Fear, Headstands and Snuggling up to Dragons

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

The Chicago Project: Validation and Humility

This past weekend I went to King’s Spa with some girlfriends of mine.  King’s Spa is a Korean spa so for the first part of the experience you get completely nude in a room full of other women to enjoy a steam room, showers and hot tubs.

King's Spa 

My girlfriends came up naked and we all looked at each other for a moment before one friend said: look at us; we’re beautiful.  We – as a whole – not based on this superficial notion of beauty but based on our willingness to share this experience with each other.

That set the tone: validation.

My friend has this tattoo on her arm: it says: do not seek outside of yourself in Latin.  I pondered this as an array of different bodies walked past me.  Body-positive experiences are something I’ve been intentional about having lately starting with the naked bike ride and taking my next steps with my yoga practice.

Throughout the evening I pondered the notion of validation within our society and seeking it from external factors.  I’m very guilty of this – as we all are.  I seek validation from the men I keep in my back pocket to make me feel attractive or the books I read to prove my intellectual prowess and the social circles I maintain to show some sort of status. Still, I keep coming to the same conclusion:  when you lose the ego you feel no need to be validated by others.

Humility is honest; it’s vulnerable and damn it, it’s scary.  It’s sitting naked in a hot tub and feeling at peace.  It’s telling the truth even when it hurts you to do so.  It’s smiling at a stranger on the street with no expectation of receiving a smile or recognition in return.  It’s walking into a room with quiet confidence knowing you have nothing to prove. 

It’s also very hard work as we fight against our conditioning in this society.  The ego likes to keep one safe.  The ego keeps my sunglasses on as I follow the beat of my heels hitting pavement attuned to my ipod making no human connections walking down my street.  The genuine me, however, wants to be honest, vulnerable and notice how lonely everyone really is and say, it’s okay, look at us; we’re beautiful.

Taking the Leap: Leap Year 2012

“People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition.  We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult in a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Full excerpt here.

I’ve been meditating on Rilke’s words a lot.  People do have a tendency towards the easiest path.  We tend to like what we are good at and build up those strengths while neglecting our weaker skills and compensating with our strengths because it’s easy.

Crow Pose

I’m horrible at yoga.  (I know, I know, how can anyone be horrible at yoga?  It’s the most noncompetitive form of physical activity in existence, but I am!)  I’m awkward and completely lack the grace that most yoginis have when flowing into poses.  Sometimes I still confuse my left with my right, I fall out of balance and my crow has repeatedly kissed the earth and not in a good way.

So, clearly, I should become a yoga teacher, right?!  Totally!

I can never just wade into the water and gradually go in; I’ve got to dive in each time.  As such, I just handed in my expensive nonrefundable deposit this past week towards a yoga teacher training certification program – equivalent to getting a Bachelor’s in Yoga and now there is no going back.

Back in February, I thought about how 2012 is a Leap Year and then I stumbled upon this Leap Year project site and wanted something to contribute.  I think this is it.  My training begins this September and goes until my 29^th birthday in February.  I’ve done some pretty wild things in my life from living with wolves to fasting for 40 days to being a full time solo wanderer unsure of where I’d lay my head the next night, but I have to say I think this is the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

I’ve never been much of an athlete and my relationship with my body, though it has evolved thanks to my yoga practice, has been a tumultuous one.  Committing myself to teaching a physical practice to others is incredibly intimidating and scary, yet I absolutely feel it is the next step in my own personal evolution.

I’m diving into the difficult, wrapping myself around my weaknesses and hoping to come out of this a better human, or in the least, knowing my right from my left.

The Yoga Project: Calming the Monkey Mind

I was going strong having done yoga for 13 days straight but I was going crazy.  I hadn’t been able to see my boyfriend or friends for more than a week (and I live alone – so when I say going crazy, I mean it literally – all work and no play make Jen Jen cray cray).  I was getting home at 10 each night and leaving by 7:30 a.m.  I felt exhausted.

It dawned on me that the point of yoga isn’t to drain your vitality but rather to replenish it.  In conclusion, I’m planning on doing yoga as much as I can without burning out or losing the point of this exercise which was to integrate more yoga in my life and develop a regular practice.  That being said, I’m planning on practicing at least five times a week or so.

Now that the technicalities are out of the way, let’s get to what it’s been like on the mat for the past couple of weeks. 

I’m learning and relearning so many things like what it is to really breathe or how to sit up straight to remembering promises I made to myself as a child that are no longer useful to me.  Engaging in a yoga practice so aggressively (bet you never thought you’d hear yoga and aggressive in the same sentence, huh?) is no joke.  There are days where I just can’t get with it – the teacher says left and I go right, my downward dog looks like a pathetic panting puppy and I’m not feeling so zen towards my instructor. 

Then there are other days where practice seems to flow so gracefully.  I do a pose I’ve never been able to do before.  My breathing stays consistent with my movement and shivasana (corpse pose) feels as though I’ve entered into a magical realm between dreamscapes and reality while conscious.

Last night, I would not allow myself to enjoy my yoga class for whatever reason.  I was having a really off night.  During these off nights I feel as though I learn the most about myself and my old thought processes and patterns.  For instance, you decide you’re good at hip openers but bad at core work so you avoid the core work and at some point you realize that you are deciding it all and not allowing yourself to be open to the experience.  Instead of opening up, you then become your mother’s voice in your head telling yourself that everything you do sucks and that of course you’ll never get into the poses that the tiny girls right next to you get into and of course you’ll never be strong enough to sink that knee fully into Warrior pose then you REMEMBER.  You remember that you’re in control, and that you love yourself and your body and are thankful it can take your knees halfway in warrior and that you can get into that one bind that you couldn’t do last week. 

Yoga reminds me of Aztec danza – for every step to the right there is a step to the left and they call themselves warriors, not because they participate in bloodshed, but because they battle themselves in the danza.  I often feel as though I am battling my mind on the mat and I wonder: which half will win tonight?  The overly critical dark half that leaves me wounded and crying or the compassionate light half that allows me to feel the joy within my body and accepts me always as I am.

More to come on my yoga journey.

Namaste

The Yoga Project: The Beginning of my Destruction (Day 4)

Something happened to me in class tonight.  Yoga happened.  (dun dun dun – insert melodramatic orchestra here).

I left class crying and feeling defeated.  It will take more than a simple blog-post to fully comprehend what is happening to me.  I believe it's transformation.

The word “transformation” seems to be this ethereal new age term that cannot be explained in a pragmatic manner.  That is precisely how I feel about my strong emotional reaction to a physical practice.  Yoga is hard, much more difficult than many things that I’ve done and emotionally, I’ve barely scratched the surface.

There is a saying about destruction being necessary in order to rebuild (rebirth).  I believe I’m currently in the destructive phase right now.  I can only hope the plans I lay out after this phase are better than what I am currently in the process of destroying.

Through this I am realizing what yoga really is.  It is a challenging practice.  It is rigorous for your mind and body.  Yoga is a mindset, it is not a destination, it is not a competition, and it is far more than I understand right now.  It is powerful.

There’s something to be said about finding your breath through the discomfort of this process and being able to hold the pose.  I feel as though I am going to be here for a while. 

The Fast: 40 Days - Retrospective Reflection

I know, I know, I’ve been way to busy eating to blog.  Just kidding!

I successfully completed 40 days of the fast.  Breaking the fast was quite uneventful to be honest.  It was almost like food was the one thing I had longed for, built up in my head, desired, craved, wanted and became obsessed with for 40 days and at first bite I couldn’t help but think: this is it? 

Don’t get me wrong, I love eating, but I guess it’s like anything else you build up in your head after abstaining from it.  The reality of it is usually much less than the expectations you had built in your head.

As you may know from my last blog post, I have become a vegan.  I bought all of these vegan recipe books and I have to say that after fasting for 40 days, it’s not that hard.  It’s pretty easy to convince yourself of things like: cheese?  Oh I don’t eat that.  Does that have cream?  I don’t eat that. Etc.  I’m thankful for being able to easily transition to a vegan lifestyle (except for my Camel hair coat and variety of leather boots which I have no desire to be rid of).  The best thing about going vegan has been that I have been able to sustain my weight loss from the fast quite easily.

In 40 days I lost about 25 pounds.  Since completing the fast I’ve gained back about 3 pounds and maintained a 22 pound loss.  If you remember, prior to fasting I had lost 20 pounds by exercising and eating better.   This means that since April of 2011 I am down a substantial 42 pounds.  Not bad, still some to go. 

Here are the less tangible benefits of the fast that I would like to share:

Cleansing = forgiveness: it seems that I was carrying more than a few extra pounds including some pretty heavy baggage that didn’t really belong to me from some ex-lovers.  Around the fourth day of the fast I did some intense meditation, wrote some compassionate letters to myself of understanding and forgave me, him and them for some hard-earned scars on my heart.  Three days later I met someone pretty amazing (who I’m hoping won’t read this blog).

I can have a great time (shocked face) WITHOUT booze:  I know, I know, it’s crazy.  I actually like hanging out with friends without drinking.  Most of you who know me in person know I love a great Malbec or Pinot Noir and of course some whiskey or scotch on the rocks but guess what?  I don’t need to drink to have a good time (it helps tho) but not necessary.  I find myself meeting up with friends for tea or doing other things that don’t include drinking.  It’s pretty awesome.  Also, I save money.

I feel better about myself: physically, mentally and emotionally.  I feel…dare I say, happy.  I’m proud of my accomplishment and it was hard and I’m happy that I stuck through it.  I proved something to myself and let go of the need to prove things to others.  Of course, my body feels a lot better after dropping significant weight and consuming healthy foods.  I also feel more secure, like I don’t need so much validation from the outside world in my endeavors because I know what I’m doing.  There’s a quiet confidence in knowing you can do whatever you want to do.  Also, I have less patience for those individuals that have nothing but excuses, particularly because that used to be me.  I guess it’s like Herman Hesse once wrote in Demian: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.” 

That being said, I'm looking for my next challenge.  I kind of feel like: Okay, I fasted 40 days, now what? 

Any suggestions?

I know it's been a while..

I ate.

I had an orange. I feel so full. I made myself some veggie broth with 5 carrots. I'm stuffed--I feel like I sat down to a five course meal.

Of course, I'm the worst at breaking the fast. I did 13 days. I lost 15 pounds. I could have gone longer but I was really missing eating and having some sort of social life (which is pretty damn hard when you aren't eating or drinking).

What have I come away with:
I think this fast really accelerated me dealing with a lot of emotional issues. I gained a lot of clarity and perspective and I made a promise to take care of Jen first. No one is going to come between my excellent relationship with myself. I'm glad I did this when I did because it boosted my confidence and I feel very in control of myself and of my body. My energy is flowing again instead of this depressed stagnation I was in.

I got the keys to my new place today. I can't wait to move in.

I've been feeling really good lately. I'm amazed at my own sheer strength and capacity to deal with the recent things thrown into my world as of late. I'm quite proud of myself. Now I just need to sum of the courage to pack up the rest of my things here and finally be done with this temporary home. 5 months of my life here. I'm glad I'm leaving because this place just reminds me of him.