Feel the joy!

I remember a picture I loved, that really inspired me. I told my teacher about it when I was studying backbends with him. It was a beautiful image of a girl doing urdhva hastasana. An outdoor setting, she had loose hair pulling free in the breeze, there was glowing sunshine and her posture was one of stability, security, serenity, natural joy, openness and so on…. I could see so many positives. It made me smile to look at her (and still does as I see her in my memory). She looked the embodiment of the feeling I wanted to experience in my yoga, and in my backbends.

But it also made me sad as I didn’t actually feel any of those things when I did this pose. Not even if I had her cute outfit, not if my hair was just enough wild to be caught in the wind, and I had that sun on my face… I wanted to feel all those things on the inside, that freedom and joy and contentment in my skin… But I didn’t know how. Instead I felt trapped in a body that I was scared of, I felt impoverished in my limited degree of spinal flexibility, and I was pretty sure that I had a closed heart and a inherent lack of worth or lovability or some quality that prevented me from truly embodying urdhva hastasana.

Another memory: my teacher shouting at me as I glitched my way through some sequence of poses while he watched. I was nervous and I’m sure it showed; tight movements, shallow breath, more analysis than embodiment. Me acting small, illogically hoping to get through without being spotted — even though I was the only person in the room! I’m sure he could see all this and his shout was one of well-intentioned encouragement: “feel the joy!”

But it’s not so easy. Or at least, it wasn’t back then.

These days I think I’m getting better at it. I’m both better at faking it so I can appear relaxed and steady and I’m also (thankfully!) better at allowing myself to feel all the good stuff, like genuine joy in my ability to move. Overall there’s somehow a natural easing of tension, a bubbling up of good cheer and gratitude.

Since those days I deliberately practise differently and in different spaces. I’m trying to create some distance from what was before, and I am surprised to find that by walking away I have become steadier in my feet and in myself. Now I’m just back from a weekend of yoga with a group of lovely beings who are somewhat restoring my faith in… well, everything really. But mainly in the yoga industry, we’ll start with that. Then faith in the practice, in the practitioners and the teachers; faith that goodness exists, that yogis can come together truly without competitiveness or judgement. The cliché of ‘safe space’ felt such to me, perhaps for the first time ever.

And because this was a slightly glitzy yoga gathering, there was a professional photographer. She moved unobtrusively between us for a whole day, and I mostly ignored her. I’ve just seen the results of her work and of course there is a photo of me in urdhva hastasana. Superficially it’s the antithesis of the original picture of the girl outdoors in nature. By contrast I’m in a fashionable London dance studio with fancy lighting, a booming sound system, surrounded by strangers, guided by a one-time New York model, all long limbs and perfect dewy skin. And in amongst these perfect strangers and all the big sensory inputs, there’s me: lost in my personal ecstasy of the asana. There’s a smile on my face, the inner kind that’s not posed but arises deeply from within. The pose itself is nothing special, my old teacher might have criticised my alignment (the degree of pelvic tilt, hands not pressing firmly enough together overhead or so on..) But all I see is: I’m doing it, I’m feeling the joy, I’m content in myself, steady to rise up strongly and arch back in openness, and free enough to move fluidly on through the sequence. Unconstrained, happily me. Now I can see it all.