Opening | Fear

I have found my drop back, and I can stand up these days. It settles deeply within me as a pure, comforting happiness unlike anything else. Different from my love for family, different from my love for work. There is a joy in the humility of it going away and coming back, of breathing softly through the frustration of "can't" and continuing to practice. "Practice and all is coming." It's hard to remember and have faith in his words. It's illuminating and inspiring to see how we repeatedly forget their truth and then see it again.

I am humbled by the opening that is happening in the spine since Second Series began...today, when my teacher dropped me back he put one of my hands on my own ankle. We will see when the other hand gets to the other ankle... I remember being in the pose and feeling the fear of it. It caught my breath, and I think that's why I let go. Sometimes it's too overwhelming to believe we can do something we never thought we could do. My students are studying "surprise reversals" in writing. Unexpectedly taking one's ankle in backbend is more than a surprise reversal...how can something be a reversal of something you had never really imagined?

Fear...it sometimes wins even in the face of empirical evidence that we can do something successfully. My daughter is just this past week beginning to laugh on a regular basis. She laughed quite steadily in her sleep when she was just weeks old...it was precious. And until this past week, she had really only laughed maybe 5 times. It's interesting...many, many babies have been laughing for months by now. But my child — not unlike her grandfather — has a smile that erupts all over her face. The laugh looks like it's going to spill out...but it doesn't. So her face inflates with happiness to the point where it seems she might burst. Finally this past week, she began to let it out in laughter. And...it scares her. Her laugh is slightly stifled, as if she is uncertain about whether she should carry it on. Sometimes it takes her over, and she reacts to her own laughter as if she might cry. Her face becomes stony and stoic...the laughter disappears. We make her laugh again...and again she seems fearful.

I remember the first few weeks of my relationship with my partner. Bliss and antacids. I was up at night with such belly aches...the fear was sizzling in my tummy, hollowing it out, taking the place of food. Not a surprise reversal...but, again, just a tremendous surprise. I hadn't really seen it coming. It scared the crap out of me.

How often we respond — by instinct? — to these unexpected moments of pure, joyful surprise with fear. We know these things are good. But even my 8-month-old daughter is wise enough to hear her own laughter, to know that there are probably great possibilities in it, and to fear it.

If I watch and follow her wisdom, as I often do, I can see something else — something new — in this old story about fear. I wonder whether sometimes the fear is not fear to be overcome. Rather, as she illustrates, maybe it is fear in the face of something spectacular. Maybe it is not fear at all...but awe. The unadulterated bewilderment we experience when we encounter unexpected greatness. It is its most pure form, I think, when we are in awe of ourselves...the awe never moves to the ego, never becomes confidence or certainty. It just sits delicately as a momentary lack of worldly comprehension — a clear, still awareness of something else. I think that is what the Sutras mean: "Then the Seer abides in His own nature" (The Yoga Sutras 6).

Works Cited

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. 12th edition. Trans. Sri Swami Satchatananda. Yogaville, VA: Integral Yoga Publications, 2007.