Fourth Form of Madness

This week I fell down a flight of stairs. It was quite a shake up for me. I had just spent the night teaching yoga to friends and then sharing a delicious meal and a few laughs. When I stepped out in the chilly night all prepared in my ugg boots, I hadn’t considered the water on the brick stairs and the slippery rubber souls of my well worn uggs. Before I knew it my feet were where my head used to be and my butt was falling towards a big wet puddle on a stair.

Luckily I was holding bags in each hand and they prevented me from sticking out my hand to break my fall (see sometimes baggage is good for you). It’s funny though as the whole thing seemed to happen in slow motion. One moment i realised my foot had slipped and then I was staring at the stairs as my feet flew up in the air and I knew I was going to land there and everything in me just relaxed and accepted the destination. I landed bumped down a few steps and then thought “Oh that wasn’t so bad”. I remember hearing my husband who was behind me telling me not to move but I knew I was okay and so I preceded to collect my bags and croaked out a humble “I’m okay”, picked myself up and poured myself back into the car.

In the car I did a better scan of myself. Right side of head and jaw tingling, right wrist and elbow tingling, right buttock aching slightly and mental state in some state of shock. Actually the shock might have been more pronounced than I thought as it wasn’t until I got home that I realised I had been operating in some sort of robotic state when all I wanted to do was crawl up in a nice warm bed. All in all, not a scratch or a bruise on me. When I do yoga I notice signs of the impact but nothing drastic. My husband and myself can’t believe how lucky I was. However, I don’t know if it is related or not but my energy is so flat I could sleep 24 hrs a day. This morning at yoga I was waiting in my car, feeling the sun come through the window and I felt I could have stayed in that car, in the sun all day recharging.

I can’t help relating this incident to my life and how I have become as I have gotten older and more set in my ways, a tad anxious about life and my existence. Somewhere along the way I had incorrectly learnt that if I worried about something then it would turn out alright, that I could control it. I do not know why I believed this but I did, in every cell. That if I worried enough I could actually prevent it, a plea bargain with life. I have come to see that life is an uncontrollable energy that does not particularly care if you worry or fret or laugh or cry, it will be what it is and run free and untamed. It is not life that must heed to your control, your ideals, your beliefs, but you that must heed and surrender to life.

I haven’t always been good at this (actually I am still in the infancy stage of learning this). I have always feared the fall, clung to the good, demanded only fun times of life. There are many ways this has played out in my inner and outer life. Commonly I never stuck at anything for a really long time. When you are only chasing the good, fun time, you have to keep moving on. In my studies, I have read about Tibetean monks that prayed for bad times and difficult situations so they could learn. These monks who also sat in graveyards, night after night, so they could conquer all their fears by conquering the grand daddy of all fears, the fear of death. I used to think these monks were crazy and I feared them. Now I respect their journey into understanding the nature of the illusion of fear and the freedom that they must have discovered along the way. I am learning that the fall often isn’t that bad and is often mostly in the anticipation not in the doing. I am learning that the “bad” times do indeed teach us more than we learn in the good times and that is, as one of my teachers said the other day, a beautiful process (even if it doesn’t feel so beautiful at the time!).

In my house there hangs a silk screen with Japanese text written on it. It says “Fall down seven times, get up eight”. I bought it for my husband as he had said the saying several times. Well that’s one down……six more to go.