Given my size and weight, many people find it surprising that I do yoga. Up until now I’ve been doing Bikram style, which has been great, but there was a part of me that wanted to try some fancy poses … please don’t judge:)
So on the side I started working on the forearm stand (pictured above) and today I feel compelled to share my lessons from getting better at this pose.
It didn’t happen over night, I did about a year worth of progressions starting from wall handstands, through headstands all the way to wall forearm stands
The biggest lesson I learned along the way is how I assumed that in order to do a solid forearm stand you have to have your muscles lock in a perfectly timed sequence as a non-negotiable requirement to be able to nail this pose every time.
What I actually found to be most helpful is quite the opposite. I found that the most important thing is to just get your feet up in the air as often as possible so that your body can do it’s job: balance itself.
This reminded me of the following bible verse rom Matthew 6:34: “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”
See, I was worrying about having a perfect form and because it didn’t seem to be coming along, many times I borderline quit … I was too worried about tomorrow.
Once I focused on just getting my feet up in the air on a daily basis, the self judgement diminished. My mindset switched from why am I not seeing any progress after all these months of practice to …. falling is kind of fun … it makes me feel like a kid again 🙂
In other words, once I focused on what I have, I realized it was plenty.
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