With my recently polished up awareness, I've been watching myself teach this semester, curious about my difficulties with performance while apparently being comfortable with teaching. While performing, I lose my center, lose myself, and have a kind of white noise in my head that makes thinking difficult. I don't see details around me, and all my vision turns inward.
It turns out that I have very similar feelings while teaching. I'm currently thinking that one difference is the length of the event. A class is, at a minimum, 50 or so minutes long. Those white-out periods pass while I go through the motions of performing my job. I get them, I feel them, and I almost panic because I can't remember what comes next. But it's MY class, it's my responsibility, and I can't let the students down. So I keep going through logical sequences of the subject that I know very well -- I know it well enough to ad lib at almost any point -- until I regain myself and connect back into the intended lesson for the day (like connecting back into the form).
I'm enjoying the sensation of being aware, and I'm increasingly appreciative of how much impact that can have on my classroom. For a long time I've struggled to integrate the "me" that practices kung fu with the "me" that does everything else. It's very, very satisfying to begin to see progress.
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I felt myself tense up while I read the description of what happens during a performance, and then relaxed when I related it to my own experiences where I somehow pushed through the "white noise". That is such a great way to describe that awful sensation.
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