What My Dad Told Me at 3 A.M. in the Car

It made no sense. One moment I was standing at the top of the stairs, the next I was mid-air, as if someone had pulled my feet out from under me.  My mind racing: is this how people die? Is this where I break my back? I'm not usually someone who catastrophizes but in this flash of a moment I was reaching for scenes from movies, stories I'd heard of falls like this. I don't remember hitting a single step on the way down. Just landing at the bottom with a big thump.

These are stairs from the late 1700s, steep the way old stairs are. I'd gone up and down them my entire  life and never once slipped let alone missed the entire flight.

I landed at the bottom in a pinwheel, oddly enough- a yoga pose, holding my own hand, a finger jammed somewhere along the way. Everyone in the house came running.

Thanksgiving dinner had just ended, and I was getting my things together so I’d be ready to leave in the middle of the night to head to Nosara, Costa Rica. I was about to teach a 100-hour training I'd spent two years building. The first program the institute had ever asked a student to create for them from scratch.

I'd wanted to be asked to create Yoga for Athletes. I was one, I'd worked with them for years, I'd written the injury-prevention manuals that training facilities actually used. Instead they asked for anatomy. Which I did know well, but shouldn't a doctor do that?

So I went in hard. Two more years of a master's in consciousness studies, just so three professors, one in physiology, one in physics, one in Jungian psychology, could check not just my science but my philosophy. Every bone. Every muscle. Every chakra that overlaps with an endocrine organ, crossing a nerve plexus. Fascia, before fascia was a thing anyone talked about. A whole section on breath that had nothing to do with taking in more oxygen and everything to do with tolerating more carbon dioxide. A 300-page student manual, fully APA cited. Two more binders of notes just for me. Every one of the hundred hours mapped out.

Back then I wouldn't notice my nerves until right before it mattered. Even though I had IBS symptoms for six months leading up to that night, I was sure I was calm, cool and collected. Perhaps I was actually scared shitless the whole time (wink), but I'd overridden it with action.

Miraculously, as I sat at the bottom of the stairs and began tuning into it, I realized I was weirdly fine. Not one bone was broken. Just a jammed finger and shaken into the reality that maybe I wasn't as cool as I thought.

I got a few hours of sleep. In the dark hours of the morning my dad generously drove me from New Hampshire to Boston, and somewhere on that road I finally asked him, "Dad, what's wrong with me? My ego is so big I was sure I was the right person to build this whole program. And it's so small I'm terrified that the second I land, they'll see I'm twenty-seven. That I don't have a PhD. That I'm not a doctor. That they'll want their money back and leave."

He's pretty great at giving simple answers that land.

"One part of you knows what you're capable of. The other part does the work to make sure you can actually fulfill it."

It makes sense to be scared, and that fear activated me. That protective part of me was smart. His reflection took the shame and the judgment out of it. Reorienting to the intelligent mechanism instead, cleared so much weight, all at once.

At this moment it feels very cool, that 3am conversation was really the actual beginning of the work I do now." Finding the intelligence in our protective mechanisms, de-shaming the process, and then finding how we can create more support!

Before teaching each class over the next two weeks I would look up at the jungle canopy and say, "Dear Archangel Michael, help me to see what can't be seen, to hear what can't be heard, and speak only what needs to be said." My skill met the challenge, but also leaning into something beyond me helped calm my nervous system. Two weeks in a flow I'd never had quite like that before. Hard. Edgy. All parts of me were fully there. And every piece of information, or an honest, “I wonder?” I arrived, when I needed to.  When in the past the nerves would lead my mind to go blank.

So if I were to throw this back to you, I wonder if you've ever had a time in which you were called to something and fully doubted yourself at the same time? If you felt a whisper and the brakes?

What if both are wise? What if the whisper knows what you're capable of, and the doubt just needs you to take one small step that you're just barely brave enough to take. One step of preparation that you've never done before.

In a few weeks you’ll see a share about a newer inquiry.  Can I create and stay devotional when fear isn’t my ignition point?!

So grateful to be human with you all.