What do I fear? What am I so afraid of? I tried kicking up into a headstand in the center of the room half paralyzed with this “fear” thing and half completely self-aware that everyone was watching me.
When
people think about yoga they don’t necessarily consider it a daring sport, to
say the least, yet, in so many ways it’s the most daring of all because it
pushes you to know your greatest ally and your biggest enemy: yourself.
I’d
been going to the studio regularly for a couple of months before I picked up
Ana Forrest’s book, Fierce Medicine. Ana Forrest is a contemporary yoga teacher
and founder of a specific practice called Forrest
Yoga. With combined expertise in
overcoming trauma, psychology and physical therapy Forrest developed a style of
yoga that is both physically and emotionally rigorous.
Forrest
Yoga is a transformative experience that pushes the practitioner into a deeper
awareness and understanding of his or her own psyche in a “fiercer” way than
many other styles of yoga. Forrest
pushes you to keep going the moment you’re ready to sink into Child’s
Pose. Forrest pushes you to fully
experience the burning in your legs during Warrior II and not to stop until you
can feel that euphoric sweet spot.
It’s
no surprise that much about this practice has to do with courage and being
brave of heart, but first, back to my headstand.
I’d
never done a headstand before and here I was in front of all of my fellow
teacher trainees in the center of the room in one. It felt like a long time, though I’m sure I
was only in it for a few seconds.
Inversions are often the scariest poses in yoga. They literally turn your world upside down
and all of your weight is balanced on your head. You may fear that all the delicate muscles in
your neck will break or perhaps that you just carry too much weight around to
begin with. My mouth tasted bitter, not
quite like the iron when you bite your tongue too hard, but metallic. My mouth tasted like fear.
Forrest
says, “We have a lot of internal responses to fear. We push it away, we deny it, we freeze, or
attack (fight or flight syndrome). But there are alternate ways to responding
to fear.” Forrest’s preferred method is
to go hunting for it until she finds the root of it and instead of “slaying the
dragon,” she cuddles up to it and allies with it.
This,
of course, is the furthest thing from my mind.
I felt the pressure on top of my head mounting.
Step
1: identify the fear. Aside from the
obvious (death from breaking my neck), I had always feared my own body. I remembered hiking with one of my boyfriends
in the dead of winter. We crossed a
river with very thin ice and had to jump huge rocks to get to the other
side. It took him all of 3 minutes to
cross, jumping confidently from rock to rock.
It took me what seemed like an hour with a lot of encouragement from him
on the other side.
“Trust
yourself,” my teacher whispered. I had
stopped shaking. “Good, good now squeeze
my hand.” She had her hand between my
thighs and I began to feel that burning sensation and my core strengthening
through the pose. The weight on my head
lessened.
Step
2: Turn around, hunt it, stalk it.
Forrest says, “Fear is a signal.
Be alert. Get vigilant. It wasn’t that long ago that other humans or
predators hunted us. This means you have
to take action. You can’t just sit and meditate
your problems away; many meditators become my students because their abuse or
rage doesn’t go away by meditation alone.
It does teach you how to get steady though. So get steady and now go out hunting.”
In
Forrest Yoga, it’s not enough to have awareness of a trauma that happened to
you that you now feel in the tightness of your hips, no, one has to be able to
chase that trauma out of one’s body. One
has to be able to not back down when you’re in a pose and suddenly your
breathing is shallow but take the courageous path to breathe in deeper and keep
digging and once it surfaces get cozy with it.
Step
3: Stop making decisions based on fear.
This is one I’ve taken off the mat more than others through reading this
book. Forrest says, “…when I respond
from that fearful or panicky place, 99 percent of the time I end up making
terrible decisions…The hero’s choice is to disobey the dictates of the fear.”
When
one chooses to not obey those dictates of fear, it’s empowering. It’s as Forrest puts it, “the brave-hearted
path.” She says, “It takes a lot of
courage to explore your fear. Courage
isn’t the numbed out, flinty, Clint Eastwood-esq stoicism we’re accustomed to,
but instead it’s daring to experience our feelings-even if this requires
painful awakening- with discernment and intelligence.”
Step
4: Find the healing within the fear. How
does one exactly do this? What does my
fear of heights say about me? Does it
say that perhaps I fear reaching new levels of success or perhaps I fear my
potential or maybe I fell from a tree when I was a child? How will snuggling up to that fear make me a
better person?
Fear
is a very powerful thing when you think about it. When you make the choice to not make any
decisions based on fear you begin to realize how much it may dictate in your
life, such as whether you talked to that cute guy at the cafe or not (fear of
rejection) or whether you stated exactly what you thought in a business meeting
(fear of communicating your truth). Then
you dig deeper. You realize you fear
your own honesty and you fear others not validating you as a person. Dig deeper.
Maybe you never felt worthy as a child or maybe that one time you told
the truth before things went wrong.
Now,
what happens when that scary dragon of unworthiness creeps into my life? How do I shift my reaction from fear to
something else, and what is that something else? Forrest has a unique approach to this: “Once
you’ve faced your dragon, your next task is to ally with it. Don’t kill the beast, you fool, because
that’s your power! This is the
archetypal hero’s quest: you’ll meet the dragons and demons and fight and fight
and fight them until you finally get the treasure. Then you’ll depart that quest irrevocably changed, with that treasure a
part of you. Every time you stalk your
fear and choose life instead of oblivion, you’ll begin to reclaim the parts of
you that have been blocked off.”
Step
5: Snuggle up to your fear: maybe this means confronting headstand head on (pun
intended). Maybe I won’t be able to get
into headstand on my own for a while, but I’m still trying and that’s a win. For me, snuggling up to my fear means trying even
though it’s not perfect and I have to sacrifice my autonomy on the mat to go
there for the moment. Learning to be in
the moment and confronting fears like turning your world upside down might be
enough of a win for today.
“I’d
believed that in order to do what I was afraid of, I had to get rid of the fear
first, but that turned out to be only an idea, not the truth. You have to do something two hundred times
before the fear will disperse. Are you
still afraid of something? Just do it
again. Do it again. Do it again.” – Ana T. Forrest
