Stretching: Body and Soul

When you think of the word “flexible,” what comes to mind?

Gymnast? Dancer? Cirque du Soleil contortionist?

Sure, physical flexibility is absolutely an ideal for the longevity of a strong and healthy body and life. To achieve that, most people understand that stretching is required. We understand the need to commit to an act that has a lot of “unseen” benefit. Physical stretching is almost always felt more than it is seen—but nonetheless, still worth investing in.

Because we know what happens when we stop moving our bodies through their full range. We get stiff. Today, I want us to think beyond the physical act of stretching and apply that same concept to our inner worlds—what some might call the soul.

What happens when we stop stretching there? How often are you deliberately stepping into the unknown in life? How often are you challenging your beliefs? Expanding your learning? Your thinking? Allowing yourself to wonder if something you have believed for years might not be true anymore?

I think aging provides us with the perfect opportunity to do this—though ironically, it can also be the time when we become most rigid. We know what we like. We know what we believe. We know what we’re good at. We’ve figured out which people, places, and experiences make us comfortable.

And comfort can be wonderful. But just like our bodies, what we stop asking to move can eventually get stiff.

Twice in my twenties, I quit good jobs with “promising growth” because my soul wanted more. My soul needed to stretch.

The first time, I got in my car—a hand-me-down from my grandmother that I aptly named Grey Lightning—and traveled across the United States. I hiked through National Parks and stayed in hostels all across the country, solo for the whole trip.

The second time, I left my high-paying (to me!) sales job to go live at Kripalu in Lenox, Massachusetts, for months to become a yoga teacher. I did certification programs, took classes that interested me, and focused on stretching myself further than I’d been before.

Some people call that fearless, but I want to be clear:

I was afraid every day. I just never let that stop me.

Fear is very familiar to me. In fact, I would say it is one of my most ingrained, experienced emotions. But my thinking has always been this:

If I’m already afraid, why the hell not DO something with it?

I spent way too many years waking up afraid. I was afraid of not having enough money. Of being unlovable. Of failure. Embarrassment. Judgment.

So many of those fears were about things that weren’t actually happening. They were possibilities. Stories. Predictions about what might happen next. Eventually, I got tired of being afraid of things that hadn’t even happened. If fear was going to ride shotgun anyway, I figured I might as well give it something real to be afraid of.

So I stretched. I tried things. I left things. I went places alone. I changed my mind. I followed curiosity. I failed. I learned. I started over. And slowly, I discovered that stretching our inner worlds may not be all that different from stretching our bodies.

We increase our range. We become more capable of tolerating discomfort. We discover that just because something feels unfamiliar doesn’t mean it is dangerous. And maybe most importantly, we learn that we can go farther than we thought we could.

I believe in being the scientist of my own life. I will conduct the experiment—just as I was taught to do as a science major at Smith. My hypothesis used to be something along the lines of: Life feels so shitty anyway, let’s see if this experiment can find me a different result.

And if not? At least maybe I’d have a better reason for feeling the way I already did.

Over time, though, the experiments started teaching me something. There were unseen forces already at play in my life. Not necessarily things I could measure or explain, but things I could feel. An internal pull. A curiosity. A quiet knowing.

The scientist in me still wants evidence. She probably always will. But I’ve also learned that there are things I sometimes know before I can explain how I know them. A felt sense. Something deep in my bones that says: Go this way.

At Kripalu I learned this Rumi quote:

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”

It took me years to uncover that voice in me. I had to DIG to find it. I used to say it wasn’t even whispering to me, it was using sign language. But, it was there. And eventually, I learned to listen.

Today, I trust that felt sense more than I ever have. I take leaps without knowing exactly where I will land. I change direction. I follow curiosity. I allow myself to want things I cannot yet explain. It’s not because I believe nothing bad will happen or because I’m fearless.

It is because I have stretched enough to know that I can tolerate the unknown. I can bend without breaking. I can be afraid and move anyway. I can trust myself to conduct the next experiment.

My body and soul have both been trained to stretch.

What about you? Where have you gotten a little stiff? What belief have you stopped questioning? What possibility have you dismissed because it scares you? What is your soul asking you to stretch toward today?

The first step is listening. Then do what Rumi would do. Get pulled.

All my love!

Kim