What is it about handstands?

My favorite line from the classic, counter-culture coming of age adventure “Into the Wild,” goes something like:

“How important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong."

This line conveys a penetrating and resonant perspective on prioritizing our subjective lived experience separate from our relationship to others and the outside world. On a personal level the sentiment illuminates the underlying motivation behind many of my physical and spiritual pursuits over the years.  It also resonates in the way I approach my role as a yoga teacher and the way in which I attempt to help my students and clients uncover strength within themselves.   Teaching yoga involves learning to see patterns in the way we move and carry ourselves, it requires me to understand physical patterns are mirroed psycho-emotionally and determine how we behave more broadly in the world.  The ancient hermetic aphorism “as above, so below,” is a guiding principle on which I base my teaching, particularly in private and workshop settings when I am working with someone who is searching for, yearning for, a transformative experience.  I’ve learned over the years that issues of safety and a sense of feeling secure are expressed in patterns in the lower body. In fact the number of knee issues that have revealed themselves to be intertwined with problems in my clients’ romantic and familial relationships staggers my mind nearly as much as the knee issues stagger those clients when they come to me.  Concordently I’ve learned that qualities such as self control, will power and cardinally confidence are addressed most directly by the way in which we bear weight in our hands.  This is a clear and compelling reason that handstands, the posture which epitomizes weight bearing on the hands, are the most direct and powerful tool in developing real, substantive, multi-dimensional self confidence.

Learning to do handstands involves learning to manipulate the entire body by way of the hands. The word “manipulate” often gets a bad wrap due to its association with emotional vampires, psychopaths and mean girls, however in and of itself it actually refers to our ability to use manual dexterity to mold the world around ourselves.  Every time we type on a keyboard or navigate a smartphone we are manipulating communication technology in order to convey a message.  Most 21st century humans are expert at manipulating objects like toothbrushes, frying pans, car steering wheels and debit cards.  Taking advantage of our well developed manual aptitude, handstands are a participatory, embodied technology which enable the practitioner to manipulate their own body, from the muscle and bone structure right down to the energetic, visceral and psycho-spiritual substrate.  They are a bridge between the neurological expertise which enable us as modern humans to function in an inexorably “hands-on” world. Handstands train our bodies which, absent a rigorous physical practice, can decay into feeling opaque, irritating and dissatisfactory .  To the layer of our bodies which are flesh, blood and bone handstands adds tone, tautness, circulation, integrity, dynamism and resiliency.  Handstand practice also enables us to channel our cognitive intelligence to the energetic and emotional layers of our bodies such that we learn focus, patience, and stick-with-it-ness.  Through this type of training we cultivate the confidence to pass through constrictive psychological states in order to arrive at the open and even sometimes ecstaticly luminous spaces that await us on the other side.  Handstands are a re-birthing process in which our own skill and determination are the forces by which we can be reborn, a process in which the practitioner is both the mother and the newborn. 

Yet there are also many other postures which deliver the opportunity to cultivate control in the hands and as such deliver, albeit with less umph, some of the myriad intertwined benefits just enumerated.  However another unique key quality that handstands require is that of orienting one’s self based on directionality and space.  In most yoga postures and pedestrian physical positions, we orient based on our connection to the ground through the feet and the objects visible around us.  We tend to not be overly concerned with our connection to the ground through the feet due to the deep familiarity with that interface.  Even in tricky balancing postures like dancer and “extended hand to foot pose” we can thoughtlessly depend on the single grounded foot to “think for itself,” and make innumerable micro-adjustments without our conscious need to manage them.  I’ve found that only in cases in which my clients have had extreme destabilizing experiences is there ever a need to remediate their native ability to balance and shift weight in their feet.  The challenge in a pose like dancer is how to orient and organize the body such that the standing foot can do its thing and we have our vision, our hands and our proprioceptive sense of the space around us as assets in this process.  Consider a handstand and the way in which we lose the assets which we would typically use to balance and orient.  Our feet are off the ground so they cannot stabilize us, our gaze is at the ground so we cannot visually orient ourselves in space, our hands are on the ground so we cannot use them to reach to find balance, and our hips and shoulders are inverted which causes them to act strangely, requiring a much greater deal of consideration and management.  How then, you might ask, given the degree to which we are disabled by it, can we possibly do a handstand?

The difference between the skill of balancing on the feet and skill of balancing on the hands might be likened to the difference between the skill of an athlete and that of an artist.  Athlete’s play in the material realm, the realm of the visible, tangible and tactile.  Handbalancers play in the subtle realm of internal organization, razor thin focus and the taming of chaos.  Learning to handstand is a matter of taming a multi-layered encounter with fear and bewilderment.  It is a way to master negative emotions while cultivating a strong, supple and resilient body.  Finally it is a way to find one’s self, to really find one’s self, separate from and unencumbered by the normal external reference points with which we typically orient and thereby define ourselves.  Handstanding is an improvisatory performance whose audience is the inner-self.  The best handbalancers’ greatest flourish is stillness and only they themselves are witness to the complex inner dance that enables that stillness to exist.

So practically what can we expect when we learn to handstand?  On the layer of our outer bodies we can expect to tone and strengthen almost all of our muscle groups and in particular the shoulders, the abdominal muscles and the posterior leg muscles.  We can expect our posture to improve dramatically based on the fine-tuning that goes into finding a sustainable balancing position and we can expect our coordination, even when we’re on our feet, to be enhanced.  On the layer of our energy we can expect to find focus more easily, emotions less urgent, a greater degree of wakefulness and dare I even say joy.  These qualities will come on within the first few weeks of consistent practice. Somewhat more gradually we will also begin to feel more at home in our bodies, as though we’ve mapped out previously forgotten about or neglected areas of our inner territory and, like a curious child, can begin to explore our senses freely.  If we are spiritually inclined we may find that handstands serve as a sort of a hermetic cave, a place to retreat and withdraw from our outer senses such that a mystical presence can be felt.  For some the feeling of this presence may manifest itself as “strangeness” but for those fortunate enough to be curious about unconventional mind-states, it can become quite tranquil, comforting and revelatory.  On the other hand, if toned triceps and six pack abs are your thing, handstands and the supplemental conditioning exercises that accompany them are second to none for developing a shredded bod.

In conclusion, handstand training is for those of us who want to go deeper while retaining a sense of aesthetics.  It is for those of us who have had a taste of the great mystery and are ready to pull back a bit more on the veil, those of us who like a challenge that we can laugh about when we stumble, who understand that working together on a solitary pursuit is not a contradiction but in fact a beautiful paradox.  Handstands are for athletic dreamers, secret shamans, spiritual bros and cerebral babes, ex-dancers who still love to dance and ex-gymnasts who still want to flip around sometimes.  They are for the brave as well as the curious-yet-timid.  Handstands are ways of saying yes to the challenges, joys and mysteries of life!