a four year lesson

as soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. ~Goethe

You know when life gets really big and you don’t know what to do with yourself? Your mind has assumed the life of a tornado, slinging thoughts around like broken tree limbs and you wonder how long before the funnel that is your brain slows and the words settle. You know that they won’t land where they should, but it doesn’t matter because, at least for a brief moment, there is relief until you have to create order, again, out of the madness. That’s where I am right now. It happens to all of us, at some point – usually over and over – and whether the trigger big or small, it’s almost always harder than you think you can handle. That is, until you remember that it’s not. You think back to all the times before, and realize “Hey, I got through that thing and that thing and that thing, and I was fine. Stronger, even.” You remembered that your body, your mind, your whatever, is handling it just as it is supposed to because it knows what it’s doing, even if you don’t. Just trust it.

That was the theme of my classes this morning, and it was inspired by the life around me. I know more people than I should who are going through a lot of shit right now, and have witnessed each one deal with life in his or her own way. I’m seeing each one pull through to the other side, many of them with a little more grace as they trust their bodies and the universe to guide them. I watch these people, and I wonder why in the hell anytime life gets too big, I can’t muster up that same trust. Why I have to fight it. Why I have to power through in such a graceless manner.

These thoughts were weighing on my mind this morning, as I was getting dressed to head to the studio, and it clicked… not in my head, where I so obnoxiously, and often erroneously, rely on logic, but in my gut. In my heart. In my everything that really matters. I thought about the first time I was trying to balance on my arms, and my teacher said to me, “Adi, you’re crazy strong, and you can do this. You just need to relax, look forward, and trust yourself.” This is one of those metaphorical mat-to-life moments that took me four years to get. Yes, four years…. sigh. It seems so simple, right? When shit gets hard, relax, look forward, and trust yourself. As students started piling in and asking what tools we needed, I was never so happy to say “Just yourselves. Today is all about trust.”