Calm down, ladies.
I was born blind in one of my eyes; it’s no big deal, it doesn’t affect my life it all, but one thing it does do is make me a god-awful tennis player. And I know this because when I was in sixth grade, my parents put me in tennis camp at the Herndon Community Center. And I was terrible. I was so bad that not only did the coaches bench me, they eventually just stopped putting me in. So for weeks I just sat out there in the heat all day watching other kids play tennis. It’s a sad story right?
But then one day while I was sitting there, I picked up one of those canisters of three tennis balls, and just started to play around with them, and I figured out how to juggle. And I was good at it, really good, it’s like I could always do it and just didn’t know. I’ve been juggling for almost 20 years now, and I started because I couldn’t play tennis. In college I went to go juggle at the rec center and the room was occupied, so I stepped on a treadmill to kill some time, and I found out I liked running; I had never done it for fun before. I ran for years, until a running injury brought me to my first yoga class at Inner Power Yoga. Juggling, running, and yoga- they’re three loves of my life and I found them because an obstacle stopped me from doing something else.
I have grown to believe that if you look at all the things you love, you can trace it back to a point where an obstacle set you down a path, to that thing. And if you think that way, then an obstacle isn’t so much a challenge to overcome, but is like an ally, that you can always count on to take you somewhere new.
So what's the point of all this? In your practice, when you hit your obstacle, and you always will, whether it’s in your mind, an injury, or a physical handicap, let the knowledge that if you allow it, that obstacle will take you somewhere new. That's all it can do. Let that be your shield against frustration.