I love yoga. This is a surprise to no one. I also love cats. No surprise there either. The combination of the two, therefore, should be magical.

I haven’t been to the studio in the past couple days because I’m scared to drive my car since ramming it into another one on Thursday. So yoga with cats will have to do today.

I’ve been feeling pretty good about my practice as of late. When I’m sitting in class or at my desk, I have an overwhelming desire to be in a pose–to be twisted and turned and flipped around. Anything but upright in a chair.

I’ve been pushing myself farther in the poses I know and playing around with some I don’t. I’ve even been feeling my body begging to be upside down lately. Odd, right? Very. Especially since I am terrified of being upside down.

I can’t dive (never have, never will). I can’t do cartwheels. I refused to play on the monkey bars as a kid. On a personality test I took for work, I scored extremely low on risk-taking because all the risk-related questions involved bodily risk (like sky diving) rather than emotional or professional risk. This didn’t surprise me at all.

There are plenty of things I can’t do in yoga. I like this about it. I’ve been working on mountain climber and am inching along with that pose.

The biggest and most terrifying pose for me, however, is the headstand/handstand. Every time I watch someone do it, I stare in awe and think, “No chance. No.way.in.hell.” I sit quietly on my mat signaling to the teacher I will absolutely not be giving it a try.

Yoga teachers are cool like this. They’ll never make you do something you don’t want to. Especially when it comes to handstands. They always say that if it’s fear that’s holding you back, no amount of prodding from them will get you over it. That’s on you.

So since I’ve had this headstand thing nagging me for a couple months now, I decided it was time to play around with it in the comfort of my own home so I don’t have to risk paralysis in front of an audience.

Terrified, too? Start by using a wall.

You can’t see it here, but both my feet are firmly planted on the wall. I prefer this method of facing toward the wall (once you’re upside down) and walking your feet up it rather than facing away from the wall and kicking your legs up to meet it. That’s way too much unsupported air time for me.

Once you’re comfortable with this, start trying it facing the other way kicking one leg up at a time so you feel a brief moment of weightless balance. Once you’re comfortable kicking high enough, you’ll come all the way up and rest your heels on the wall.

After doing that just twice, this happened…

“That’s it?” I thought. What a stupid thing to fear. What a waste of energy to fear something so silly. As it turns out, most of the things I fear in life are this way. I was paralyzed by the fear of quitting my job earlier this year. Once it happened, I had the exact same thought… “That’s it?”

Yes. This is it. This is your simple, comfortable, safe life. Nothing is so scary you can’t face it.

I think what’s so cool about this pose for me is that I have never ever been in this position in my life. 25 years of upright living is cool and all, but finally flipping upside down is a welcome change of pace… almost freeing.

I’m not very far along in my yoga practice, but I can’t believe how far I’ve come in the time I’ve been working at it. I wish I had pictures of me when I first started so people would believe that you really can go from that to this and beyond. It makes me excited to see where else yoga will take me.