Tuesday Truth: Falling Down

Over the weekend, I was teaching a yoga class built around the transition from crow pose to tripod headstand. My whole class was built around this “grand finale” (or peak pose, as we call it in the teaching world), and I was excited to show my students how to do it.

When we got there, I told everyone where we were going, began to talk them through it while demonstrating, and after coming into tripod headstand, I fell out of the pose. Yes, it was in front of a room full of people, and yes, I should have been super embarrassed.

But guess what? I wasn’t. You know why? Because yoga has taught me how to fall down. Once you've done something hundreds of times, it's not scary or embarrassing anymore.

When I was a child, I once asked my dad, “What does it look like when adults fall down?” He always reminds me of this question, because he thought it was such a funny one.

As a child I fell down all of the time, but I had never seen an adult fall down, and I couldn’t imagine what it would look like. My dad tried to show me—he pretended to walk and then trip and fall, but I knew it wasn’t a real fall,  so it wasn’t enough. I wanted to see what it truly looked like. Such a funny childlike question, isn’t it?

However, what I find even funnier is that now, as an adult myself, I have a job where I watch adults fall down almost every day. Not while walking down the street or while climbing the stairs, but while practicing yoga.

I saw at least 3-4 people fall down in my classes this past weekend, and it was great; I love watching someone fall down and then get back up and realize that she is fine, that she can fall, that it’s simply a part of the learning process and no harm has been done.

When people are new to yoga, there is often this huge mental barrier around the idea of falling down. We don’t trust our instincts, we don’t trust our bodies, and we don’t trust the practice.

But then, many classes and asanas later, we’ve learned. We have the reflexes that will [usually] catch us before we land on our faces. We have the strength to fall slowly, with control, and to land in a way that won’t hurt us. We have the balance to fall out of tripod headstand and into wheel without any pain.

Sure, if we approach poses recklessly and aren’t mindful about our challenges we can get hurt, and falling isn’t always safe, but it can be okay to fall if you go into a challenge knowing that you might fall—prepared for the fall and accepting the fact that it might happen and if it does, it will be fine.

There are a few ways to look at the idea of falling as an adult.

If you never try anything new, you definitely won’t fall.  But if you don’t give yourself the chance to fall, you also won’t learn how to fall, and you definitely won’t learn that you can do that thing that you thought you could never do.

When you start to trust your instincts—on the yoga mat or in regular life—you begin to learn when to say no and when you should say yes, I'll give that a try. You start to get a feel for how to fail without causing much harm to yourself. 

You learn that maybe it is okay to go for that opportunity, because if you do fail, you know that you’ll be able to jump right back up and try again, even if you are slightly embarrassed or if you landed awkwardly on the person next to you.

Take it from me, you guys, it’s worth learning how to fall. I’ve seen many an adult fall at this point in my life, and I know that while we rarely bruise anything more than our egos, more often than not, we connect with something exciting and new--or we take flight, or we change immensely in the process of falling in front of a group of people.

When I fell on Sunday, I wasn’t embarrassed or hurt at all, but instead, I was glad that I actually had the opportunity to show my students that falling is totally fine. And then while taking a class yesterday, I tried a new transition, and I fell out of it (quite a few times), and that was totally fine, too.

I’ll leave you with the words of Claudia Cummins, which don’t really further my point, but which I think are worth sharing, anyway:

“Of all the many gifts of yoga, this is one of the sweetest: Yoga wakes us up to life. It saves us from sleepwalking through the beauty, the amazement, the raw sensations of our passing days. I don't know about you, but even when life hurts, I would rather feel its pain than feel nothing at all.”