how much farther ahead he was that I ever imagined.  Oh yeah, and how I still couldn't do some things after 15 years, mostly because I rarely practiced them.

Mostly, though, I've been thinking about learning because of conversations with my wife, Amanda Dates, who is a yoga teacher.  She's talked about the yoga bliss / burn-out effect, which is something I've gone through myself.

My first few yoga classes were, frankly, just plain hard.  I didn't have much time to experience anything except struggle and tiredness - but after class I felt good that I had put in some physical effort.  But it wasn't too long before things started to improve - and rapidly.  Poses that had been hard were not only easier, they felt good.  I then started having "experiences" in yoga class - moments of incredible insight, or other moments where I was reduced to weeping - not crying, but literally weeping - during savasana.

That's the yoga bliss period.  Then, like many things, it plateaus.  And not only plateaus, but even dips, and then so does my interest and energy.  Poses that were easy are sometimes hard.  If I don't cry in class, I have a nagging feeling i didn't get anything out of the class.  Why are some of the basic poses still so hard for me - I've been doing this for a year now....

This is the hard stage - for any learner, for any learning process.  When things stop incrementally improving, when things are no longer new, when things are easy enough to do that your mind can wander elsewhere when you do them.

It happens in drumming too - I can map those experiences in yoga to my percussion learning.  But Amanda, in her classes, points out some fundamental things to remember about practice - any practice, be it yoga, drumming, or ... law?  First, that practice is not a straight line - the learning "curve" doesn't always go neatly up with every step forward in time.  You'll have moments when your practice isn't as good today as it was yesterday.  And as people who are committed to practicing - and learning - we should recognize this phenomenon, and not beat ourselves up over it.  Practice will advance quickly, hit a plateau, slow down, then hover for a while, then go up again.... Yes, you see where this is going.  It's Jo-Ha-Kyu all over again.

The second important aspect - and probably more important to learning - is that ultimately practice is about showing up.  It's about putting the time in.  Putting the time in.  Putting time.  In.  I'm not trying to be coy with my writing here, I'm trying to point out that most of the time, we like to skip over what we already know.  And if you've ever done something you know really well - be it a vinyasa flow, a drum rhythm, a song, or even bicycling - and you do it for a long time..... An hour?  A couple of hours?  A couple of hours a day....  Things start to change.  There's a lot more down in there, in the molecules of that practice, that we tend to overlook in the day-to-day practice.

So just show up.  Just put in the time.  I'm beginning to believe that applies as much to my drumming as it does to my yoga. In fact, I know it does.  Small hand-flips I do on the congas now, unconsciously while playing rhythms, comes from playing with a band, rehearsing for 6 hours a week, playing the same rhythm over and over again for hours, days, months.  It's something I need to remember when I practice pandeiro, and think that I'm not getting better fast enough, or even that I'm worse at I than I was a few days before. 

Just show up.