Fearlessness

 

I’ve been spending some time at my grandmother’s house, along with my four-year-old and my uncle, who also lives there on the farm. During our stay, my son turned four, which is a really fun age for all the family. He’s playing superheroes all the time, especially Spiderman, and he and his great-uncle put up shields to protect themselves when they are fighting off bad guys. He's learning about being strong, about being brave, and even about being feared.  My son asks about these things, and I think about how to answer him in a way that he can understand and still carries the weight of what more there is to know about fear and courage.

While in Western Kentucky, I was excited and honored to teach a workshop in my home county at the yoga studio on the town square.  It's owned and run by a mother and daughter team, and it has been super-fun to get to go to classes there with some of my high school friends, their sisters and mothers.  The ladies at the yoga studio were interested in learning more about inversions and arm balances, so I decided to teach alignment and strength in the upper body and pair the actions with the theme of courage.   

Now, let me paint you a little picture.  The son of the family runs a pawn shop next door. This seeming juxtaposition of the yoga studio next to the place with displays full of guns had not gone unnoticed in the preceding weeks of my visit.  I kept thinking, ‘Only in Todd County.’  (Let's just say I'm a little more accustomed to coffee shops and juice bars next to my yoga studios.)  As we ladies were sitting in the front receiving area, allowing the room to cool off from the heated class before, we were greeted by a burly gentlemen in overalls toting some sort of rifle. Of course, he was headed to the pawn shop, but that didn’t keep him from letting out a friendly,“I’m not headed for you!” to relieve a little of the tension that was naturally there.  Everyone made light of the event, and we moved on with our morning. 

In India, the gesture of fearlessness is the right hand held at chest height with the palm open and facing outward. (See the photo above.)  It has a sort of softness and roundness to it, unlike our hardened palm-face-out ‘talk to the hand’ gesture that means the conversation is over. It’s a showing that there’s nothing being held that could hurt you, and so you are beckoned closer, to the possibly even more frightening process of intimacy. Yoga is not just that which is peaceable, calming, or harmless. It invites us to raise the stakes as much as lower them.It brings us into the churning and heat of facing our interior selves and our exterior lives.

What I taught on Saturday to the ladies who were relatively new to bearing their bodies’ weight on their hands was that fearlessness is not about hot having any fear, but rather being afraid enough of the right things. Something gives us a moment of pause, and we take the time to give the right amount of respect to something that could hurt us. When we do that, we get to keep going, trying, and living. What would otherwise stop us completely becomes the invitation to more. 

The value-added project, a phrase my teacher loves to use, becomes not just staying in your own conversation, not just keeping your same point of view, but rather really bringing your hard-won experiences and opinions to bear in moments when there could really be some growth and learning.

Bravery is not the opposite of staying safe, nor is it willfully putting yourself in harm’s way. It is being willing to take the kinds of risks that you can take, of stepping up to your capacity and capabilities.  I hope that I can give these teachings to my son, over time and through example.  I hope that he will be able to listen, learn, and act in ways that are truly heroic.