At the start of the year I set an intention for heart expansion, and yet what kept coming in as my deepest paths of learning were breath and balance. It wasn’t totally out of left field because breath and balance are foundational to my work and personal practice, but these past few months they have been front and center.
Last weekend in NYC part of the reason for this crystallized, as I had to rely on everything I had learned thus far to remain connected to my breath and a sense of balance. These are the skills this pandemic is encouraging me to deepen because they are what’s needed right now.
One of the images that came through my Akashic Records recently was of my hands on the ground, as if in an inversion. I felt a grounding connection, and the message was that I am learning new ways to find balance. “What’s up is down, and what’s down is up.” In a topsy-turvy world, I have to be equipped to find 360 degrees of perspective (and here I felt myself going into a cartwheel). There’s certainly more than enough room for joy in the tumult.
This has also clarified for me my recent obsession with crow pose. I am not an aspirational pose kind of person, and I used to be terrified of crow. I never leaned forward enough to give myself the slightest chance of learning anything because I didn’t want to fall on my face. Suddenly this year I became super curious about it, and started practicing at home.
I’d never been so intimate with a yoga pose before, and what a journey it’s been so far. Once I’d gotten over my fear of falling forward (by actually falling and experiencing no harm), synchronously my yoga studio offered a crow workshop where I spent two hours deepening my structural understanding of it. What was most helpful was adjusting my drishti, or focal point, farther out than I assumed it should be.
Just recently, however, I managed to get into crow by softening my gaze, by which I mean breathing so deeply that my sight became blurry and my gaze retreated somewhere deep inside of me that I can’t quite put to words. It wasn’t my core, but my internal point of balance, which had really been stumping my mind for months.
It was the wisdom of my body that located it for me because I had finally given myself that breath and taken my mind out of it. And it truly felt like something that had been there all that time, both the natural point of balance and my body’s awareness of it. It didn’t feel I’d “achieved” it the way I’d achieved certain strength goals, such as being able to do a push-up. Yes, the core conditioning, the mechanical understanding, and the connecting of the pieces all needed to be in place, but that point of balance has been available all this time, waiting patiently for me to become aware of it.
I am not yet able to pop into crow reliably and repeatedly with grace and ease, but I am learning so much and having fun along the way. It makes me wonder what other points of balance are waiting to be discovered. And I am also curious about YOU! What new points of balance are lying within, ready for discovery if you were to take a breath and let your Brilliant System—which includes the natural wisdom of your body and all your multidimensional awareness—activate your 360 degrees of perspective and open your inner senses to what already Is? Imagine what treasures you might unearth? Such wonder awaits!
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