Trust Yourself
5 minute read
I’ve been practicing yoga daily for 20 years now and of the myriad gifts the practice has given me, trusting myself is perhaps the one I cherish most. I don’t mean to suggest I didn’t trust myself before I had a dedicated and consistent yoga practice, but I certainly did not trust myself as I do now.
Trusting yourself might seem too obvious a topic to write about, but when you don’t quite trust yourself, the ground beneath you can feel shaky. If you can’t keep a promise you made to yourself, how can you rely on yourself? And if you can’t rely on yourself, how can you rely wholeheartedly on anyone else?
By the same token, if deep down you don’t feel confident in your decisions, how can you feel confident in your life overall? When you consistently fail to make good on the intentions you set, and second-guess important choices you make, you’re more likely to feel insecure and ungrounded. I know because I used to be like this. A lot.
You may be wondering what is it about yoga practice that has changed things for me. So let me tell you. It’s the ability to do arm balances (and inversions). Or in other words to hold my body up using my hands and with my feet off the ground. Here’s the thing: when you balance only on your hands, you have to trust that you can hold yourself up. No one else can do the pose for you. The greatest yoga teacher in the world cannot do the pose for you. They can demonstrate the pose, they can talk you into it, but they cannot do it for you. No one can. And that is the great secret.
Learning to balance necessitates learning to fall; it’s just part of the process. After all this time I sometimes still fall, and that’s okay. I laugh and start over.
Time and time again, you lose your balance, regroup and come back to the centre. This is the practice. Do it enough times and you know that you’re solid. At essence, yoga is about trust: trusting your teacher, feeling supported in your practice space, trusting the practice, but mostly it’s about trusting yourself.
It requires showing up in a sustained way over time. You have to be able to hang in there with yourself for the long haul. Your practice becomes a vehicle for deepening the relationship with yourself, and just as with any relationship, trust deepens with experience and repeated engagement.
But it was one day when the teacher said “Okay, now we’re going to practice bakasana” that things really got interesting. Sometimes called crow pose, bakasana is an arm balance that requires you place your shins on your upper arms and lift both feet off the floor while balancing on your hands. A lot of strength is necessary and a good dose of equanimity too. Focus helps, as does a sense of humour since falling is a given.
Getting into the pose requires that you place your hands a little wider than shoulder 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 bring your shoulders forward of your wrists, raise your seat while engaging your abdominals and contracting your thighs, then lift both feet off the floor. This is the breakthrough moment, the movement into the unknown. You have to radically trust that you can actually hold yourself. It’s both terrifying and exhilarating.
A useful hack is to take one foot off the floor at a time as you build strength and confidence in balancing. The first time you get both feet off the floor is a triumph and an affirmation of self. Getting there can be vulnerable and confronting. The pose is hard. In 18 years of teaching, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do it on the first try.
If you lack confidence in your balancing skills, it’s helpful to put a folded mat at the top of your yoga mat to act as a crash pad. This has the dual effect of providing psychological comfort and of softening the landing if you do fall. The trust that’s required to lift your feet and believe 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 the confidence to try other arm balances and inversions, but more importantly, confidence in your capacities beyond the yoga mat.
I had a profound experience of this while studying for a Ph.D. in analytic philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I was taking a seminar in the conceptual implications of quantum mechanics, which was stretching me to the max of my intellectual capabilities. Two-thirds of the seminar involved the mathematical underpinnings of quantum physics and, since maths is not my forte, I was struggling to keep up.
At the same time I was taking some challenging yoga classes with a brilliant teacher, but the physical difficulty of the yoga classes balanced the mental challenge of graduate school. One day I went from the quantum mechanics seminar directly to this yoga class and got airborne in bakasana with both feet off the floor for a full five breaths.
To say that I was elated doesn’t quite capture it. Ripples of satisfaction ran through my body and I felt really good about myself. My dopamine reward circuit was on fire! I walked out of the studio feeling six feet tall and I took that enhanced confidence into the seminar room with me. With application and determination I got an A on the seminar. Getting bakasana made me believe that I could do other things that were really hard. It’s just a yoga pose, but it’s also a means of empowerment and self-belief, a way to trust yourself.
I ‘got’ bakasana because I went outside of my comfort zone. It meant showing up repeatedly and building my strength with other yoga poses, making progress, little by little, and doing my practice again and again. In other words, it took a lot of self-effort. This is the reward that money can’t buy.
When you gain confidence in what you can achieve in yoga practice, you are mining that practice for jewels that can affect your whole life. Trusting yourself is essential for thriving and for resilience. When your yoga mat is a means for building that trust, you are on the advanced track.
None of this is meant to stipulate, or imply, that everyone should embark on a yoga practice. I’m just sharing what I know to be true. And I’ve learned that setting challenges and rising to meet these challenges is a big part of being self-reliant.
In her book Flourishing, Irish psychologist Maureen Gaffney writes about the importance of embracing challenges if we’re to experience a robustly satisfying life. We humans need a certain amount of stress and challenge to thrive. When we rise to challenges, we experience ourselves as resilient, and when we meet challenges we set for ourselves, we feel self-reliant.
Self-reliance is particularly important for a life well-lived as it is an intrinsic reward. In other words, we derive ongoing satisfaction from it regardless of external circumstances, and it boosts our sense of self and feeling of autonomy. Trusting yourself doesn’t have to mean forgoing the support and counsel of others. I don’t think I would ever have become virtuosic at arm balances and inversions if I had not had highly skilled and supportive teachers. And who hasn’t sought the advice of a wise friend from time to time.
No, solid inner trust is about leaning into your own sovereignty and autonomy. It’s about taking responsibility for your choices and making decisions you can live with. It’s about choosing you and exploring what really matters to you. Getting there may be arduous, but there’s no firmer ground on which to stand. Or indeed balance on your hands
Dearbhla Kelly, February 2022
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