Working together, working alone

This latest piece for Conscious is about partner work and finding your own muscles—on and off the mat. You can read it here and below.

How do you feel about partner work in a yoga class? Maybe you love it and find it a fun way to get to know other students in your class. Maybe you find it really awkward—the business of introducing yourself, worrying if you’re getting the pose right, feeling like you’ve been jolted out of your “zone”. Maybe it’s a combo of both.

The first few times partner work came up for me years ago, I did find it awkward, but I’ve grown to really welcome it—and I had a bit of an epiphany in class today concerning working together. We were practicing going up into a handstand in the middle of the room from a wide-legged straddle. This is definitely something I cannot do unassisted yet! And the same applied to most of the people in the class; we gazed in admiration as a sweet classmate called Trevor demonstrated this maneuver on his own with grace and seeming ease.

As I say, I’m not ready (at all!) to do this myself without support, but with the right assistance from a classmate, it felt simple. In this case, it was a tweak at the hips and then support at my ankles, taken away briefly for one delicious moment where I found my balancing point. This experience of getting the right kind of support is something I’ve had a few times in the past years: Ooh! Your feet magically float up! There it is!

In this way, your body recognises and understands what it is you’re working towards doing on your own. So, you practice and you work and you get stronger and more in tune with your body. And then one day—Ooh! There you go! All by yourself!

The thought I had today in relation to all this was that this is how life is, off the mat. I’ve needed a lot of support over the past few months following some difficult personal events, and I’ve been fortunate enough to get it from loving friends, family and teachers.  What I’ve noticed, as I move through it, is that I’ve started to understand that while the support is great—invaluable, actually—I also need to do it for myself. I need to find my own muscles, and crucially, apply that balance of effort and ease in my life, on my own. When I was a little girl, I would sometimes object to other people intervening in whatever I was up to, saying, “I want to do it my own self!” Thus, “Her own self” became a family nickname, and one that I am seeing the positives to as an adult!

You can adjust someone in a yoga pose in nine zillion ways to get them aligned and in the pose—kind of. But if the moment you pull the support and props away, they lose the posture, it’s only helping them so much. We have to participate to fully be in the pose, and to fully live our own lives.

Other people’s thoughts and takes on one’s situation can be incredibly helpful; it can feel like, “Ah! So that’s a potential way of viewing this. That’s an option. Good to know.” Just like in our yoga class, other people being there can provide crucial support, right when we need it; it makes us feel like, yes, we can do it, after all! Which is wonderful.

Ultimately though, I would really like to be able to get into that handstand in the middle of the room myself, just as I want to find my own balance in life. So I’m flexing my muscles and doing my practice and taking my time. Hopefully one of these days I’ll be able to get back to you and report that yes—Ooh! My feet went up, like magic. Or that I learned something really precious along the way, which turned out to be the real gold.