Today we got to try acro yoga: a form of yoga that you do with a partner that involves acrobatics such as balancing a person on top of you. For example, take plank pose. That's your basic push up position. One person gets in plank, then the other person wraps her hands around the first person's ankles, climbs on top, and balances her ankles on the first person's shoulders and also rises into plank. I did this pose both on the top and on the bottom and it was fun and really empowering. I didn't think I'd be strong enough to hold someone on my back but if you get the alignment right, it works! It really fires up the core muscles and forces you to concentrate and to communicate with your partner.
Another fun pose we did was handstand. I didn't think I would be able to do it but thanks to the help of 2 spotters, I did! It felt great! I was so excited that I was able to do it.
Our last pose of the day was a fairly complicated "flying" pose, meaning one person is on the ground as a base and one person is in the air while another person spots. The base is on her back with her feet straight up in the air, perpendicular, while the flyer balances on her butt on the base's feet, her back arched, completely off the ground. At the end of the pose, she plants her hands behind her and flips her legs over her head in a back walkover.
Everything seemed to be going fine till it was my turn to spot. The person I was spotting was doing fine in the air, she planted her hands and I thought all was well. However, when she flipped, she somehow lost her balance and came down hard on her knee. The sound of it was awful. The feeling of guilt I felt was worse. I felt like it was all my fault that it went wrong and I wished so badly I could transfer the pain from her knee to mine. She was so gracious about the whole thing and even though I kept apologizing she said it was ok. I could apologize 100 times more and I think I would still feel awful about letting her down when she needed me.
I have tried to think of what lessons I can learn from this. I know that as a team we should have communicated better. I know that I can't break my concentration for even half a second when I'm spotting. I know that causing someone pain is as horrible as the physical pain itself. And I think this experience also speaks to the cycles of real life: sometimes we fly high, sometimes we fall. Sometimes the feeling of happiness and gratitude comes so easily that we think it will stay forever, sometimes we're just in a funk. These cycles are a normal part of the human existence and I suppose instead of resisting them we can learn to accept them.
That doesn't mean we don't appreciate the good days or strive to pull ourselves out of the doldrums, but it does mean we shouldn't beat ourselves up when life happens and when accidents happen. We observe it all, learn what we can, and move on, knowing that the cycle of life, of light and dark, sunshine and rain, sunny and freezing, will keep churning on and it takes the bad experiences to appreciate the good.
If there were never any darkness, we'd never see the fireflies, right?
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