Winter: States of Trust and Fear

Trust is the word this week and it is the work of this juncture.  I have been working on establishing trust in my yoga practice and must now turn the trust lens toward my work with Ayurveda.  Trust is not an easy thing to establish—even within oneself (or maybe especially within oneself).

When I looked up the work trust, descriptors such as reliance, truth, confidence, and faith emerged in a variety of ways.   Confidence in something or someone.  Faith in oneself or another.  To be able to rely on something or someone—or oneself.  

And right now I’m searching for trust in the work I have done over the past several years. Trust that the work I have done can help me stay the course as I move into places that do not look familiar.  Yet in many ways things do look familiar.  The way we move through the world. Pressing up against the seasons. Each year winter has a similar smell, taste, and texture.  But the air is different.  The crisp cold sun that shines down is not the sun from last year.  It is new, yet the same. Winter brings with it different challenges each time it cycles into my life. New challenges.  Deeper challenges.  I want to feel like I’ve mastered the art of winter.  So I try to engage the same strategies and routines I established last year.   I seek out familiar feelings even as my body reminds me over and over that those are not what I need. I want to default to what came before because I struggle to trust what is next. I do not feel confident in myself to handle what is to come, so I look back and try to hold tight to the familiar.  I realize how much I lose myself in that process. I lose out on possibilities. I lose out when I forget that there is an art to winter.  There is an art to establishing trust and finding joy in those new winter spaces. And when I forget that, I sit frozen in fear because I am scared of what comes next. 

The opposite of trust could be fear. 

Fear has words such as dread, apprehension, distress, and danger to define it.  Impending doom, whether real or imagined, is a great definition for fear.  When one cannot trust the unknown, fear settles in. When I cannot trust myself to handle the unknown, fear settles in.  It seems that the fear of the unknown has been growing for me in this juncture.  

My routines have been shifting and I am still searching for new routines, but I’m struggling to hear what I need. I’m struggling to figure out what is going within me. 

So I go back to a photograph, capturing a place where fear and trust coexist.  Trust takes a great deal of courage and I think about my hike up the Cog Rail at Manitou Springs, Colorado this past summer.  A straight hike up. I was excited for the adventure. I didn’t know what was ahead and there was no dread.  I trusted myself to make it. At every level in which the trail grew steeper, I trusted myself to make it.  I was scared at times.  Tired.  I had moments in which regretted my decision to hike.  But I never doubted that I would make it.  And I did. In the golden warmth of that mountain, I trusted myself to face the unknown.  In the steely cold of these plains, I am riddled with fear.  It’s silly, I know.  I can trust myself to make it up a steep hill, but I am terrified of presenting my research to the community.  If only I could channel the feeling on that mountain and bring it here. Bring it here to calmly and slowly make my way through challenges.  To feel my body with each word, each step. Taking my time.  Enjoying the view. I need to figure out a way to cultivate trust in this time of year.  

The opposite of fear could be trust. 

Resistance and Malasana

Resistance.

That is probably the best way to describe what I have been experiencing these past few weeks since my last entry. As per my usual process, I will try to delve into the word to better understand what it is I'm experiencing.

Resistance, according to Merriam-Webster: the refusal to accept something new or different; effort made to stop or fight against something; the ability to prevent something from having an effect.

I seem to be in resistance mode.  My sense is that I'm trying to fight against the shifts naturally taking place this time of year.  If I think about it, it's a big shift.  We are moving from a time in which we are in full bloom throughout summer and into a time of shedding those dying blooms and retreating inward to strengthen our resources, our fire. But it doesn't feel that way.  It just feels like everything is drying up and blowing away from me. I feel like I have to work harder to see and feel the beauty of the world.

At the same time, the sun is present less and less.  She is fading through the changing angles and motions of the earth and I just don't like it.  I realize that it has to happen. I'm trying hard to embrace that transition, but it is not easy. I'm trying to be kind to myself as I experience resistance, but I can feel by body stiffen, brace itself, worry, fortify, and do everything I can to resist things I can't control.  Futile, perhaps.

Iyengar's Beautiful Malasana

Symbolic of this struggle is my relationship to the yoga pose, malasana.  Garland pose. Iyengar does this pose so beautifully.  But me?  I am the purple bear below trying to access the pose.  Except I'm not smiling. I get angrier and angrier with my body when it won't do what I want it to do.  I stiffen, brace myself, worry, fortify, curse, and stop listening to what my body wants me to hear.  What I know, though, is that the angrier I get, the more impossible it is to do this pose in an effective way.

I will say, though, that I had a moment of serendipity as I started this blog post, because I was looking for descriptions and images of malasana online.  I found a random blog called "five-minute yoga" (http://myfiveminuteyoga.com/411/take-the-five-minute-malasana-challenge/).  The post asks its readers to take the five minute malasana challenge for seven days.  I have been sort of doing this each morning--taking several minutes to practice malasana and get angrier and more upset with my limitations.  But it redirected and reminded me that the point is not to look like Iyengar, but to embrace my heavy-bear moments. It became clear to me this morning in my yoga practice that when I come to this pose, I stop feeling. It becomes more a matter of conquering, accomplishing, this pose.  Why, though? To feel good about myself?  What happens if I stop and just feel the pose?

What happens is that I truly experience the discomfort of my tight hips. I fully experience the fear my body holds with the idea of letting go.  Total resistance.  I realize I need to send my hips love and compassion so they know it is okay to relax and let go.  They do not feel safe in my brutal attempts at fighting my way into the pose and it makes the pose miserable. I can't feel where the tightness centers itself. I can't feel my body at all. I'm on the surface of my skin, bossing my muscles around and as a result, they resist.  They do not want forceable change.

Not unlike in malasana, my body fights against the changes that start moving me into winter. It's like I try to strong-arm myself into accepting the transition from summer through fall and into winter.  I sit at the surface and try to boss myself around and tell myself I need to just be okay and pretend that the world around me isn't changing.  So then my body resists enjoying fall and the release of the beautiful blooms. I try to hold on so tightly to some sort of forever summer and I know it is not sustainable. Yet, I often don't even realize that is what I'm doing.  I lose intention and no longer really know why I'm doing anything that I'm doing.  I'm doing things totally out of habit (even if it is a good habit). Or I do the same practices expecting the same results all the time. That is when I know I'm not doing any of those activities with intention and I can't reap all the benefits that I could.  Fall is the time of harvest. It is the time to reap benefits, but instead of reaping those benefits I find myself worrying and waiting and bracing for some storm to arrive.

Impending doom, as Brene Brown calls it.  I can't enjoy the moment, because I'm so afraid of some other shoe dropping or some bad thing happening to somehow reinforce all my negative talk. You know that talk when you convince yourself that you do not deserve to experience pure joy.  It is such a tender area for me. And this is such a tender season for me.  I need to remember that and be kind.  Therefore, I will take the seven day malasana challenge and practice it with kindness.  I will practice it with intention, reminding myself that it is time to shed the impending doom voice.  Or, at the very least, not let it be the dominant voice in my busy mind.

I hereby promise to report back next week on the outcome of this practice. I will spend this last week of fall holding myself accountable to the season and to malasana.