Fear & Yoga

Last night, when Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States, she quoted the famous words of one of the most beloved presidents in the history of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which were:

There is nothing to fear, but fear itself.

I recalled these most celebrated words as I moved through yoga practice this morning, and particularly as I approached what has been the most difficult yoga pose for me: Crow or in Sanskrit: Bakasana.

 

In the 15 years that I have been moving my body through asana, the poses of a yoga practice, Crow

has been the most challenging for me.

 

At first, I thought my difficulty with this pose was coming from issues like: not enough arm strength or too little balance.

But as my arm strength improved and my balance developed, I had to acknowledge that I might be working with an emotional barrier, not a physical one.  Namely: fear.

I know I am not alone in the yogi world to encounter an emotional obstacle while practicing asana.

I recently finished Claire Dederer’s book called Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses,

and in it she also spoke about how fear manifested itself in her yoga practice; interestingly enough, Ms. Dederer also included how she took on Crow as well!

(I have included several quotations from Poser to share with you below in case you would like a little preview of her writing too).

Even though I am a psychotherapist by day, I am always still amazed at the power of a single emotion to destabilize us- quite literally in the case of yoga.

So this morning, as I considered my approach to this pose that has at times felt like a great teacher at others like a great nemesis, I held FDR’s words in my heart—there is nothing to fear, but fear itself—and I opted to not place a folded blanket right underneath my lifted head as I usually do before I move into this quite arduous (for me) arm balance pose.

Instead, I intentionally directed myself away from my fears, away from the Technicolor video in my head of me falling hard with a crash.

No, instead I tenderly said to myself: “You know can do this.  You have the strength. You have the balance.  Go ahead. Just do it.  No problem.”

And you know what? I did.

For 15 perfect seconds, and with a huge smile swept across my face, I balanced my body into a beautiful Crow- without the safety blanket resting underneath my head.

Working in Crow has been a good lesson for me in working with its emotional correlate: fear.

Master Yogis talk about some of the mystery of asana, and for me, emotional happenstances during asana is a part of that mystery.

How about you? Have you ever encountered a yoga pose that was challenging because of an emotional barrier? How did you work through it?

Favorite Excerpts from Poser

“You might be feeling discomfort now. If it is time to stop, it is time to stop. But if you can, stay with it. What is discomfort? What does it feel like? Is it really pain, or are you just in an unfamiliar situation? That’s an OK place to be.”

“I tried to breathe. I felt a radiating sensation in my right hip. I felt something else, and I recognized it, as if it were a ship on the horizon: relief.  I was finally feeling my own discomfort, my own lack of ease in the world. Discomfort, anxiety, dread- they had been lurking there all along, and I had been avoiding them, rushing away from them, moving quickly so they couldn’t make themselves known.”

“This was a pose that felt right to do alone. To turn inward. This was the most alone of the poses, the kind of alone that you were as a kid.  Contented in your own world. Living inside your own geography. Recognizing that your body was its own territory, bounded and united and sufficient.”

The red-haired yoga teacher with the Indian accent did catch my attention with one thing he said: ‘Those of you who are really bad at yoga, you’re in the right place. I hope everyone will allow themselves to be really crappy today, to walk away from being perfect. The real yoga isn’t in the perfect pose; it’s in the crappy pose that you are really feeling. You want to feel it from the inside out, rather than make it perfect from the outside in.”

“As I prepared for wheel, I thought back to Fran, all those years ago, offhandedly describing the feeling in my chest as fear. It was no joke. It was scary to unfold my chest, to open something that remained so habitually closed.”

[A Yoga teacher named Seidel says the following to Dederer’s yoga class]. “Anyway, I think of yoga as a kind of counterweight to the way I behave in the rest of my life. No matter how hunched I am the rest of the time, I know that for at least an hour or so every day, I’ll have beautiful, open shoulders. I’ve given up on having them in the rest of life. I just enjoy them while I have them.”

“We bickered pleasantly; I had begun to think of bickering not as the beginning of the end of the world but as just another way families communicate. We carried Bruce’s depression and my anxiety with us, on the roof rack, as it were. They weren’t going to leave us alone. They were just part of the deal.”

“I thought I would do yoga all my life, and I thought that I would continue to improve at it, that I would penetrate its deepest mysteries and finally be able to perform a transition from Scorpian directly into Chaturanga. But here’s the truth: The longer I do yoga, the worse I get at it. I can’t tell you what a relief it is.”