Keep Walking: Yoga with Kristen at 808 Wellness: Kihei, Maui,HI: November 23, 2018

For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through Love —Carl Sagan

In the space of a single week, in three different yoga classes, with three different instructors, in three different poses, teachers looked right at me and said, “You don’t trust yourself”. They just blurted it out, for the entire world to hear, words that hit my heart so hard I exhaled in despair. That knowing and painful truth that hits you and resonates down to your bones, where it hides, deeply concealed, like a bad secret you hold in your storehouse of shame.

How can they see this from the front of the room? I mean none of these people actually know me, I just happened to walk in their class, unroll my mat, and was trying to do a little yoga. When it happened again this morning I felt like announcing to the whole class, OK ! Alright already! I have trust issues! With God, with myself, with my life. Now can we all just get back to our mats and do a little stretching together please?

I didn’t of course. I’m way to self-conscious to do something that bold and brazen. I hate calling attention to myself, which is the flip side to someone with a massive ego. Either case its a uninformed perception. In the big scheme of things we all are only here for a short moment. Carl Sagan said, “for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through Love.” Love of this magnitude is a force to be reckoned with. I can’t even bear my own weight on my own hands.

I got busted in this not trusting business in arm balances. I can get away with faking it in downdog or plank, sometimes in crow, but when it comes to anything fancier I’m wobbly because I never firmly press my whole hand on the earth in solid connection.

In yoga, the hands are rumored to be the motor organs of the heart. They are connected by 108 invisible channels that run directly out of the heart. What is missing from my arm balances isn’t upper body strength, it endeavoring to trust my own self with my whole heart.

The body never lies. The breath is always our guide. Buddha said, ‘in this body you’ll find all the gods and all the demons.” Darkness is a part of us and it seems the play isn’t to fuel it with more hate, but learn to trust our way through it to the other side. Arm balances speak for me because I haven’t mustered the strength to even admit my weakness to myself.

This is entirely inconvenient because I’m writing my book. I’ll start and then stop because it’s not good enough. Like my arm balances I get into it, get scared, and back off, because I don’t trust. Then the next day, I’ll try again because it’s the only thing I know to do to really find some peace of mind. Van Gogh said, “if you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”

The dull ache of unfulfilled dreams and doubt live in the centers of my palms. They itch to bring my book to market. Planting my hands fully on the mat so I can pick up my own feet and climb out of the mental darkness of doubt and shame, fear and lack is my practice today and I’m so glad I got called out on my own tricks. And then coming home and planting my hands freely on this keyboard to write about it, with the distant echo of “you don’t trust yourself” haunting me.

Yeah really? Well we will see about that, won’t we.

Health, Love and Rock N Roll