Milking the cow

I am fortunate to live in an ecovillage in a beautiful valley on Waiheke Island. In the field next to our house there live a couple of cows and when the owners are away, I get to do the milking. When we first came to live here I had never milked a cow in my life - I expect very few people nowadays grow up with a milking cow. I was keen to learn so I went along at dawn one day to try my hand. It was Bobby’s first calf and she was not too keen on being milked. Generally she would put up with you for about ten minutes then kick the bucket and agitate to get out of the stall. Milking a cow is not as simple as it seems: there is definitely a skill to using the right amount of squeeze between finger and thumb and the ripple movement of the other fingers, not to mention the coordinated strength of wrist, shoulder and back. Add to that the fact that milk is stripped one squirt at a time - it takes a lot of squirts to fill a bucket. I’d never really thought about that before. I was very slow.

I was too slow, the cow was impatient, there was not enough milk in the bucket. My experience of learning the new physical skill of milking a cow was accompanied by a feeling of inadequacy and haste. You may have heard the saying, “neurons that fire together, wire together”. This was certainly the case as my brain learned this new skill called ‘milking’.

Last week I milked again after a long while. Bobby is now older and has grown into a perfectly patient and docile cow with beautiful big eyes that you cannot help but fall in love with. As I perched on the low stool and started to milk I noticed an interesting phenomenon: My breathing became irregular as anxiety constricted my chest and tension spread through my shoulders and into my hands to the mental refrain “Hurry, go faster, she won’t wait forever. You’re too slow!”

What did I do? How do you work with a neuromuscular program that has been laid down in a certain way - in other words, with a habit? I rest my head against her warm flank and inhale her cow smell, her stomach(s) gurgling as she tucks into a pile of hay. I remind myself that I have time, I also have more skill now. The sensory input as much, if not more, than the mental input calms my nervous system and allows me to not slip back into the learned anxiety habit. And the more I milk in this new way, the more the old pattern fades.

AT is a way to identify, unpick and change unhelpful habits. It requires subtle and patient work. Ultimately it is about taking control of your own life and responsibility for your reactions. Of course you could just go and get a massage…but it’s not the same thing.