Falling Into Gratitude

photo credit: Flóra

I took what could have been a seri­ous tum­ble yes­ter­day dur­ing my yoga prac­tice . It shook me. It hap­pened when I was attempt­ing a new type of inver­sion. When my arms buck­led I crashed to the ground — for­tu­nately I tucked hard and so took the brunt of the impact across the tops of the shoul­ders instead of the neck; that ‘tuck & roll’ instinct prob­a­bly saved my life and/or limbs. But that is not what I want to write about. It’s the awak­en­ing process that the inci­dent brought me that I want to speak of, for that spooky fall did indeed tum­ble me head­first into rev­er­ence and gratitude.

The tum­ble, (more accu­rately “crash”) hap­pened in slow motion in my mind, I had men­tal time enough, while it was hap­pen­ing, to watch the fall and men­tally com­ment on its moment by moment unfold­ing. From the moment my arms col­lapsed, my thoughts went some­thing like this: “I’ve done it now. So this is how it ends. So be it (the body eases a lit­tle). I’ve bro­ken my neck. Is any­one close enough to call? I accept it - ten­sion eases. Are my teeth ok? No dam­age there. Good. What about head injury? Not sure, maybe (head is throb­bing). I accept it — body relaxes a lit­tle bit and my head pain begins to dimin­ish. Neck okay? I think so … don’t move it yet tho. Wait ’til it releases. I accept it — body releases even more. I am SOOOOO grate­ful! (waves of grat­i­tude now) Thank you, Father, for pro­tect­ing me.” And my body con­tin­ues to release and relax.

As I con­tin­ued to assess my body dam­age, slowly, slowly releas­ing, uncoil­ing the body from its recent cri­sis by lying very still at first and then begin­ning to make small adjust­ments, slowly unwind­ing the body towards a full corpse pose on the floor. I’m guess­ing it took some fif­teen min­utes to unwind my crum­pled body into shiv­asana (corpse pose). Time is dif­fi­cult to guess when we are oper­at­ing out­side its rel­e­vance, so I am not sure how long I lay there barely mov­ing on the out­side but with mad goings-on inside my mind? I know it must have taken a full half-hour or more before I was ready to uncurl into full stand­ing pose — my head still throbbed on the way up. I con­tin­ued to slowly seek stand­ing align­ment, gen­tly stretch­ing as I went, until I found myself in my qigong ‘ready’ posi­tion. I was sur­prised, I hadn’t decided or planned to do qigong but obvi­ously my body thought it was a good idea so I coop­er­ated.

Unim­peded by my usu­ally bossy mind, my body led me through a gen­tle unwind­ing. My job was sim­ply to let go and let it lead. I did. As the body moved through var­i­ous qigong forms I focused on Source, bring­ing heal­ing life energy in to re-establish bal­ance in the body after its upset.

I noticed that the qual­ity of my thoughts had changed dra­mat­i­cally, mov­ing from the ter­ri­fy­ing thought, “I’ve done it this time!” — to thoughts of accep­tance and sur­ren­der, “I trust that I am ok. I trust that I am pro­tected — that this is hap­pen­ing for me, that I am safe.” Such thoughts gen­tly nudged my body into a relaxed state from which to unwind any dam­age that might oth­er­wise have resulted, if not from injury, then from the ten­sion and con­trac­tion of going through the trauma of the fall. I relaxed enough to release and thereby pre­vent dam­age to the point that I sit here today writ­ing this with lit­tle neg­a­tive effect what­so­ever, beyond some tol­er­a­ble soreness.

My fall turned out to be a pow­er­ful tes­ti­mo­nial for the heal­ing power of accep­tance and sur­ren­der! It ver­i­fied my con­vic­tion that heal­ing requires the abil­ity to fully relax into trust­ing Source. I am con­vinced that it is surrender/accepting/leting-go that most often saves us because when we let go and trust real­ity and the way things are we don’t have to fight against our­selves, and /or Source. Resis­tance always leads to con­trac­tion and cre­ates a bar­rier that causes us to pull away from life rather than to allow love and heal­ing to hap­pen. Trust in Source alle­vi­ates the need to resist. With trust, peace and heal­ing enter nat­u­rally the space that sur­ren­der creates.

I felt I was a part of a mir­a­cle yes­ter­day morn­ing. It brought me an enhanced aware­ness of how ten­u­ous and frag­ile life can be and allowed me to expe­ri­ence how pow­er­fully pro­tected I am. I walked out of that room yes­ter­day grate­ful to be walk­ing and pro­foundly aware of the Pres­ence of a Lov­ing Source who is ever present and into whose capa­ble, lov­ing hands I can relax know­ing that the more I fall into sur­ren­der, the safer I will be.

Bless­ings, Lynne