Food for Thought

Handstand practice in yoga is one of the most challenging poses. Not only are you upside down and seeing the world from an entirely different perspective, you're balancing precariously on your little hands and arms, which are typically much weaker than the legs that shuttle you around all day, every day. I've been practicing for about a year and a half now, and the closest I've gotten to landing handstand was about 3.5 sweet, solid seconds of air time.

My teacher said something in class a few months ago, though, that gave me pause. She looked around at all of us, flinging our legs up in the air, balancing for a second or two, then crashing right back down, and she laughed. She said, "So many of you are so close. In fact, you're there. You have handstand, but you make yourself come down, thinking there's no way you could stay up. At some point, you just have to do it. You have to stay up."

I thought that was interesting, and possibly, very true. A lot of the time, I think that people (myself included) have a hard time letting themselves really go there, for fear of what it will be like at the top of wherever they want to be, and even scarier, how bad it might feel to fall back down from there. Whether it's landing handstand in yoga, or getting that dream job, or really letting yourself get fully immersed and invested in your relationship, sometimes we self-sabotage. The higher you go, the farther there is to fall, right? But next time you're in yoga class, or on a third date with someone you might actually like, or sitting down to think about writing a business plan, maybe you can stop for a second and just believe that things could be as amazing as you've hoped. That you can be that amazing. So amazing, in fact, that even if you do fall, even if you lose everything, you'll be able to pick yourself back up, dust yourself off, and do it all over again.

As that wise teacher said, sometimes you just have to do it. Start that business you've been pondering. Move across the world to see something new for a little while. Let yourself fall in love unreservedly. Go for the things that make you feel like you're 20,000 feet up. It's scary up there, but even if you fall (and you probably will, a zillion times before you're through), it will have been worth it.