As I was doing yoga this morning, I had a minor epiphany about balance. I was standing in Vrksasana (tree pose), my right leg up and my left leg on the floor. This posture always requires lots of focus. It requires that I stand on one leg for at least a minute. I’ve gotten to the point now where this is usually not a problem, but there are times when I don’t make it and need to come out of the posture so I can re-balance myself, which is always very frustrating. However, if my mind is sharp, like it was this morning, that minute is one of the most satisfying experiences I can imagine.
Today it was as if something clicked within my entire being. In order for me to stand still on one leg for the entire minute, that leg should not be stiff. This is always the case, but this time I could see the struggle between wanting to be stiff and the impossibility of that goal. The muscles in the grounded leg are constantly tensing on and off. If the leg starts to move one way, the muscles contract to pull it back into balance. This is happening in the foot, the toes, the ankle, shin, knee, thigh… it is a symphony of muscle twitches all designed to keep me upright. And this all happens effortlessly, as long as my mind doesn’t get in the way.
Now, most of the time, my mind engages and disengages in its own disproportionate way, with a pesky narrator who seems fixated on trying to topple the whole Jenga set of my bones at any moment. When I first started doing yoga, the voice was much louder, and so keeping myself upright was such a struggle. Through years of practice combined with meditation, the voice got a little softer. Just as there is a symphony of muscles designed to keep one leg upright, over the years I have created a symphony of connections in my brain designed to ignore that voice!
But it seems that ignoring that voice actually becomes the whole task, and it never really works perfectly. What happens is that the voice barges in at about 5 seconds into the pose with some words that sound like, “Uh oh, you’re gonna fall, this is not your day, this is going to be the day you don’t even last 10 seconds,” and on and on. So for 1 full minute, I’m just usually pretending to ignore this voice. And today was no exception. However something different happened today.
The narrator was still there in full swing, but I didn’t focus on him. I was too fascinated with the symphony of muscles firing on and off in my leg. Then I realized that the voice of the narrator was just my own voice trying to avoid the thought of these muscles, because I’m usually worried that the shakiness will make me fall. But that very shakiness is absolutely needed to keep me upright. So instead of ignoring the shakiness, I focused on it, and not only did the narrator completely disappear, but the falling seemed absolutely impossible.
I stayed in the posture for beyond a minute and when I came out of it, it was not because I was afraid of falling, but because I felt I had completed the pose. In every asana after that, the struggle fell away. I simply focused on the balance, that point in the posture where my body is stretched to its fullest possibility, where all the muscles conspire to hold as long as some predetermined amount of time, in a glorious yet ever-so-subtle symphony of twitches, glitches, shakes and wobbles, all working together to maintain a perfect, yet all-to-fleeting moment of stillness that exists not within the body, and not within the mind, but somewhere beyond the physicality of my being.