A Blissful Life 9/9/2026: Let Yourself Be Surprised

Practicing handstands has become my new obsession.

One of my favorite things about movement is feeling myself make new connections in my body. This is happening for me right now every time I flip upside down. I notice something a little differently each time. How am I kicking up? Where does my weight need to go? What are my hands doing? How much strength do I actually need, and where am I drawing that strength from? How do I need to stack my body? And perhaps most importantly, can I trust myself?

It has been such a good reminder of why yoga is called a practice. You’re not supposed to walk into your first class and immediately understand everything. You’re not even supposed to understand everything after years of practicing. There is always another layer to discover. The joy is in that discovery, and the discovery happens because we keep showing up.

When I was little, my gymnastics teacher called me spaghetti arms. In high school, my basketball coach called me Olive Oyl. I was tall and lanky and never really thought of myself as someone with much upper-body strength. During my 200-hour yoga teacher training, I started throwing myself upside down without really knowing what I was doing and ended up injuring my shoulder pretty badly.

After that, handstands became one of those things I quietly decided just weren’t for me. And honestly, I was completely okay with that. For me, yoga is not about collecting increasingly difficult shapes.

But recently something in me became curious. Maybe I could do this. So I started playing. Practicing against the wall, falling out, trying again, paying attention. Rather than focusing so much on whether I could “get” the handstand, I started noticing all of the tiny adjustments happening from one attempt to the next. A little more push through my hands, into the floor. A little more engagement through my center. Less force in the kick. More trust. That part has become much more interesting to me than the pose itself.

I know eventually I’ll hold the handstand, and that will be fun. But this is fun too. What I’ve been enjoying most is realizing how much can change when I stop deciding ahead of time what my body is capable of.

I think we do this in so many areas of our lives. We move through the world according to stories we’ve collected about ourselves: I’m good at this. I’m bad at that. I’m not strong. I’m not creative. I’m too old to start. I could never do that. Sometimes those stories began with something somebody told us years ago. Sometimes they came from one experience that didn’t go well. And sometimes we’ve repeated them for so long that we don’t even realize they’re stories anymore.

But we change. Our bodies and circumstances change. We learn things. We become stronger, we heal, we gain perspective. Yoga continually asks us to return our attention to what is actually happening now, rather than what we expect to happen based on the past. When we can do that, even for a moment, there is a little more possibility.

Maybe the invitation isn’t to prove anything to ourselves. Maybe it’s simply to stay curious enough to be surprised. What have you already decided about yourself that might not actually be true anymore?

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