Hand-stands are hard

Handstands are hard. I can’t do one yet but have been trying for several years.

As hard as I thought it was going to be to push up into a handstand when I started training, the reality is, it’s even harder.

It takes more upper-body strength, and it’s scarier.

When I really think about it, the challenge is part of what drew me to it.

A little over 10 years ago, I had brain surgery for an ongoing health issue. I started practicing yoga about five years ago, which is what eventually led me to work on handstands. Before yoga, I avoided any exercise that targeted my shoulders or neck (the part of my body most impacted by the surgery). Those parts of my body felt tender and vulnerable. But I also stored trauma there, and I didn’t have the tools to release that trauma before yoga.

More and more research indicates that we store trauma in our bodies. This isn’t just new age, hippie theorizing. It’s hard, science-backed medical research. Bessel van der Kolk describes how past traumatic experiences can train our body to stay in a hypervigilant mode or even shut down and become desensitized to physical feelings and emotions. In one study, researchers found that female incest survivors had more immune cells that females who did not experience incest (D’Elia et al., 2018). Trauma has real, tangible, physical impact on our bodies. Because of this impact, often the best way to release trauma is through a physical practice. Many find success with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Others, like me, find yoga to be the key to healing.

Prior to practicing yoga, any time an uncomfortable feeling came up during exercise, I would back away from it. Yoga taught me how to embrace those emotions and work through them. It also taught me that there was empowerment and joy on the other side of the trauma. Several months into yoga practice, after a backbend-heavy class, I experienced my body without a sensation of trauma. (Trauma, for me, feels like a fight-or-fight sensation, a slight anxious reaction to everything, even when not warranted.) For the first time in years — maybe ever — that feeling wasn’t there. I felt calm in a way I was not used to. I was content and warm all over. I felt safe just existing in my body, and if you’re not used to that sensation, it’s amazing. It probably does not need to be said, but I really, really like backbends now.

For me, handstands began another conversation with myself. I am terrified of moving my hips above my shoulders and putting the weight of my body over my head. And as rational as that fear would be for anyone, it may be even more rational for me.

I have had chronic head pain since I was 14, and that pain got dramatically worse and became daily when I was 25. I was diagnosed with chiari malformation type 1. A chiari malformation is a type of condition in which your cerebellum hangs down below your skull bone just a bit. For me, it’s somewhere between 3 and 5 millimeters. But it’s enough to cause sometimes intense pressure headaches and near constant nausea and dizziness. At the advice of my medical team, I had a six-hour-long brain surgery to manage the symptoms. There is no cure for chiari.

It took me almost a year to fully recover from the surgery. For months, I would come home from work and school (I was in a PhD program at the time) and collapse on my couch, too tired to do anything past making it in the door each evening. The surgery helped, eventually, although it took many months for me to know that it was helping. Still, even though I am improved, even today, a good part of my effort in life is spent managing my health condition.

One way to look at it is: I am a bit particular about what I will and won’t do with my head — what foods I will eat, what smells I’ll hang out around, what noises I will tolerate. But, while I don’t mind making sacrifices to keep the pain to a minimum — red wine and chocolate in small doses only — I don’t like avoiding things out of fear.

My experience with backbends also taught me that there can be great growth in pushing your body past what you initially think are its limitations. (If it is done in a safe, thoughtful, supported way.)

In February 2019, I signed up for a workshop with Adam. At the time, Adam was a yoga teacher who focused on hand balances. His classes were intense and a bit scary for new students, but I was drawn to them, even before I could keep up physically because he was so relentlessly positive. Growing up, I learned that positive people were fake. From the moment I met Adam, I sensed he was legitimately just that upbeat. Looking back, I think I started going to his classes because I was curious whether a person could really just be that excited about life. Then I began suspecting yoga had something to do with his positivity, and I wanted to find that connection. Before I knew it, I was feeling as positive and upbeat as I used to think he was strange for being. I was one of the crazy happy people.

His workshop that February focused on beginner hand balancing, and my goal going into the workshop, very consciously, was just to start this conversation with my body. I have never developed upper-body strength easily. I don’t know what made me think this was a reasonable goal. Maybe I never thought it was reasonable. What I can remember is that I wanted to do it, and I wanted to start learning how.

Adam instantly believed in my ability to achieve this goal, even though, as far as I can tell, I showed zero physical potential at my first workshop. And every step of the way, he saw my growth before I did, and he believed in me even more than I did. That’s just the kind of teacher he is. And somewhere along the way, I started to believe in myself. I developed a new level of confidence in my body and in myself.

I learned how to do crow pose — which for most people is the first hand balance. Then, I could do a tripod headstand, and a handstand against a wall.

Along my journey, I went to another handstand workshop with Adam. This one was about nine months removed from the first. In between, I had practiced yoga 4 to 5 times a week and done regular hand balance practice on my own at home.

For any human, but especially someone with chronic head issues, there’s something incredibly illogical about propelling the weight of your body above your head. But it’s thrilling, too, and this tension between terror and excitement, between predictable failure and new bounds of ability, is part of why I want to achieve a handstand.

At the second workshop, we practiced an exercise in which we held a plank and a partner picked up our legs and pivoted us slowly forward into a V until our hips were above our shoulders, mimicking the basic levering that happens in a handstand. My partner was another student, Julie, who was also working hard to make her first handstand, so she had lots of compassion for me. However, because of my strong instinct to protect my head, and muscles that weren’t quite strong enough, this moment of pivoting my hips over my shoulders was my absolute limit — both physically and emotionally.

As I hit that limit, my teacher, Adam, was crouched down next to me.

I held my plank and Julie moved my legs slowly higher into the air, Adam repeatedly told me I was safe. He and my classmate Julie both said over and over again, “We’ve got you.” “You’re safe.” “We’re here for you.”

And I felt it.

I was absolutely overwhelmed and frightened, but I also knew I was completely supported. I was safe to explore my edge. I was okay in that scary place because I had support.

I almost cried.

Not because I was scared or because I failed to hold the position but because I was completely supported by two amazing human beings who gave me what I needed to be there in my vulnerable emotions and explore my edge. I don’t know if I have ever felt that before. But now that I have experienced that sensation in my body, I will never forget it.

I know what it is to be held by a supportive community when I most needed it. And I know that this is how we grow, through support and gifting each other safety and encouragement.

I didn’t cry in that moment, and I’m not sure why. Maybe my body was too focused on the physical exertion to stay with the emotions long enough to produce tears. But it would have been fine if I had cried. I was safe, and I am 100% certain these people would have given me space to feel. Before practicing yoga, I might have fought a public display of unexpected emotion. Now, I realize that it was a spontaneous expression of life, and that is a beautiful thing.

I still can’t do a handstand, and I’m not even 100% sure I will ever get there. My yoga practice has helped me reach many poses and skills I thought would never be possible for me, but not every pose is possible for every body, and I’m ok with that. I think the journey has taught me more than reaching the pose ever could. I was blessed with a great teacher and a beautiful community that supported me in my most vulnerable moments. Anyway, why would I need to balance on my own when I can balance so beautifully with these other people at my side?

Citation

D’Elia ATD, Matsuzaka CT, Neto JBB, Mello MF, Juruena MF, Mello AF. Childhood Sexual Abuse and Indicators of Immune Activity: A Systematic Review. Front Psychiatry. 2018 Aug 6;9:354. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00354. PMID: 30127754; PMCID: PMC6088139.