When I was a teenager, one of the things I worked tirelessly at was how to do a handstand correctly, without falling backward or worse hurting myself. For a few minutes every day, I placed my hands near an unobstructed wall, tightened my core area, and swung my legs up. My parents groaned when I hit the wall with a big bang.
“Sharon, stop it! You’re going to break the picture glass in the living room,” my mother would exclaim.
It took a long time before I was able to balance away from the support of the wall and even then, I could only hold the pose for a few seconds. I kept trying. Up and down. Up and down. When I finally did a free-standing handstand, in just about perfect form, it left me feeling euphoric. The joy of evenly distributing my weight enabled me to be calm and unwavering.
As I’ve written in earlier blog posts, yoga is part of my daily routine, and for the past several decades I continued to practice the handstand, the elbow balance, and the king of all poses –the headstand, not only for my health but for the discipline of how to balance; how to live with equilibrium, poise, stability, and a sense of steadiness with myself and the world around me.
I don’t have answers to the most troubling issues of the world and even my day-to-day life often has glitches: learning a new software program, navigating the latest rules of book marketing, and keeping up to date with social media and innovative technologies. How do I do that? What does that mean?
This art of balancing my body upside down every day, this habit of calm behavior, has taught me how to maintain a certain sense of mental and emotional stability, and how to focus my attention on one thing at a time. Because if I don’t, I usually fall.
“I’ve learned that you can’t have everything and do everything at the same time.” Oprah Winfrey
How did you find solace this week?
Sharon
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