New trick of the day on the silks: bomb drop! aka bombs away! aka I’m the bomb diggity. aka my labia will never forgive me. Anatomy-averse alert: I say labia at least twice this vid. #normalizelabiaineverydayconversation#thingsonlyheardinsilksclasses

My li’l sister, Gretchen, teases me about my Silver Sneakers Silks classes which makes me both lol and proud af, as whippersnappers like my baby sister would say, whatever the hell a whippersnapper is. I mean, for real, it’s not every day a 55 year old runs away to join the circus—just typing those words makes my brain go “hmmm,” and also warms my own heart.

This was the second attempt at the bomb drop in my lesson today; turns out, I climbed too high for Teresa Cannon Tebbe to hands-on spot me this time, the way I usually beg her to for weeks, months, even years after being introduced to a new trick (I’m lookin’ at you, Angel Drop, and Scorpion, and cross-back straddle). I had two choices: either let go and drop, or “walk” my way out of the wrap and back down to earth—aerial-speak for a hand-over-hand method that takes one through the trick in a very slow-motion, controlled manner. No shame at all in walking it down—it can be ridiculously, even dangerously disorienting and hard to inventory all the body parts when tied upside-down in silks. Walking it down can be its own kind of powerful, beautiful slo-mo version of an often hard-to see what’s going on free-fall, but it’s also the default method that my hyper-vigilant, control freak brain prefers and takes forever to give up.  

There’s an interesting paradox in the spiritual practice of yoga, from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, that speaks of abhyāsa (perseverance) and vairāgya (detachment), a continual dance between the opposing ideas of holding on and letting go, the coming together and falling apart, the diligence of practice and the knowledge that no matter how hard we practice to find calm on the inside, everything outside of us is out of our control, that happens again and again and again throughout our lives. Truth is, nothing stays the same, everything is always always always changing, even if we don’t let go, things will still change. I remember a grief therapist once telling me that people still move on from a loss, but the difference can be like being dragged like a pebble under a glacier or yielding to the grief and allowing the changes to exist, and doing the difficult work to show up for ourselves and our grief, our struggle, our attachment and do the work that helps us move us not just through, but beyond something even greater that our grief. 

Trying to stop it, or control, or ignore or numb ourselves to it is futile. All of which only leads to suffering, but so often, it’s so hard to see that it’s our own stranglehold of control that’s causing the suffering. Our holy work is to, instead, find and practice ways to steady our mind, and let go, while in the midst of chaos. There are as many ways to this peace as there are people on this planet, and it’s a helluva mad superpower to hone because holy shit the world continues to be a wildly unsettling place to live…it is not work for the faint of heart. But it is heart work. 

It’s a practice that we’ll never perfect‚ this letting go—it takes so much trust, faith, peace and stillness—especially in the face of a world that is hellbent on loudly screaming at us that we’re wrong…The goal isn’t perfection, but practice is essential… It was a curious thing, to feel, in my body, how when Teresa told me I was too high for her to spot, I didn’t immediately panic, which has been the default setting my mind for so long when life feel like it’s unraveling in my hands. Instead, I took deep breaths, asked a few questions to make sure I knew what to do (letting go doesn’t mean gettin’ all reckless and dangerous, kids—or maybe it does…another fine, fine line to dance), I trusted that I could do this, because I have the best teacher, I have practiced not just this move but so many others that preceded it. The free fall was exhilarating. I felt like a kid again.

Historically, my control tactics, while they do the job to quell my mind (at least temporarily), felt desperately, fragmented, chaotic, grasping, gasping for air. A betrayal of my heart. At this point in my life, all 55 years of it, letting go, curiously, feels like I am more in control, more coherent, more congruent in all my parts—mind, body and spirit soaring together, instead of frantic, jagged fragments hurtling through space…Helluva paradox, indeed. xo.