balance

"We're going to start with a headstand." I felt my shoulders tense and evidently every one else in the room felt tense too. The instructor commented on the sudden heaviness and fear in the room. So she told us to breathe and notice where that tension was settling. To detach and look at it. I immediately started thinking about the vertigo I was feeling in my life, like my world was upside down. How do I retain any sense of balance, of vision, when it just feels like I'm about to fall?

John O'Donohue writes, in his book of Celtic blessing, about how we encounter those tilted spaces between and within us: 

We never see the script of our lives; nor do we know what is coming toward us, or why our life takes on this particular shape or sequence. [But] a blessing...opens a different door in human encounter. One enters into the forecourt of the soul...Our longing for the eternal kindles our imagination to bless. Regardless of how we configure the eternal, the human heart continues to dream of a state of wholeness, a place where everything comes together, where loss will be made good, where blindness will transform into vision, where damage will be made whole, where the clenched question will open in the house of surprise, where the travails of life's journey will enjoy a homecoming. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now....When you bless another, you first gather yourself; you reach below your surface mind and personality, down to the deeper source within you--namely, the soul. Blessing is from soul to soul.

Perhaps the way out of fear is through blessing, giving and receiving it. If you've ever tried a headstand you know that it helps to cultivate a strong inner core as well as to focus on something other, outside yourself. And the result just might be balance, even when, especially when, all around appears upside down.