Yoga and Trust

Yoga is about trust. Trusting your teacher, feeling supported in your practice space, trusting the practice…but mostly it’s about trusting yourself. Doing so requires showing up in a sustained way over time, you have to be able to hang in there with yourself for the long haul as stuff comes up on your yoga mat. Your practice becomes a vehicle for deepening your relationship with yourself. And just as with any relationship, trust deepens with experience and repeated engagement.

You might be wondering why it is that yoga requires trust, isn’t it just a physical practice you do with your body and it’s not like you worry about trusting yourself when you go for a run or play tennis. Well yes and no. It’s probably safe to say that most people who begin practicing yoga are not gymnasts or elite athletes. They’re folks like you and I who found their way to a gym or a yoga studio and took a few classes, liked what happened and kept coming back. So far so good. And one day the teacher says ‘okay, now we’re going to do bakasana.’ For the uninitiated bakasana is an arm balance that requires you to put your shins on your upper arms and lift your feet off the floor while balancing on your hands.

In my experience as both teacher and student bakasana is the blueprint arm balance and the most accessible for newbies. And it’s hard! There’s nothing particularly easy about balancing on your hands with your thighs hugging your ribs and your feet in the air. Even after seventeen years my doing it still requires effort and focus.

Getting into the pose requires placing your hands a little wider than shoulder width distance, crouching on the balls of your feet and leaning forward to place your thighs on your upper arms. Then comes the moment of truth. To get airborne you need to lean a little further forward, raise your seat while engaging your abdominals and contracting your thighs, and then lift your feet off the floor (it’s okay to start by lifting one foot at a time). This is the breakthrough moment, the movement into the unknown, you have to radically trust that you can actually hold yourself. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying.

The first time you get both feet off the floor is a triumph and an affirmation of self but getting there requires courage and confidence, even if you have to fake it till you make it. Using a folded blanket at the top of your yoga mat as a psychological crash pad helps the mind relax and softens the landing if you do fall. The trust that’s required to lift your feet and believe that you can hold yourself is crucial and it’s something that grows with time. Every time you do the pose you build and strengthen that psychic muscle and confidence grows. Confidence to try other arm balances and inversions but more importantly confidence in your capacities beyond the yoga mat.

A good teacher can facilitate the process and help you develop your trust muscle but even the best teacher in the world can’t do the pose for you. Yes, it’s important to be in a supportive environment with a teacher who is effectively holding space having explained how to do the pose but after that it’s up to you. No one else can do it for you. This is both the stumbling block and the reward. But the rewards are gargantuan.

I had a profound experience of this myself when I was a Ph.D candidate in analytic philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. At the time I was taking a seminar in the conceptual implications of quantum mechanics and I found it extremely difficult. The course was mostly mathematics since all quantum conceptual theory derives from the underlying mathematics. Have I mentioned that mathematics is not my forte?

I was maximally challenged in the seminar but very invested in doing well and very interested in the theoretical components. I was concurrently taking some very challenging yoga classes which was great as the physical challenge provided a good counterpoint to the mental challenge of graduate school. One day I went from the quantum mechanics seminar to a yoga class and for the first time managed to get both my feet off the floor in bakasana and hold the pose for five solid breaths. Yessssss!!! I was elated.

I felt so good about myself that I walked out of that studio feeling a foot taller and feeling that I could do well in the seminar. I thought: I got bakasana, now I can get this quantum mechanics class. My renewed sense of purpose and confidence served me and I did indeed do well in the seminar, finishing with an A. It took a lot of effort, focus and determination but I knew I could do it because my bakasana lift off empowered me and helped me believe that I could rise to the challenge.

I got there because I went outside my comfort zone and kept trying to balance with my feet off the floor. It took showing up repeatedly and building my strength with other yoga poses. It took self-effort. But this is the reward and this is the thing that money can’t buy. When you expand your self-conception and gain confidence in what you can do in your yoga practice, you are mining your practice for jewels that affect your whole life. Trusting yourself is an essential component of resilience and thriving. When your yoga practice is a means for building that trust, you are on the advanced track.