Victory!!!

Well, Shanti-Town, it's been a wild couple of weeks; I have been to the desert, I have turned one apartment into a another apartment, I have belted out some Carrie Underwood in front of a room full of strangers, I have celebrated A LOT and today I turned a corner...

Today marks the first day of the last year of my twenties. That's right, folks, today this little yogaholic turns 29. A birthday surprising in its momentousness. 29? Who knew THAT would be a big birthday? 30 is what it's all about. 30 is the birthday deserving of some total skin-shedding. Right? Am I right? Well...I may BE right, but 29 sure snuck up on me.

This morning, while getting in a quick cuddle with my love before heading off to (ugh) work, I was quietly overcome with a chest-gripping nostalgia: My god, time is just moving. It is a train that I have boarded and can not get off of (wouldn't, even if I could), but man is it just my imagination, or is it SPEEDING UP? My twenties have been such a mass of confusing emotions and big changes that for a long time I've felt...well, let's just say more than ready to say goodbye to them. But this morning my twenties did not seem to me like an aggravating ball of crazy, no, this morning I could feel all the sweetness, all the energy, all the veil-dropping-ness of what it is to be a twenty-something. I could have cried.

I could go on, trust me, all about growing up and revelation and this illusive thing called "womanhood", but I'll digress...because this post (please reference above title) is about victory. It is about a little tiny (giant) personal victory.

Drum-roll please!

Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, while sequestered in the tiny gym on the 7th floor of the lawfirm where I work weekends, I DID MY FIRST UNASSISTED DROPBACK!!!

(For those of you who don't know what one is, THIS is a dropback.)

Now, I've been doing assisted dropbacks for quite a while now, and I know--have known for some time--that I have all the flexibility and strength and know-how I need in order to be able to do one on my one, but, until today, I never have. I have wanted to, oh, how I have wanted to! I salivate over dropbacks. I have given myself many a neck crink just watching other people do them in class...they are...DELICIOUS. But, I have always waited for the teacher to come over, or some good old fashioned wall-time in order to get them done. And why? Because dropbacks are S-C-A-R-Y. Scary.

In Anusara they say that the back of the body represents the unknown (and of course for most of us the back of the body literally IS unknown, unless you happen to have a 360 degree mirror in your home, or have ever been on that Tim Gunn show where he makes a 3D computer mock-up of your body) and so for most of us dropping backwards in space is pretty f-ing freaky. (This is also what makes inversions pretty difficult for many of us...upside down AND backwards! Yikes!)

But, people, I have had a nearly daily practice for over 3 years now,and knowing myself and my own body there is no reason for me not to be able to dropback. Except for fear.

Fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, feeeeear. (My arch nemesis).

So, this evening, as I was winding up my practice with some backbends, I suddenly decided that NOW was the time. I decided that, damnit, it is my 29th birthday, I have been stuck at work all day...I am going to overcome this one tiny pesky little fear. I figured, if I can start here, on this first day of my 29th year...if I can just conquer one small fear...well, the sky's the limit.

I stood up, heart pounding.

I started sort of sticking my toe in the water, bending back, bending back, bending back...whoop! Right back up to standing again. No go.

Heart pounding more, now.

Little voice says, "oh, come on, you don't need to do this today!"

Other little voice joins in, "yeah, who's gonna know? You'll do it later. You'll do it next time you're in class...when there's a teacher."

New little voice, "you could do it at home...maybe you can have Paul come stand near you when you do it, just to spot you."

First little voice again, "yeah, you should really have someone else there. Just so you don't hurt yourself. What if you hurt yourself!? What then? You're all alone in this little gym..."

And then, BIG voice chimes in, "No! Hush. I'm doing it."

I'm doing it, goddamnit. Heart still pounding. I breathe. I settle in to my feet. I set myself up--thighs back, tailbone down, ground through my legs. I lift up and start opening up to the sky and then behind me. I breathe. And then...like magic...like I've been doing it my whole life, I dropback into a perfect, silent, backbend.

I immediately get up and do it again, giddy, so that I know it wasn't a fluke and then, when I am finally on my back and on the floor, I pump my two fists in the air and let out a little whoop.

I did it!

And when I stand up I am shaking from the exhiliration and the adrenaline and for the second time today I well up with emotion. I did it. I did it. No one there to see it. No safety net. I did it.

I am twenty-freakin'-nine years old and I can do anything! Well...I can at least do one thing today that I was scared to do yesterday, and that is a huge birthday victory.

All my love,
YogaLia

Possible Impossibility

I wish that Blogger had a drawing feature so that I could make a little stick figure of the crazy thing I was attempting to do in class today. Many crazy things, actually. Things so out of my reach all I could do was prop myself up and gaze at the ladies on the other side of the room who seemed to float from one complicated position to the next. It's not all the time that I feel schlubby and inept in a yoga class, but today, I felt it. Big time.

Impossible Pose #1: Double bakasana. Okay, bakasana, for those who don't know, is Crow Pose. Basically your hands are on the floor and your knees are balanced on your bent arms, like this:

Not so bad, right? An intermediate pose, probably? Well, and I don't even know where this comes from exactly, but imagine spinning that little stick figure guy over so he's on his back, in bridge, his head and shoulders on the ground, his pelvis and butt up in the air, his elbows bearing his weight on the ground and his two feet in each of his two hands, so that basically he is balancing on his shoulders and elbows, with his knees bent bent bent and his feet pressing up against his bum and resting in his hands. This is double bakasana.

Can you even picture this?!

I could get one foot in my hand but couldn't even BEGIN to lift my other foot off the ground.

Impossible Pose #2: 4 minute handstand. That's all I have to say about that. You think 4 minutes doesn't sound like a very long time? Try it, mo fo! Seriously. It's not pretty.

Impossible Pose #3: I don't even know what to call this...the teacher called it "headstand droppings" or something like that, but I will try to describe it to you. The first thing we did was Urdhva Dhanurasana with headstand arms, which looks like this:

Which, I can do pretty well, because I have a really flexible back (though it's a bit rough on me shoulders)...but folks, this was just the WARM UP pose.

Next thing was, we were to get into headstand, sirasana A...which looks like this:

And then, from headstand, to DROP BACKWARDS into the above urdhva dhanurasana. Which I managed to do, but made the teacher come stand by me first (because I'm five years old, apparently), AND THEN (nope, not finished yet), from the urdhva with headstand arms we were supposed to "pump and jump", meaning pump with our heart and jump with our legs, back into headstand.

Now, this--ugh--my attempt at this was totally laughable. The teacher tried to spot me and she put her hands on my hips, asked me to pump forward with my heart, and began counting, "1...2..." and I knew when she got to 3 I was supposed to attempt to jump back up into headstand, but my legs pretended that english was not their first language. "Oh, you have to jump harder than that!" she said, and not one to turn down a challenge (even though I could barely tell what was up and what was down and was a little bit afraid I might break my neck in the process) I tried it again, flailing my legs up into the air, and somehow...landed back in headstand. "That's great," she said, "you popped in like 9 places."

Yeah, great.

I sat up to recover and looked across the room to watch a super incredible floaty boneless yogi, as she moved like a bird might move through the sky, from headstand to urdhva to headstand to headstand variations, to urdhva, back and forth back and forth, hopping with the ease of a little girl hopping over a puddle...and then turned to watch another woman, across from her, whose back seemed to bend in 600 different places as she did the same, back and forth, back and forth...

One girl caught me looking at her, with my mouth agape, and all I wanted to do was shout across the room to her, "how did your practice GET like that?!" I mean, my god. A practice so beautiful it makes me kind of choked up just thinking about it...

Sigh.

Of course my small mind (mini me) is sort of sniping in the background, like some petulant teenager leaning against a brick wall, cigarette hanging from her lips..."I bet she's a dancer. She's probably been doing it forever, it's probably all she does. How are her arm balances, I wonder? Has she seen my biceps...they rock."

And there were other things...hanuman (the bane of my existence!), twisted half-moon, pigeon pigeon pigeon...and by the end of class I thought, my god, this has been a class entirely composed of all the stuff I'm not very good at (except pigeon, I rock me the pigeon). And as much as I hate that...all the struggling and the feeling that my belly is just endlessly in my way...I was also really pleased with it. I have SO far to go, I thought. And it was a relief...the thought that it was all never-ending, was a total relief.

Which got me thinking about other things. It got me thinking about my work as an actress, and how hard it can be for me when I am not able, or not as good as, or totally in the dark about what some super-technical thing is supposed to look like--how I lambast myself, tell myself in a whole myriad of ways that I am hopeless and that my inability is just proof of that hopelessness. I started thinking about what a different feeling that is from this feeling in my yoga practice of an endless unfolding...about how I rarely beat myself up for not being farther along than I am, and how I am EXCITED to move toward the next thing and the next. I could use that, as an actress.

And I thought about my life, my quest for development of some kind or another, and how often I can do the same--how I can hone in on all the ways in which I am failing and write myself off as some kind of lost cause, forgetting that this same principle holds true: I will never get it done. Even when I get to the point where I am balancing only on my head in headstand, there is still going to be someone who can balance on her head AND have her legs in lotus. (For example).

I love you, dear readers, and I wanted to remind you of this...that it will never end. It will only grow and grow and grow. You will put water in the bucket and the bucket will grow. You get me? So go out there and just do, even if you think you suck, because you will get to where you want to go, I promise (and as soon as you get there...you'll have a new destination in mind.)

All my love,

YogaLia