Hands to Stand On

Despite years of trying to launch my hips above my shoulders, I still can’t seem to manage to get into a handstand on my own. It’s not for lack of trying, and after seven years of yoga, it might seem like karma owes me a favor. Please, please—I just want to feel that I have the power to completely flip my world view, even if it’s just for 15 to 20 seconds.

My real search for a handstand began about the time I moved to New York City in 2004. I lived in Manhattan, a broke and busy intern, and I was lucky to make it to class once a week, striving to reach the potential of my Shakti. Early Saturday mornings were the best, because then the usual two inches between individual yoga mats (slotted into every studio nook and cranny) stretched out to as much as 10 inches, and on a good day sometimes even a foot. I go to class to commune with my fellow yogis and yoginis, but I like having enough space to know that if I lose my balance, the whole room won’t go with me like a row of dominoes.

Most classes would lead to that moment—time to practice our handstands. I’d dutifully line my yoga mat up against the wall, wondering if this could be my lucky day. I’d place my hands in a short downward dog, the perfect upside-down V—halfway to my goal. My hands lined up a few inches from the wall. I kicked, one leg at a time, attempting to bring my hips in perfect alignment above my shoulders and my heels to the wall. Unlike many of the lithe bodies that gracefully floated up the studio walls, I’d push off with one foot, moving a few inches, sometimes a couple of feet towards the wall. But my hips seemed to have a weighted sinker attached to them. On those misfires, when my feet thudded to the floor, I’d push off harder, hoping my body might stay against the wall. It didn’t work. It was as if my body had a warning label glued to the sole of my foot—do not stand on hands.

Even though my hips seemed weighted, my life felt free and strangely unplanned. After slaving through seven years of a graduate degree that had become more torture than exploration, I completed my PhD and within a couple of weeks, traded college-town Midwest for Manhattan and a chemistry lab for an intern’s cubicle at a monthly magazine. My life had inverted within a month, but my body resisted any comparable flips in perspective.

Yoga teachers were initially sympathetic—“Oh, it took me a long time to get into handstand.” But after they’d been seeing me for months, I sensed their frustrations, or maybe just the mirror of my own. They’d try to give me tips—try to fill the center of your back, stretch your legs out straight when you kick, put your shoulders over your wrists. I’d get close and they’d boost me up, giving me a whole new view on the world. I can stay in a handstand for a reasonable time once someone gets me there, but as I’d watch them demonstrate a nearly effortless, cat-like hop into handstand on their own, I felt like a yoga failure.

Yes, yoga is about relaxation, internal focus and pushing my own limits, and that’s why I’ve done it for seven years, sans solo handstands. I’d built up a scrappy athleticism over my early-to mid 20s by pushing hard against the world around me. In my daily life as a chemistry graduate student, I had managed plenty of heavy lifting: chemical bottles and drums, cylinders of compressed gas and vacuum pumps in the lab. I jogged and defended soccer goals to blow off steam.

In 2001, I started taking yoga classes to release the tension in my shoulders, back and hips—accumulated from a variety of family stresses, relationship wounds and a growing dissatisfaction with my chosen career. As I focused on the internal adjustments of aligning my body to each of the new poses, I ventured inward. I cherished the release of lying in corpse pose at the end of class—the one point in my week where my racing mind stopped and took deep breaths. Those peaceful moments became addictive—tiny islands of tranquility that the rest of my life wasn’t allowed to invade.

As I was doing those initial stretches of hips, hamstrings and shoulders, inversions were icing on the cake, a relatively unexplored world. In the meantime, I was making small adjustments in my life: a graduate course in journalism, volunteer work at a kids’ science museum, and articles written on the sly for the student newspaper.

But once I’d moved to New York, handstands became about moving forward and overcoming fear of the unknown—and a crash landing on my head. For a couple of weeks at a time, I would try repeatedly to practice handstands at home, only to get tantalizingly close and frustrate myself. Because I face the floor, I can’t even see incremental progress in my upward kicks—I’m either up or down. Then one evening in 2005, I lined my mat up against my closet door in my Manhattan apartment. I launched myself effortlessly into a handstand not once, but twice. I finally understood the ease that cat-like instructors had been trying to describe for months. I left that second glorious handstand to answer my cell phone. I babbled ecstatically to my new boyfriend about the handstand, but I couldn’t explain to him in that moment what it meant, this buoyancy in my body that somehow matched the joy of our new relationship.

But that easy spring into handstands didn’t last, although the boyfriend is now my husband. I’ve learned to strain and wobble into headstands or forearm stands. But it’s almost more frustrating to have experienced that leap into an actual handstand and not quite know how to recapture it.

As I sit in my home office and write each day, I face the same demons of doubt that run through my mind when I approach a handstand. I wonder if my work is good enough. I yearn to learn, grow and evolve and fear falling flat on my face. My yoga practice helped me to look inside myself and upend my life in ways that I can’t seem to upend my body. But as I continue to face challenges of stretching myself in new directions, I’m impatient for that moment when I can see the world as I fl oat above my hands.

Now, in the smaller Brooklyn studio where I take my weekly classes, my teachers offer helpful feedback (“Your shoulders are a little tight.”) or encouragement (“You’re almost there, everything is in the right place.”). But they don’t try to boost me, and I’m not willing to cheat to get into the pose. Like any other transformation, somehow, sometime, I’ll find that inversion on my own.

After escaping the chemistry lab, Sarah Webb now ­experiments with words instead of molecules. Between her hops toward handstands, she writes about scientific innovations and the people who make them possible from Brooklyn, New York.

~Sarah Webb