Triumph: Handstand - Adho Mukha Vrksasana

It has been nearly three and a half years since my last handstand. Oh handstand, how you eluded me. Well no more! Victory is, at long last, mine.

Saturday we finished the inversions section of our training with this pose. We spent hours and krama after krama prepping and jumping and let me tell you, I felt like gravity itself. I did not feel like I was accomplishing anything from jumping. I felt small and stuck in the mud when I should have felt like a super strong yogi. Handstand is about gearing up, strength… it should feel empowering.

But here’s the thing. I was afraid of handstand – thought that someone with my body would just not be able to get there. After a car accident left me with a few degenerative discs in my thoracic spine at the happy age of thirteen, I had to come to terms with the fact that my body just didn’t move the same way. By the time 2007 rolled around I was pretty comfortable in my twenty three year old body (this was of course a long time coming - another story altogether) so when someone offered me the opportunity to try handstand, I tried, but did not expect to succeed. This became a class I visited often and eventually I did find the pose – lots of practice melting my heart forward to find more backbend, lots of core work to find the strength, etc.

Of course, as soon as I became confident that I was getting handstand down, I got a nice humbling kick in the face. No really. We were paired and assisting each other up slowly, into handstand – not kicking at all. Except that my partner was brand new to yoga, in the wrong class and had a mean kick in the wrong direction. Her heel cracked me in the nose. Hard. I righted myself, left the class, and held ice there for a moment thinking ‘okay, I’m okay’. But when I touched my face my nose just was not where it should have been. I went in and finished the class. (Pitta – headstrong – can’t help it.) Turned out that my nose was broken in two places and my septum was deviated.

Spent Christmas and New Years looking like this…

My nose was back to normal fairly quickly. Handstand however, was totally lost to me. I know I did not fall on my face – which is what many people are afraid of – and I know that no one kicked me while I was in this pose. But for some reason the mental block was a strong one. I had just started to believe I could do it and then got broken down by it. So I went back to where I was before. Anytime handstand came up in class I just avoided it or would attempt to do some practice kicks, get panicky and give up. Plus now I knew exactly what a broken nose felt like and did not want to go there again. Oh, hello, new fear of falling on face - welcome to the party.  

Teacher Training turned out to be the perfect place to overcome my fear. Where else, right? This experience has helped me discover so many new things about myself and see things that I had long lost touch with. Of course my handstand phobia would arise. And after the hours of practice mentioned above, I had a moment of self love – ‘just try one more time and then let it go.’ I told myself. ‘Handstand does not need to be a thing anymore. You tried. Try once more and then let it go.’

So though exhausted, I oomphed up, felt my toe touch the wall behind me, and with a surge of strength I felt my hands ground; power spread up my arms and shoulders and realized I had done it. This was the pose! I held it for a few breaths and when I started to laugh, came down. I kept laughing and then the tears erupted from me. Molly rushed over and put her arms around me. I managed to mutter “I did it!” To which she smiled and simply replied, “What were you waiting for?”