I remember, vividly, the first time my heels reached the mat in downward facing dog. It was a Friday night yoga class.
The beauty in any yoga asana is letting go and allowing it to be what it is for your body in that moment.
I had long since given up on my heels getting to the floor and in this class, I’d forget it was ever a goal.
In this class, on Friday nights, it was easy to leave it all at the door. All the ambitions and goals, all the wants and needs, fell off me in the entryway. Once I was in the room I could just be in the room.
I didn’t so much get my heels to the floor, as I just suddenly realized they were there. I remember thinking…
“When did I learn to do that?”
The thing about this class, was that I had to drive in the opposite direction from my home to get to it at the end of a long week at a stressful job.
But as I unrolled my mat, I could unpack and put away my ego and expectations and then, just be on the mat.
And as I started to move, I could let go of my need to find the perfect position, I could just be with my body and my teacher’s voice.
I was too mentally exhausted for anything else. My only interest was in the release of the emotional and physical gunk that had built up through the week.
We are so caught up in our goals, in our ambitions, in our ego that sometimes they can trap us. We have been taught to value the end result and we often lose the perspective of the path and the process.
Yoga and pilates reward the process. They are disciplines that revel in the ability to observe and change on a minute level. But sometimes, we can even get bogged down in that well-meaning observation.
Sometimes you just have to be the movement and not stand in judgment of it. You have to give yourself absolute permission to ‘be where you are.’ Then you just work in that place without a thought for anything other than the step you’re on right that moment.
If you’re working one vertebrae at a time, you don’t even consider the next vertebra until this one has finished. And that work in the moment, be with that vertebra, without criticism or praise, without caring how much it moves.
That’s where I was when I realized my heals were on the floor, in a rare moment of absolute acceptance.
It is a paradox. The success that you seek comes when you stop searching for it. There is such beauty in letting go, if only for an hour on a Friday night, and there is a new realization.
The success wasn’t getting the heals to the floor. The success was getting to a place in the self, from which the heels could fall to the floor on their own, because they were no longer being held, they were no longer trapped.