On Headstands and Broken Hearts

Because ever since I read Susan Jeffers‘ book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, I’ve used that term as a mantra, the following:

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In Giselle’s jivamukti yoga class this morning: time for headstands. I look around the room, and notice that, of those doing headstands, nobody is using the wall.

Okay. I’ve gone up into headstand many times without the wall, I know I can do it, but… it still scares me every time.

Committed to conquering this irrational terror, I set myself up, and slowly raise my legs, watching my reddening face in the mirror.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

I could tell I wasn’t entirely straight, wasn’t balanced on my center, since it still required too much effort, but fear of toppling over backwards kept me from straightening any further, even though I’ve done it before. I stayed up for 11 breaths or so — in fear the whole time — then slowly lowered my legs and rested in child’s pose.

While I’m dealing with this fear of balancing upside down, this is my M.O: go up, come down, go up again. So pretty soon up again I went.

But this time I tried something new: going up one leg at a time. I wobbled slightly off balance, and for a split-second it felt like I was going to crash backwards onto the floor.

This time the fear brought me back down immediately, along with a flood of tears.

Well, actually, because I didn’t want to upset anyone (since people frequently get confused and think tears are the hurt, instead of the healing from the hurt, and then I feel like I have to take care of them when what I want to do is take care of me), it was more a quiet stream than a flood.

But it felt good to cry. To acknowledge my fear and let the feelings out.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

And there were more feelings under the surface than just the fear of falling out of a headstand. I’d woken up this morning to a dream that upset me, a dream in which someone who betrayed me in real life was betraying me again, but in a somewhat different, only-making-sense-in-dreams way that I couldn’t quite articulate upon awakening.

It left me feeling hollow and out of sorts, like the hurt was fresh again, like I’d just had the rug pulled out from under me.

So here I was in yoga, now in savasana at the end of class, my mind unable to still itself.

I thought about how open-hearted I’d been with the person who hurt me, and remembered how during that relationship, backbends — heart-opening postures — suddenly became so much more open and available to me. And I realized how afraid I am to go there again, to open my heart only to have it broken into a zillion jagged pieces.

And I also realized that no matter how afraid I am, I want to open my heart again, and I will not let the fear stop me. It may take time, and that’s okay, but I know eventually I’m going to march back into the lion’s den, because I can’t imagine living any other way.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

And I thought about the things I’m trying to achieve in my life, the life I want to create, the businesses I want to grow, and how terrified I am that I will never achieve them, create them, grow them, that I’ll always be just a wannabe. But I’m not going to let that fear stop me either.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

So I’ll keep trying my headstands. I may use the wall as a crutch for the rest of my life, may still be in terror going upside down as an old retiree, but I’ll bet you that I’ll get better at it, and more confident, little by little.

And I’ll keep going after the open-hearted relationships I want in my life. My heart may have lots of stitching and scars, but as my friend Cosy Sheridan sings in Anthymn, “a heart without some stitching is hard to find.”

And I’ll keep trudging after the life I really, really want, despite feeling lost sometimes, and hopeless sometimes, and terrified much of the time.

I’m just going to keep feeling that damn fear and doing it anyway.