Sometimes I hear something and it speaks right to my heart. I went to a Winter Solstice yoga workshop the other night and the instructor, Jessica, was a lovely lady with wisdom and humor and a gift for sharing. We were talking about muladhara, the root chakra, where it all begins. Balancing poses in yoga work with this chakra because you ground with one leg and lift through your spine from the stability of your foundation. Tree pose, for example.

If you’ve done Tree pose, then you know that some days you feel more balanced and others you sway and bend as a tree would on a windy day. I’ve always loved this representation of life, coming in and out of balance. It spoke to me enough to build my blog around it. But sometimes it feels extremely uncomfortable to be out of balance. If in a yoga pose, I want to hold it steady and “do it right”. If in life, I want to align all the little pieces properly so that it appears “balanced”.

And then Jessica said something. She said, “Balance is not for you to hold. You don’t have to hold it together. IT holds YOU. Sometimes it holds you for a decade. And sometimes, it holds you for a breath.”

Still days later, this brings tears to my eyes. I feel an almost overwhelming sense of relief wash over me every time I think of this. “Oh thank goodness,” my mind sighs, cries, yells. “Because I don’t have it all together. I’m trying really hard and some things are out of balance and I can’t figure out how to put them all back together again so they are perfectly aligned, one off-setting the other.”

Do you ever feel this way? Does your mind ever speak to you like this? Do you need to hear that balance is not for you to hold? That balance holds you.

I have not fully assimilated the teaching that this represents for me because there is still too much emotion tied to it. I can’t quite pull all the little strings apart that keep tugging at my heart in order to look at them and study them individually. A thought, an idea, bubbles to the surface and I can almost grasp it, but then another thought branches off and I follow it a little way until yet another comes to mind. It’s okay, I tell myself. You can still lay it down in your blog because it is not for you to give the answer. It is not for you to hold.

Photo courtesy of Rising Tide Triathlon Coaching from her epic Norseman/Ironman.