This Wild Playground

This week I found myself hanging upside-down from aerial silks in an artist’s studio in Oakland, when the blasphemous words came out of my mouth, “I can’t!” I found new levels of humility while failing to find muscles I knew I had somewhere, and trying to decipher my right from my left while twisted and hanging inverted, swinging like a spider on a thread. I hit walls of frustration, followed by spontaneous laughing. I was reminded over and over of what En Vogue sang so well, “Free your mind, and the rest will follow.”

To celebrate the culmination of the 2011 Yoga Teacher Training Program, one of the trainees invited us to her art studio in Oakland to learn some aerial performance techniques. We were ready to have fun, monkey around, and see Sarah’s amazing creative world of movement. Sarah is an artist and instructor at the Art Institute of San Francisco. She is an aerial performer, a hoop and fire dancer. And now, she’s also an official, certified yoga instructor. She is beautiful and transparent and lovely to spend time with.

Sarah began by showing us some key moves and vocabulary for staying safe, then proceeded to show us the simple routine she put together for us to learn. We were all ready to try, except for Kristen who said, “I can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s OK, I’m just going to sit and watch.” Her eyes were huge and she seemed incredibly nervous.

We all took turns fumbling about and enjoying varying levels of success at mastering Sarah’s instructions. It was both incredibly frustrating to hit limits I didn’t know I had, as well as liberating to be so far out of my daily comfort zone. I kept squealing in frustration, “I can’t!” and my friends — my students — called that bullshit right away. After all, saying “I can’t” in yoga class is sheer blasphemy. We would laugh and I would carefully rephrase, “I CAN, I just have to figure this out. . … Ahhhh!”

Pretty soon Kristen couldn’t see the point in just observing — after all, what was the harm in trying? She was pretty trepadacious and took it one step at a time. With Sarah’s help, she was soon upside down gripping the silks with her hands. “Let go!” Sarah said. Kristen’s face was terrified. “Let go.” Sarah said, again. I don’t think Kristen could let go at that point. Sarah yelled this time, giving her no choice, “LET GO KRISTEN!” Kristen let go and her world changed. I saw it in her face. Her world literally changed. She swung upside down like a bat in a tree, completely liberated. As she came out of her sequence, she was reborn. Her world flipped upside down in more than one way. She saw right through the illusion of her self-limitations, and caught a glimpse of her infinite potential – and it was a beautiful thing to witness. She shifted from saying, “I can’t” to saying, “I have a living room I don’t use with really tall ceilings…. I wonder if I could hang silks there?”

We move through life, often unaware of the mind-space we’re propelled by. We hurl through life seeing all of the things we think we can’t do and all of the things we are limited by, OR we recognize this wild playground we’re swinging on as the limitless, shape-shifting place that it is.

;

ONLY ONE RULE

The sky
Is a suspended blue ocean.
The stars are the fish that swim.

The planets are the white whales I sometimes
Hitch a ride
On,

The sun and all light
Have forever fused themselves into my heart
And upon my
Skin.

There is only one rule on this Wild Playground,

Every sign Hafiz has ever seen
Reads the same.

They all say,

“Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun,
In the Beloved’s divine
Game,

O, in the Beloved’s
Wonderful
Game.”

;

;

Do you follow Hafiz’s rule? When was the last time you had fun while doing something extremely difficult or uncomfortable?