If you know me or follow my blog you might remember I was lost on a mountain last year with my dog Jethro. Oddly enough, through that formidable ordeal, there was never a moment of fear. What I am terrified of though are my feelings, the intimate ones that ache when hurt, the tender ones that fear rejection.
Thirty years ago I bent backward over a bioenergetic stool in the Upper East side office of Alexander Lowen. Lowen was a pioneer in body mind psychotherapy and the father of Bioenergetics. He instructed me to breathe. A spontaneous convulsion of sobs rocked my body. He summed up my condition with this phrase.
You are scared to death.
I had no idea what he was talking about. I never felt afraid. As a matter of fact, before the insurgent sobbing, I was numb to feeling anything in my body. I scoffed at his diagnosis.
Somehow he saw, deep in the shadows, a little one buried in fear. One who believed she would never be loved. This is the bedrock I have built my life upon, a misguided truth that I am not loveable. A truth born from voices outside that shamed my feelings into submission until the outside voices became my own.
Yes I am scared to death. Not the specific kind of fear that is scared of snakes or heights or small, dark spaces but a nameless fear that has seeped into every cell, tightened every muscle and twisted every thought in a relentless drive to find security.
There is a shape that fear has. Fear contracts us to the smallest denomination of ourself so we cannot be seen. Fear builds a fortress of protection around our heart through a contortion of muscles that keeps pain out and insures nothing gets in.
Somewhere inside another voice whispers. One too faint to hear beneath the armor. It is the voice that brings my head to the floor each morning in my practice of yoga. A voice that can only be heard once the armor melts.
Yoga changes the shape of fear. Little by little, ancient tensions bound in bone and sinew lose their grip. Truth is found when the armor cracks. Demons hiding in darkness tumble awkwardly through an opening leaving us existentially naked in the dawning light of truth.
Yoga opens our most vulnerable heart in a deepening dance between the retreat in to darkness and the revelation in to light. Yoga changes the shape of our heart. A shape that learns to let the love in.