There's a heat wave this
week in Philadelphia, and I am consciously aware of where I was and what I was
doing exactly one year ago: big belly, moving slowly, on the brink of
submitting my tenure dossier...expectant.
Today, I sit at my desk in
my slightly cool office, feeling the twinge of vertebrae talking to one another
after a deep practice this morning. My teacher has led me toward Karandavasana,
and we are working through it in pieces: taking Padmasana while in the balance
of Pincha Mayurasana, then taking the balance on the forearms with Padmasana
curled up into my body. Last year at this time, this space is where my baby boy
lived.
I have a keen awareness
these days of fears in upside-down postures, and my teacher tells me that it is
the wrestling with mortality that comes from mothering. I sit in the amazement
of a stronger, more flexible body, accompanied by a mind that is, truly, more
fearful. Where between babies I used to jump up into handstand and find the
security there, now I feel a need to protect myself from falling over. Today,
my teacher asked me to bend all the way back to the floor in Pincha Mayurasana
so that I could feel the feeling of falling over. There was the floor. Not an
abyss...just a floor.
But the fear isn't really
of the floor, is it? It's of the abyss. And the abyss is the mystery of loss.
What if... My baby boy has unfolded with both a sweet, delicate nature and a
durability that is uniquely his own, and I am drawn into it as his mother to
both protect and challenge him. My daughter, now 4, is committed to climbing
higher and sometimes wants to let go of my hand. She sits these days in the
contested space between wanting to own every skill, and wanting us to brush her
teeth for her. This negotiation of fear and security, I find, I am doing in and
with my own body. Close to the floor I build strength: in jumping back, in
twisting, in back bending. Even in back bending, I can see the floor as I fall
toward it, and control the fall. But upside down—especially after seeking the
protection of a wall in upside-down poses while pregnant—draws out of me the
fear of what I'm falling into. I cannot see it. I want my teacher to help.
And, as mothers, do we not
spend so much of our precious energy protecting our children from what we
suspect might be lurking? Even if it's unnecessary? And don't we have to let go
of that a bit, to have faith that the child will begin to make those
predictions himself or herself, and to negotiate falling into the earth below,
even if he cannot see it behind him?
Practice is a mirror—in it
we see who we are. But it's not just a mirror, but also a physical application
of all that we're working through. It's a laboratory to experiment with and
examine who we are: the actions we take, the ways in which we identify
ourselves, the questions that haunt us. In every pose, we see a relationship to
ourselves that is not just about that pose, but also about how we're moving in
the world more generally. It forms a philosophical and tangible bridge into the
day that leads us into a sharper awareness of how and why we will be in the
world. And the next morning, it welcomes us back to journey deeper into
that awareness. This fear of falling is real in how it manifests in my
practice and in my movement in the world. But practice teaches us that reality
is always a product of the mind, and that calming the mind can take us to the
edge of how we've created our vision and help us to revise our realities.
My teacher tells me that
the fear will never really go away, and that instead of resisting it and
waiting for it to disappear I should instead acknowledge that it is there. A
longtime companion.
A reminder that there is
space to move through and around it, with myself, with my children. Space for
faith that a fall will not be far.
