“Embrace the Wobble”
How a Yoga Pose Taught Me Life Lessons
In a recent yoga class our teacher instructed us to do the tree pose, which involves balancing on one leg and placing your other foot against the inner thigh. This can be a challenge and usually involves a bit of unsteadiness. She used the words “embrace the wobble.” For me, this was a wonderful cue to breathe through the unsteadiness, to accept the quivering as part of the pose, and to recognize that I didn’t have to do the pose perfectly. I refocused my breath, let it join my shaky leg in that focus, and felt steadier and more supported with that concentration.
But her words stayed with me well after the class. I realized that “embrace the wobble” applied to many other elements of life. In fact, life itself has a rhythm of steadiness and unsteadiness. You can think of this rhythm as having good days and bad days or good moods and bad moods. This rhythm can result in different experiences and perceptions. I realized that I need to be able to accept all of these experiences and perceptions, good and bad, not just focus on the pleasant ones and ignore the unpleasant ones. Embracing the wobble of a bad mood, for instance, by not judging it or running away from it and by staying with it to see where it leads, usually results in understanding it better and helping me see how it came about. What led to this bad mood? What do I need to do to shake it off? This “embrace the wobble” realization is part of my inner process of self-realization that I have written about.
Steadiness and Stability
Modern life, or more accurately modern media life, tells us that everything ought to be pleasant and comfortable. I beg to differ. Life is not like that, not by a long shot. In reality, life comprises both suffering and happiness, effort and rest, comfort and discomfort—all to a greater or lesser degree. In my case, allowing myself to experience the suffering, effort, or discomfort always leads to more understanding, with more “aha” moments where I have an insight. My inner voice says, “So, that’s what was happening!” The negative aspects of life’s rhythm are part of the cycle of healing, processing, and getting through difficult experiences. In fact, the positive and negative aspects are intricately linked like the great yin and yang sign of Taoist philosophy.
After thinking about “embrace the wobble,” I realized the unsteadiness of that tree pose was the path to finding greater stability. Steadiness and unsteadiness inextricably linked. Much like darkness and light, failure and success, sickness and health, and so many other “binary” qualities in life, we need to embrace one to find the other.
The same goes for worry, fear and anxiety. In his great book, The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck notes that when we are anxious or fearful about something, it is a sign that something is going on in our subconscious that needs attention. By paying attention to that feeling, for example, by embracing it as a path to healing and not as something to be avoided, we put ourselves in a position to move through a challenging situation and arrive at a better understanding and resolution.
Effort and Recovery
Virtually every week, I put quite a bit of effort into my health practice with an exercise regimen that includes Zone 2 training and High Intensity Interval Training. Yet, as I get older, I’m finding that I need to build more recovery time into my life. My body needs more time to heal and get stronger (or stay strong) from the exercise and other practices I do. It also takes me longer to digest food. I recognize that this is part of my life now, the result of things slowing down within me. The healing forces are just not as robust as they used to be. It is a rhythm that frustrates me but is probably unavoidable. As the 15th-century Venetian nobleman, Luigi Cornaro, wrote the “digestive fire” is less robust than it used to be. Cornaro lived to be over 100 years old and discovered that he could accommodate this reduced “digestive fire” by eating less food.
But effort and recovery are both essential to health. The effort stimulates the recovery. These two aspects of life’s rhythm are also inextricably linked. Embracing the recovery, which is hard for me because I am used to being so active, is something I am getting better at. On days that I know and feel that recovery needs its time, I still move around, for example, while doing household chores, but at a slower pace. Or I meditate or take a nap. What I don’t do anymore is deny the fact that my body is recovering from some type of exertion. I used to minimize my recovery time for fear of being perceived (by myself or by others) as having low energy, being tired, or not being active all the time. I’ve now gotten better at embracing the rest, recovery, and tiredness that are the sources of bringing about the healing within.
The Inner World and Outer World
Meditation and conscious breathing have become a much bigger part of my life over the past year. I have always had difficulty simply sitting still and trying to be peaceful inside. I’m getting better at it and starting to realize why this has always been so challenging. I have always wanted my life to be full of things to do, places to go, people to meet. This is not only how I got things done, it is how I wanted to be perceived in my working years. Rest, recovery, and health were things I blindly relied on my body to provide me, and I was blessed that it was able to do so during those hectic and demanding decades.
Now, though, since pursuing my journey into later-life health over the past 20 years, all that has changed. The experience of just being alive and healthy—a conscious focus on my inner world—has become as important to me as the things I do in the outer world, perhaps even more important. If you have ever meditated, you know that “emptiness” is part of the meditation as you seek to empty your mind of all the stuff that gets crammed into it every day.
But that emptiness is far from “empty.” It is full of freedom, of releasing past patterns and habits, and of the simple yet immense wonder of existence and being alive. That inner freedom, compared to the rigid and conforming patterns by which many of us live our lives, can be scary, as it still is for me.Yet the more I learn to embrace that emptiness, the “wobble” of existing and being alive, the deeper and more meaningful my experience of life becomes.
