When Maps Steer Us Wrong
How yoga might help us find our way
Somehow I’ve been teaching yoga for 18 years now. My god. Thousands and thousands of classes later, I find myself still stubbornly searching for better words to articulate what it’s all about. While I hold great respect for the rich history of yoga philosophy, this modern moment calls for new ways of describing how yoga works and for what purpose. I am convinced yoga has much more to offer that just chill stretching, but sometimes I wonder if it makes sense to keep teaching as the world burns. Other times, it feels like one of the only things that makes sense.
This essay is an exploration of navigation as a fruitful metaphor for the human experience, and how yoga might help us find our way. It’s also a low-key advertisement for an upcoming 6-week course I’m teaching in October (details at the end).
Exhibit A:
This car was driven onto a tidal mud flat because the GPS navigation insisted it was possible to drive from the Australian mainland to an island 9 miles away, and the driver believed the algorithm over his eyes.
This is just one of a whole genre of “GPS gone wrong” incidents that the Internet is happy to tell you about. Again and again, drivers choose to trust their devices over the direct evidence of their senses and end up in harrowing circumstances.
It’s easy to laugh at someone else’s stupidity, of course. I’m sure each incident has mitigating circumstances. But let’s use the situation as an analogy for the human condition. What might cause me to drive into the ocean?
In short: we all rely of various forms of inner GPS, out of necessity, but inevitably they will steer us wrong if we follow them blindly.
In long: Humans love convenience for basic metabolic reasons, not (just) because we’re consumerist lemmings. Navigating the world takes a lot of mental resources, and evolution strongly encourages energy-saving adaptations.
So we use mental shortcuts, or heuristics to be fancy, to achieve good-enough accuracy for less effort. We roughly model big chunks of the world, rather than perceive every leaf and twig. For more in this vein, see my piece Biased Towards Survival.
Human cultures evolve norms of behavior (taboos, religion, laws) that bound the choices of its members. It’s a drag, but also makes for efficient living if we don’t have to continually choose NOT to commit crimes at every moment.
More intimately, our movements are primarily guided by automated motor patterns rather than conscious will. When I decide to reach for my mug of tea, it’s akin to typing a destination into Google Maps. I just care about getting my hand there, not exactly how it happens. I trust my sensory motors system to figure out the best route, and most of the time it works out great. Occasionally, though, I stub my toe on a door frame that my map didn’t quite accurately model.
Similarly, I use a rough model of myself to make quick decisions: “I’m a liberal, so I support this thing that liberals seem to support.” We rarely think through our stance on a given issue from first principles - too much work, too many complicating footnotes! As Socrates famously showed, most positions break down into self-contradiction upon close inspection. Much easier to coarse-grain ourselves with identity tags.
What’s the problem? Sometimes our GPS insists you can drive on a road that’s actually a rocky footpath.
Without warning, heuristics that have been getting us safely about jam us into a ditch. It’s very disconcerting to learn that what you thought was trustworthy can lead you disastrously astray. Perhaps you can think of a few parallels in your own life? In our collective life?
So what to do?
Look up from the map
We have to occasionally reality-check the proposed route with what we see in front of us.
Extremely simple, yet profoundly difficult. It’s a sobering process to accept that we are not where we thought we were supposed to be - possibly even 900 miles in the wrong direction!
A Belgian woman took an astonishing 1,800 mile detour through six countries after her car navigation system went wrong.
Sabine Moreau, 67, had intended to drive to Brussels from her home in Solre-sur-Sambre to pick up a friend from the train station - a journey of just 38 miles. But she took a catastrophic wrong turn and eventually ended up 900 miles away in Zagreb, Croatia.
Despite crossing five borders and seeing multiple-language traffic signs, she did not stop to question her sat-nav until two days later when she realised that she may not be in Belgium any more.
Although she stopped to refuel her car several times, Ms Moreau did not think her TomTom could be leading her down the wrong path.
‘I saw all kinds of traffic signs. First in French, then in German - Cologne, Aachen, Frankfurt,’ she told a Belgian news website.
‘But I didn't ask myself any questions. I was just distracted, so I kept my foot down,’ she added.
Again, easy to dismiss her as a daft woman, but can I really say I’m so different? I can certainly appreciate the allure of just following instructions. Life is complicated. Sometimes it’s nice to just trust that I’m being guided in the right direction, zone out to a podcast, not ask inconvenient questions… Isn’t that a yoga idea, after all - trusting the process, going with the flow?
No, this is actually a New Age simplification of a more nuanced dynamic. I can’t just turn myself over to whatever impulses come my way. Prematurely “going with the flow” often means just following the same habits that have gotten me into my current situation.
Yoga and its ilk go on and on about The Present Moment for good reason, even though it can get rather annoying as a trite slogan.
NOW is the only place and time that I can get “fresh data” about where I am. This is true across all human dimensions: what am I actually sensing, how am I actually feeling, what do I know for sure right now, what is this person across from me really saying? If I’m not attending to what’s happening now, I’m either on autopilot or dwelling in my brain’s world simulation. Again, both modes are quite useful… except when we drive to Zagreb by accident.
All told, I think it’s quite savvy for modern postural yoga to begin with a focus on the physical body because it is an excellent training ground for head-centric folks. Postural yoga brings me into visceral contact with myself as I am now. The feedback is swift and vivid in the form of sensations and biomechanical consequences. Either I can balance or I can’t. In pursuit of a particular alignment - even if totally arbitrary - I am compelled to figure out where my arms and legs are RIGHT NOW, not just in theory. Eventually, even the position of my toes, eyes and tongue becomes relevant.
Seeing what’s actually there
But according to the news story above, the problem wasn’t that Sabine didn’t see evidence that she was going in the wrong direction. She saw signs for German cities and kept driving! The information was there. It was recorded in her memory, but it didn’t permeate far enough into her awareness to register as a discrepancy.
This highlights an important truth that just noticing what’s happening now is not enough. Acceptance of what we perceive must follow. Acceptance as in receiving what is offered by reality, rather than rejecting it or pretending I didn’t notice. This isn’t the same as acquiescence or resignation. Accepting the sorrows of the world doesn’t mean agreeing with them; it is simply to grant they exist, whether we like them or not.
Acceptance is more intimate than mere awareness. When I accept my experience as it is, I take the risk that I will be changed by what I perceive. This can be inconvenient if I’m trying to prop up a fantasy of how the world should be (“I’m going in the right direction”), but it’s essential if I want to navigate the actual world.
There’s a Carl Rogers quote that I come back to regularly:
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change.
I find that postural yoga can offer a very direct experience of this truth. When I’m up against a tight limit in my range of motion and I fight harder to overcome it, I don’t usually get very far. I see this all the time in beginners. Their automatic reaction to finding tension is a grimacing face, gritted teeth, held breath - the opposite of acceptance. They become focused on their reaction more than what’s actually happening. They are fixated on the imagined destination - a straight knee, keeping up with the instructor, reclaiming what we could do in our 20’s - and lose contact with their actual situation.
Time and again, I find that if I can back off the intensity a bit, soften my effort and accept the sensations, then a whole new set of possibilities appears. Often, the guarded muscles will relax on their own. Or, I realize that I actually have a choice to relax them. Or, that I’m already in a fine place and there’s no need to press further. What I thought was solid is actually mutable. I have looked up from the map to see the true territory. Super effective, yet strangely difficult to remember as an option.
The body is a particularly effective medium for practicing present moment awareness and acceptance. It’s tangible, nonverbal, full of surprising pleasures. The more I become established in a steady somatic presence, the more I can open to my immediate psycho-emotional situation and the world beyond. The material suchness of the body serves as a phenomenological anchor for all other perceptions.
Furthermore, learning to stay present and relaxed in more uncomfortable bodily circumstances - called “working at an edge” in yoga jargon - trains me to stay present for other edges, such as the discomfort of navigating unknown life terrain. This is a big deal, a key feature of the human curriculum: to remain open in the midst of uncertainty.
I read these GPS-gone-wrong stories as a testimony to the human minds’ deep discomfort with uncertainty. We are so averse to feeling lost that we will robustly ignore direct evidence that we are. Consider what that tells us about humans. The psychological risk of admitting we’ve been steered wrong feels greater than the physical risk of driving off a cliff or into the ocean!
<Insert your own parallels with current events here. />
Can’t we just get better maps?
Perhaps this is a transient issue? Eventually we’ll have every square inch of the world mapped and analysed, so all navigation will be perfect and we can just relax. This is the dream of science. With enough data and sensors, our cars will drive themselves, alleviating us of all onerous wayfinding. More time to view ads on our phones!
No doubt it will be convenient, and probably safer, but it will also diminish our capacity to orient to reality even further. This is already happening. The problem is that there are vast domains of experience which will never fit inside scientific formulas or algorithmic predictions. Particularly, the optimal course of our own human life cannot be derived in advance. We are not particles that simply respond to fundamental forces1. We are strange loops, permeable droplets of self-aware sunlight that integrate information over vast timescales, woven in a tapestry of interdependence with countless other beings. Theories such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Steve Wolfram’s notion of computational irreducibility support this conclusion: some parts of reality are not mappable in advance or by shortcut; we can only know them through living them.
So no, we can’t just wait for better maps and then turn over all our agency to the algorithms. We can shuffle uncertainty around a bit, try to hide it under the rug of life hacks for happiness or Made For You playlists, but sooner or later we’re going to find ourselves in unmapped territory. We’re going to have to look up from our maps and orient to what is here and now. We can wait til our car is stranded on some unexpected precipice, or we can cultivate our orienteering skills in advance.
Yoga, especially when done with this intention, seems to work well - both to steer us back on course and to help us avoid big detours. Lots of other movement and meditative arts can work similarly. I like that yoga has a wide scope that can integrate a lot of seeming opposites: body and mind, effort and relaxation, movement and stillness, control and spontaneity.
Where do you want to go?
Ok, so I’ve considered how humans fall under the spell of “route guidance” thanks to our deep craving for certainty, which motivates us to just keep going despite mounting evidence we’ve gone off course.
I’m going to risk loading one more idea onto this metaphor, even though it’s starting to groan under the rhetorical weight. The question arises:
How do we decide where we even want to go in the first place?
What do we type into the search box?
How do we choose what to do next, on any time scale?
One simple answer is that we mostly don’t choose - we’re just following the turn-by-turn instructions of some higher level GPS. “Drive to IKEA” or “Make dinner and eat it” are stops on a larger route programmed by all manner of influences.
Examining the unconscious motivations for life choices is a fascinating and potentially endless undertaking - sometimes called “shadow work” - and more the domain of psychotherapy than yoga. Examining what informs moment to moment actions, such as how I arrange my feet when standing; how I breathe when exerting; how I talk to myself when it’s quiet - this is yoga’s specialty. There’s more traction here, down in the tiny moments from which a grand narrative is built.
I’ve always been taken with the notion that we can practice “mental postures” alongside physical ones. For example, I can select out certain strands of my ongoing experience - sensations, feelings, thoughts, etc - and give them primary attention, often revealing nuances that were previously unconscious. This is an Awareness practice.
Or I can, just as an experiment, practice opening to all sensations - positive, neutral and negative - without turning anything away. This is Acceptance practice, and quite difficult!
I can even make a practice of Choice, which can take the form of deliberately making different choices within a yoga pose: changing intensity, changing how I breathe, changing where I focus my attention. Or I can play with going between guiding my body deliberately versus allowing spontaneous movement to emerge. I can imagine that different parts of my body lead my movement, and discover my pelvis has very different ideas than my elbow!
Over time, I start to notice connections between these different mental postures. I find that I make better choices when I’m more aware of my body - especially my heart. I have more access to my heart when I first accept how I am feeling, even when it’s yucky. I can choose to attend to the beauty that’s in front of me, rather than just be swept along in the river of bad news.
The interplay is endlessly fascinating, with no end, just a continual recursive flow. I get the sneaking suspicion that “me choosing where to go next” is really just one of many shapes my life takes - not false, but not the whole story either.
Destination TBD
The world is not getting more predictable any time soon. The traditional landmarks of a “normal life” seem harder to reach than ever, or perhaps not worth pursuing. How do we navigate these churning waters and to where?
One option is to double down on what we think we know - follow the suggested route, consequences be damned!
Another is to consult multiple experts about the ideal place to go, collect lots of maps, maybe take some webinars… and generally swim in place while feeling anxious and guilty about not knowing the perfect answer.
Of course, expertise and information has its place. But when we privilege “hard facts” over all other sources - like the sensing body, our imagination, the living world - we lose access to a lot of important guidance, especially when it comes to walking our own life path.
These times are too complex to rely on any one map or universal route. I wish it was otherwise. So much easier to follow turn-by-turn directions, but also more boring and less educational.
We live in the intersection of so many worlds. In just a few minutes of smartphone scrolling, I can travel to distant galaxies, witness fearsome tragedy, and order probiotics for my microbiome. As a parent, I constantly negotiate between what is best for me, my two children, the whole family - all mixed up in a stew of animal instincts, ancestral patterns, and cultural expectations. It’s disorienting to feel the wind blowing from so many directions at once.
I have a vision of the human heart-mind as a multidimensional compass, able to tune into the magnetic field lines of countless different realities, different truths. It is both a gift and a burden. We are each left to find our own balance between staying open to new signals and staying the chosen course. Rather than try to pick any one optimal strategy, perhaps the best we can do is become adroit enough to dance among the possibilities, to follow different currents of truth as they call to us.
I suppose we might call this faith. To proceed without any guaranteed destination, following our compass even when the needle swings wildly from day to day. It sounds risky, uncertain… but is there really any other way?
Related Essays
Everyone is just totally winging it, all the time
by Oliver Burkman
What I’m Up To
If you’d like to hone your wayfinding skills in a structured, supportive environment (and you live near Evanston), please check out my upcoming course.
Does life feel especially stressful and confusing these days?
Do you feel disconnected from yourself, unsure of what really matters?
Do you have the vague sense that something in your life needs to change, but have no idea what, or how to go about figuring it out?
When life gets overwhelming (say because of a global pandemic), one of our animal instincts is to tune out all the stuff that feels unimportant to our immediate survival, and focus on just getting through the day. Sound familiar?
This response is brilliant for dealing with short-term threats, but when it goes on for months and years, it can leave us dissociated from vital signals. We lose touch with our body, only noticing it needs our care when there is acute pain. We lose touch with our authentic desires, unable to make clear decisions about what we really need. We get stuck in stale habits that no longer serve us, preferring familiar suffering to the risk of something new.
Maybe just try harder?
That’s the most familiar cultural response to a problem. Work harder at eating healthy. Journal like hell. Exercise #everydamnday. All of these things have their place, of course, but they easily become another stressful item on our to-do list that we guiltily ignore.
There is another way: thaw the frozen lines of communication. Regrow healthy connections to parts of you previously turned aside. This often means trying less so we can listen more. Allowing movement rather than forcing it. Relaxing assumptions and discovering forgotten capacities.
There are lots of methods that can help you do this. The trick is to pick one and actually do it.
If you’d like some expert guidance and good company, Nick Beem is offering a 6-week course this Fall based on Phoenix Rising yoga, somatics and Buddhism. It’s local, in person, and totally doable.
The essence of the approach is to:
Reopen friendly, diplomatic relations with your body
Increase your awareness of what’s happening in the present moment
Recognize what you can change, and what you cannot
Practice making choices based on what’s true, rather than your ideas of what should happen.
Learn to collaborate with your life, rather than be either the victim or the commander
The yoga practice is quite simple and accessible to beginners. The yoga postures serve as laboratories of discovery, rather than exact architectures to accomplish. There is also guided meditation, journaling, and group process. You’ll get interesting homework assignments and practice recordings.
Of course, quantum mechanics suggest that even the course of individual particles can’t be predicted in advance.
Nice piece, Nick. Thanks for devoting your time to it.