I loved the article in Yoga Journal, back in June or so, on mudras.  There was one hand gesture where you spread your hands, palms toward you, and then interlace your fingers with thumbs stretched wide to either side, and then press your hands against your chest. 

I think i’m going to do this one in Power Yoga tonight.  It’s a protection mudra.  Not in the sense of closing yourself off to life and people, but in the sense of giving yourself the safety and protection to do the things you want to do.

Fear is such a wacky thing.  It’s tough to have a good handle on it because it happens in that primitive part of the brain and we usually react or form a conclusion about something before we’ve really given it any thought in the less primitive part of our brain.

It’s like – gee I’d like to do do x, oops was that fear?  Yup, OK I’m not going anywhere near x.  Here I am walking briskly in the opposite direction of x.  x?  what’s x?  Before we know it, this thing we want is not even in the picture anymore.

Frank said something cool about fear though, that we really don’t want to be *fearless*.  People who are fearless are the ones doing things like careening down a hill in a shopping cart well on their way to a lifetime in a wheelchair.  That’s fearless.

Fear simply tells us we’re doing something new.  That we’ve found our edge.  It’s a signpost.  It tells us that we’re just outside our comfort zone.  And that’s good right?  It’s a good sign because life begins at the edge of our comfort zone.  That’s where the juice is.

So the key isn’t to wait until our fear subsides (you should live so long) but to act anyway.  Feel the fear and do it anyways as Susan Jeffers said.  And to do that we need to find room for courage *with* the fear.  Not replace the fear, but to let them co-exist. 

It’s like the yin/yang symbol, you allow some fear in your courage and some courage in your fear.  Like the Reese’s Peanut Butter cup ad put it – You got peanut butter in my chocolate!/You got chocolate in my peanut butter! – mmmm.

So I think we’ll do that mudra in class tonight.  We’ll think about an area of our life where we want to move, but feel fear.  Maybe find room for our fear and our courage too.  Maybe we’ll find a little bit of protection and a feeling of safety to help them live together.  So we can move ahead.