A Yoga Room with a View

Maybe you remember around Day 9, I hit up some yoga classes while visiting Philadelphia for the Passover holiday. Stillpoint Studio, where my family practices – is really stunning. Check out the view from my mat.

I’ve been saving up this photo for a while just for you guys. Let me tell you about it.

I was in some seated pose, sweating my tushie off in the heated room gazing out the window. And peeking through behind the wall, and the fence, and the bushes, and the trees, and no joke – it’s hard to see – the barbed wire on top of the fence, were these bright blue patches of clear sky.

Also if you recall, I was really nervous going into this weekend. Passover treats and heavy meals abound to tempt me into a complete backslide, I was struggling to make a plan to get through it all.

And then it hit me all of the sudden in class – as epiphanies often do when you’re breathing deeply into your contorting and sweaty yoga body:

Sometimes, in order to reach the beautiful blue sky you have to scale a wall, climb a fence, fight your way through barbed wire and then machete chop your way through the brush.

And the crazy part was that I could SEE the sky through all these “obstacles” in my way. I could SEE what I wanted, but there’s way a lot in my way – too much almost – it seemed almost too daunting to even imagine getting through all of it. How perfectly fitting for where I was on Day 9.

In other non-metaphorical words, sometimes you have to go through a lot of muck, be scared, fight battles, feel your fears, find your resolve, and figure out how to get around what’s in your way, in order to reach your big beautiful goals.

And most of the time, you’re going to hate it while you go through it all. (That’s the loathing.) It’s going to be messy and painful and you’re going to get scratched up and battered a bit. And then you’ll emerge. Stronger. Smarter. Bolder. Resilient.

In fact, what I realized a couple days ago also, is that the most rewarding things that have come into my life, have been a direct or indirect result of my own big hairy fears and climbing through barbed wire to reach them.

So if you’re feeling stuck, can’t see the blue sky, yet have even an itty-bitty feeling of hope that there’s a patch of it somewhere, think about what scares you. Think about what scares you so much it makes your palms sweaty and your heart race. Think about it, feel it, see what happens. You might surprise yourself and find that it’s worth getting a bit scratched in order to lay flat out in the sunshine under blue sky.