In several yoga classes of throughout the years, I have developed a pattern that I have become aware of this month. It goes like this: I watch the yoga instructor show us a pose, and then show us the advanced variation of the pose. They say something like: "You can balance on one foot and hold your body parallel over the floor or...you can do that AND grab your other foot, pull it over your head and tickle your ear with your toes while wrapping your other arm behind you in a prayer position." At some point, my mind would disengage from what the instructor was saying. I was still watching, but was distanced a little, amazed at what shape was possible with a human body and then I would say something like "Maybe next year" or "Yeah, right!" making light of my belief that there was no way in hell that my body would do that. Ever.
Something like this?
Now I have written before about how careful I am to know my body's limits and not push them to go somewhere that might cause injury. I am speaking about something else entirely when I say that I have limited myself by not even trying new poses (or new things in life) by just declaring that it was impossible.
Impossible. An interesting word. If you give it some belief and a little space, the word can be made into "I'm possible." When we see something as a possibility, we create space to have it happen. And rather you have viewed it as such before or not, space is growth.
I recently fell in love with a very challenging (for me) form of yoga called Vinyasa. It is a fast paced class, with several balance and strength building poses. Basically, you sweat a lot. Or I do. My first Vinyasa class was with a treasured teacher of mine, Dolly Stavros. She was showing us how we could move faster through a sun salutation flow by jumping from a forward bend into a push up and vice versa. And immediately, I zoned out a little saying, "Sure. Maybe next year."
"Why not now?" she asked me.
I had to pause. Gulp. "I don't know, I just have never tried and I don't think I have the strength." A mat length is a long way to lift the rest of your body while balanced on your hands.
"Sure you do!" she coaxed.
Dolly walked me through step by step what to do with my feet to get them from between my hands to extended out in a push up. And yes, it did occur to me a couple of times that I might fall on my stomach.
"Okay now you try it." She said.
I was willing to try.
"Wait," Dolly said, "Before you try, close your eyes and visualize yourself doing it. If you can see it, you can do it."
That's some huge life advice right there. I closed out my doubt by closing my eyes and saw myself leaping backwards, pressing my legs back into space and catching myself on my toes. The first time you attempt something new like that, there is a lot of unknown. And you have got to be comfortable enough with the unknown to try. I could see it, so I mustered up all of my strength and pushed into my hands and it happened! I didn't land on my stomach, I caught myself on my toes in a plank (push up) position and wooped and giggled.
The rest of that class, through many leaps back and forth on my mat, I began to be aware of how many times I had just passed opportunities by writing them off as impossible. If I did it this often in yoga class, how often did it happen in the rest of my life? My practice on the mat was just a tiny refection of the rest of my world. The tiny shift in my perception to consider something as an option for me was actually huge. It was a beautiful reminder of how we limit ourselves by our own thinking. Because I wasn't even willing to go there in my mind at first, there was no way my body could do the pose. It wasn't my body that was limiting me, it was my mind. This relates off the mat as well: it is not the world keeping you from doing something, it is yourself. For whatever reason, we hold ourselves back, we draw the box of how big we can live, how much we can have, how far we can go, how much we can earn, even how much love we can accept. Self imposed limits, all of them. The wonderful thing about self imposed limits is that they can change. With internal work, we can re-set our patterns and our beliefs. Each of us is creating our own reality. And when we accept and embrace this, absolutely anything is possible. We can redirect our thinking, change our conditioning, and turn impossible into I'm possible.
My invitation to you is to examine your self-imposed limits. What is something you want but distance yourself from with the word impossible? If you haven't allowed yourself to visualize it, create space for that. Take time to see what you want happening and imaginaing what that would feel like. At some point when visualizing living bigger, we run up against ourselves putting up obstacles in one form or another. And that's where the work begins. When we find that we aren't comfortable with having our dreams as a reality for some reason and identify that reason. It is our own glass-ceiling. Rather we feel we are not worthy, or someone had told us something about ourselves that we believed that contradicts having what we want now, or perhaps we are not open to change, or we run up against fear, whatever it is - its an opportunity to grow. Be gentle with yourself when you find that thing that holds you back, it's not wrong, it is just one way of thinking that has served you up until now. Self awareness allows us to create another reality by changing our thinking.
"Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning." - Ghandi
This month, my boyfriend and I are beginning the downsizing of our entire home and moving it over 2,000 miles away. Several life lessons have been brought up for me recently about letting go, about the things we collect vs. the things we really need and of course about how home is more inside me than in any house or furnishings that decorate a house. This week, there are so many details to consider, and so many unknowns. I would like to take just one of those life lessons to extrapolate upon and share: Letting go.
One of my favorite stories of the Olympics comes from sportscaster Charlie Jones who interviewed the athletes of professional rowing teams before and after the competition. The questions he asked them ranged from: what do you do when the other team is pulling ahead of you, what do you do when you break an oar, or when the winds are howling gale force against you? To Charlie’s surprise, several of the athletes had the same response to different questions. They told him simply, “That’s outside of my boat.”
After receiving identical answers, Charlie asked a rower to explain what they meant by “that‘s outside of my boat.” The rowing team had been trained to diligently stay focused on the task at hand, to their immediate surroundings and to put their energy only on the things they could control - within their boats. They had realized that thinking about what was outside of their boat only distracted them from their goal, and “that which is beyond our control is not worth our time or energy.”
The professional rowers of the Olympics are not in the competition thinking about the choppiness of the water, or rather the crowd is watching or how fast the other team is or the varying rates on their home loan or if the cost of gas will go up in the middle of summer. Every ounce of their energy is honed into the present moment and each row stroke they are making. And does it work for them? As successful athletes, they won enough races and became fast enough to compete in the Olympics. You tell me.
This story made me think about my own life and how much I often worry about things that are outside of my boat. And I understand more and more that in order to feel effective in my life, I have to choose to spend my energy on things that I can control. Because I want things to go well for others, I often am giving advice or wondering the best way they should approach a problem. And yet, no matter how caring I am, I simply cannot row their boat when I am sitting in mine. I have no affect whatsoever on which direction their boat goes.
To me, following news stories is very much the same concept. If I get caught up in a horrible violent event that happened, and spend most of my spare time dwelling on how awful it was for the individuals and families involved, I am not watching where my own boat is headed, and the energy I may have had to plan where my journey might go next has already been spent. If we spend our lives in other’s stories, we end up half living their lives while not truly living our own. Worrying, dwelling and staying in the stories of others doesn’t really help them, and doesn’t solve anything for them. That’s an area where I am always going to feel helpless. So why go there?
I don’t watch the news because I choose to stay out of the drama of strangers, and because I don’t want that helpless feeling. (I also find it overwhelmingly negative and disturbing.) Instead, I save my time for my friends and family and the people in my community - the people I can really know, work well with and make a difference for. I can’t help captives, I can’t find missing people, but I can take the grocery cart back for the little old lady next to me in the parking lot. I can slow down on the road to let the person who has been waiting to turn have space in front of me. I can make the baby in the grocery line laugh, I can treat my friend to lunch and I can hug the regular customer in the café whose loneliness might border bitterness without touch. I can volunteer to help a friend move, or share my lunch with a hungry co-worker. There are so many ways for me to interact with my fellow rowers - the people in my little circle where I have the power to make a difference.
This story also made me reflect on how I am getting better at letting past events stay in the past where they belong. When I have a hard week at work, or when I have had a disagreement with others, my mind tends to return to that and go over the situation several times. Even when I have closure over it. When really, that uncomfortable situation is in the past, so why would I choose to make the present uncomfortable by rehashing it? And I am not aware of any kayaker, sailor or Olympic rowing team that could paddle forward while looking behind them. As a white water paddler, out on the river, the minute I look behind me in a rapid, its over. I stop going where I want to, stop moving forward altogether and usually loose control of my boat and end up wet. Using this analogy helps me see that thinking about the past really doesn’t help me move forward and that by doing so, I loose my control over the present moment.
I invite you to reflect on the “Its outside of my boat” concept as well. Are there areas in your life that you spend your time an energy outside of your boat - focusing on things that you cannot control? Are you familiar with the limits of your own boat, and how could you get more involved with the others in your community?
Charlie’s story of the Olympic Rowing Team is an inspiration to me to let go of trying to control things outside of my boat, to stay present, keep calm, keep moving forward and enjoy the experience.
