Chapter 11: Learning to Wobble

I’ve been riding bikes for forty years. You’d think by now I’d have figured out how to stay steady.

That’s what mastery looks like, isn’t it? The wobbling gradually diminishes. The corrections get smaller. Eventually you find that perfect line where the bike just… stays balanced. Steady. Smooth. No more side-to-side lean.

That’s what I thought, anyway.

Spring 2020. The shutdown was in full swing. Restaurants closed. Offices empty. Playgrounds with yellow caution tape. The world had contracted to the boundaries of our neighborhood, and we were looking for any excuse to get outside.

So we started riding. My wife, my six-year-old daughter on the bike extension trailing behind me, and me—suddenly paying attention to cycling in a way I hadn’t in years. When you’re riding the same routes week after week with nowhere else to go, you start noticing things you’d stopped seeing.

We’d explore different parts of Austin. Sometimes toward the lake. Sometimes through the neighborhoods with their massive live oaks creating tunnels of shade. And one day, we decided to head toward Mount Bonnell.

If you know Austin, you know what that means. Mount Bonnell sits on one of the highest points in the city, and the roads leading up to it don’t ease you into the climb. They announce themselves. You round a corner and suddenly you’re staring at a wall of asphalt tilting up at an angle that makes you reconsider your route choice.

We got to the base of one of these hills and I just… stopped.

The hill was absurd. Not impossible—people rode it all the time. But steep enough that you couldn’t spin your way up casually. You’d have to commit. Get out of the saddle. Push.

I decided not to think about it. Just get on the pedals and focus on forward movement. One stroke, then another. Don’t think about how far to the top. Don’t calculate the gradient. Just pedal.

About twenty feet up, I noticed something odd.

Each time I pushed down hard on the left pedal, the bike leaned significantly to the left. Then when I threw my weight onto the right pedal, it swung right. Back and forth. Left, right, left, right.

At first it felt wrong. The bike was leaning too much. Way more than when I was cruising on flat ground. This seemed like it would be a problem—all this side-to-side motion when I needed to be going straight up.

But then I noticed something else: I was still moving forward. In fact, the lean seemed to be helping. Each time the bike swung to the left, my left leg had a direct line to push down. Each time it swung right, my right leg did the same. The wobbling wasn’t getting in the way of climbing. The wobbling WAS the climbing.

My quads burned. My breathing got ragged. But I kept pedaling, and the bike kept wobbling, and somehow—painfully, slowly—I made it to the top.

I stopped. Caught my breath. Put my foot down and looked back at what I’d just climbed.

Years later, I’d watch footage of Tour de France cyclists climbing mountains—the real mountains, not Austin hills pretending to be challenging. And there it was. The same wobbling I’d discovered, but amplified.

The bike swaying dramatically left and right with each pedal stroke. At first glance, it looks almost violent. Like they’re fighting the bike. But they’re not fighting anything. They’re doing exactly what I’d stumbled into on that hill: using the wobble to climb.

The physics of it makes sense once you understand what’s happening. When you stand to pedal on a steep climb, you’re shifting your center of gravity with each stroke. Your weight moves more directly over the forward foot—the one bearing almost all your weight as it pushes down. This increases your mechanical advantage. The steeper the hill, the more you need this advantage, so the more pronounced the wobble becomes.

Cycling coaches actually teach specific ratios: on a 5% grade, the wobble is imperceptible. At 10%, it becomes obvious—the handlebars moving in an arc of about six inches side to side. At 15% or steeper, the wobble is dramatic. One coach described it as “comical” at the steepest pitches.

The wobble isn’t poor technique. It’s not what happens when you’re tired or losing control. It’s the technique. It’s how you generate the power needed to climb something that steep.

The bike rocks. Your body stays relatively stable. And the alternating lean—left foot down, bike left; right foot down, bike right—that’s what gets you to the top.

But here’s what got me: if the professionals wobble MORE on steep climbs, not less, then what does that say about mastery?

I’d been assuming that expertise meant eliminating the wobble. Getting steadier and steadier until you achieve some perfect, stable balance. But that’s not what happens. Expert climbers wobble dramatically because they need to. The challenge demands it.

So I started looking more carefully at regular riding. The casual cruising on flat ground where I thought I was steady.

And once I looked for it, I saw the wobbling everywhere.

Even when I’m riding casually, the bike is making constant micro-adjustments. My body shifts slightly left, the handlebars move imperceptibly to correct. I shift right, another tiny correction. The wobbling is always there. It’s just so small and so constant that I’d stopped noticing it.

It’s not unique to cycling either.

Stand up right now. Try to stand perfectly still.

You can’t. Your body is making constant tiny adjustments. Your weight shifts forward slightly, your ankles adjust. You lean back, your muscles compensate. You’re never actually still. You’re wobbling in place, correcting so quickly and so automatically that you don’t even notice.

That’s not a problem with your balance. That’s how standing works.

Or walking. Each step is a controlled fall. You lean forward, your body starts to tip, and your foot catches you just before you hit the ground. Then you lean again, fall again, catch yourself again. Walking IS wobbling from leg to leg. The forward motion comes from the falling.

Running is the same pattern, just amplified. Runners talk about “controlled falling”—leaning forward and letting gravity pull you while your legs catch you, over and over, dozens of times per minute. The falling isn’t what happens when you lose your form. The falling IS the form.

The pattern shows up everywhere once you see it: all movement is controlled instability.

Perfect stability means you can’t move. To go anywhere, to do anything, you have to wobble.

So what does this have to do with meditation?

Remember that lean we talked about in the previous chapters? The automatic pull toward pleasant experiences, away from unpleasant ones? That feeling tone—vedana—that makes you want to grasp at some things and push away from others?

That’s the meditation wobble.

You sit down to meditate. Your mind encounters something pleasant—a moment of calm, a pleasant memory, the satisfaction of “doing it right.” You lean toward it. You want more of it. You try to hold onto it.

Then something unpleasant arises—discomfort in your body, a worrying thought, restlessness, boredom. You lean away from it. You want it gone. You try to push it out.

Left, right. Toward, away. Over and over.

Just like on the bike.

And just like on the bike, your first instinct is probably to think this wobbling is the problem. That meditation means finding some perfectly steady state where you’re not pulled toward anything or pushed away from anything. Where your mind just… stays balanced.

But what if that’s backwards?

What if the lean toward and away—the constant wobbling between grasping and avoiding—what if that’s not evidence you’re doing it wrong? What if that’s just… how life works?

Think about climbing that hill again. On flat ground, my wobbling was barely noticeable. Small corrections, easy adjustments. But on that steep climb, the wobbling became dramatic, obvious, necessary.

The same thing happens in meditation.

Some days you sit down and everything feels calm. Your mind is settled. The wobbling is small—tiny leans toward and away that you barely notice. Those are the flat-ground days.

Other days? You’re climbing. Something stressful happened at work. You’re worried about a relationship. Your body is tense. Or maybe nothing obvious is wrong—you’re just tired, or your nervous system is activated for reasons you can’t name.

On those days, the wobbling is dramatic. You lean hard toward any moment of calm. You lean hard away from the discomfort. Your mind swings back and forth with an intensity that feels like it must be wrong.

But maybe it’s not wrong. Maybe that’s just what wobbling looks like when you’re climbing.

The Tour de France cyclists don’t think something’s wrong when their bike sways dramatically up a mountain. They know: steeper challenge, bigger wobble. That’s how it works.

Here’s the thing we keep trying to do: we want to capture balance.

We have one meditation session where everything feels calm and clear. The wobbling is minimal. Everything just… works. And we think: “This is it. This is what meditation is supposed to feel like. I need to get back to this state.”

So the next time we sit down, we try to recreate it. We try to find that same quality of calm. We try to hold onto that feeling of balance.

But it’s like trying to capture a river in a bucket.

The moment you scoop the water out, you don’t have a river anymore. You have still water in a container. You’ve lost the essential thing—the flowing, the movement, the aliveness of it.

Balance on a bike isn’t a static state you achieve and then maintain. It’s a living process. It arises in response to conditions. The terrain you’re on. The wind. Your speed. Your energy level. It’s context-dependent, moment-by-moment adjustment.

You can’t bottle it. You can’t freeze it and carry it with you.

The same is true for meditation.

That calm session you had last week? It happened in specific conditions. Your body was in a particular state. Your mind had a particular quality of energy. The environment was a certain way. All of those factors created the possibility for that experience.

Today is different conditions. Maybe you’re climbing a hill. Maybe you’re on rough terrain. Maybe there’s a strong wind.

The wobbling will be different. Not wrong. Just different. Responding to what’s actually here, not to what was here last week.

This connects back to everything we’ve covered: preparing your body, using breath as a tool, setting up your environment. All of that matters because it affects what kind of terrain you’re riding on.

You wouldn’t expect to ride up Mount Bonnell the same way you cruise through flat neighborhoods. Different terrain demands different wobbling.

But we do this all the time in meditation. We ignore the conditions we’re bringing to the cushion. We try to meditate the same way regardless of whether we’re activated or calm, whether we just ran five miles or just sat in traffic for an hour, whether we slept well or barely at all.

And then we wonder why it doesn’t work. Why we can’t find that balance we had before.

The balance you had before was a response to those conditions. Right now, you have different conditions. The wobbling will look different. That’s not a failure. That’s the wobbling doing its job—responding to the terrain you’re actually on.

Wobbling is necessary. It’s how climbing works. It’s how running works. It’s how standing works. It’s how meditation works.

The lean toward pleasant and away from unpleasant—that’s not the problem you need to solve. That’s the wobbling that keeps you upright. The challenge demands it.

But—and you might be feeling this—there’s something tricky here.

Because you’ve also felt what happens when you try too hard to control the wobbling. On the bike, the moment you start overthinking the balance, consciously trying to manage every lean, things get worse. The wobbling becomes more erratic, not less. Your corrections get bigger, not smaller. You start to crash.

So wobbling is necessary. But trying to control it makes it worse.

How do you learn to wobble well?

You didn’t learn to ride by calculating each micro-adjustment. You got on the bike. You wobbled. You fell a few times. And somehow—without consciously controlling every movement, without thinking through each correction—your body figured it out.

Something was happening when you weren’t trying so hard. Some kind of learning that didn’t require micromanaging every adjustment.

That’s the key to wobbling well in meditation too.

But how do you do that? How do you let the wobbling happen without either trying to control it or getting thrown off entirely?

That’s what we need to figure out next.