The Plateau and the Gift

In his book Mastery, George Leonard described the learning curve as a lie. Progress, he argued, doesn’t arc smoothly upward. It moves in a step function — periods of exciting growth followed by plateaus that can stretch for weeks or months, or longer where nothing seems to be happening and hard-earned skills feel suddenly inaccessible. Then, seemingly without cause, a jump. A new level of competence arrives not through more effort but through integration — less like climbing a staircase and more like an electron jumping to a higher valence. You can’t force it. You can only stay in the work long enough for it to happen.

I first encountered this in Aikido. Years of practice built real strength and fitness, but I learned quickly that strength wasn’t enough and sometimes it was more a liability than an asset. Mastering even basic techniques required softness — a sensitivity to feel the opening, to sense the timing, to move with rather than against. There will always be someone with more muscle. The practice that mattered was learning to stop relying on it.

That was my first real encounter with the plateau. That invisible wall where forward progress stalls and it can even feel like what you’ve learned is sliding backward. Leonard had described it well, but knowing it existed didn’t make it less disorienting.

Meditation came next and deepened the lesson in a different direction. Where Aikido is relational — two bodies, two energies negotiating contact and flow — meditation is a solo journey inward. The subtlety is of a different order with a different feedback mechanism. And the plateaus arrived the same way: long stretches where I couldn’t discern any movement, any growth, anything to do except be patient. The same insecurity. The same quiet question of whether I was doing something wrong or simply not built for this.

The lessons of one path, I’ve come to understand, don’t automatically transfer to the next. Each of these endeavors is worthy of a lifetime. They share a common architecture of mastery, but arriving at one doesn’t inoculate you against the struggles of the next.

Which brings me to Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, my latest endeavor and no less of a challenge.

BCST draws on both worlds. Like Aikido, it is a practice of contact between two beings, where the practitioner’s presence and quality of attention can influence the outcome of a session. Like meditation, it demands a capacity for stillness and sensitivity that cannot be achieved with intellectual understanding. The anatomy is fascinating and more expansive than I anticipated. The client care dimensions are subtle in ways that surprised me.

What built slowly over months, not dramatically, not in a single moment of crisis, but as a quiet accumulating ache — was the fear that I might not have the gift for it. That I loved this work— work that brought me real joy — and I might not be able to do it well enough to matter.

I brought those doubts into our training conversations and found I wasn’t alone. Experienced bodyworkers I’d come to respect were sitting with the same questions. Our instructor, a genuinely kind man, offered encouragement and a piece of candor that has stayed with me: BCST is a practice that can’t be learned, exactly — it has to be caught.

I appreciated the honesty. I also sat with the unsettling implication that not everyone catches it.

What brought me forward wasn’t a breakthrough. It was an honest assessment. I looked at the work I was doing with clients and I struggled with whether there was enough there — enough presence, enough sensitivity, enough genuine effect — to justify continuing. I realized there was. Not perfection or mastery, but enough to explore more and see what develops in my practice. I gave myself that, and forged ahead.

Leonard also wrote that true mastery requires learning to love the plateau. I won’t pretend I’ve managed that. But I’ve learned to stay on it — to trust that integration happens in its own time, that the jump will come when conditions allow, and that the work of showing up is the only thing actually within my control.

The softness I first learned to value on the Aikido mat. The patience I first built in meditation. What BCST asked of me was to bring both into contact with another person’s nervous system — and to trust what I couldn’t yet fully see or measure.

That, it turns out, for me, is the whole enchilada.

Featured Image by Sree Pavan G on Unsplash