I towered over Jessica, and that made me afraid.  I didn’t want to crush her during the opening exercise in level 1 training of Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy. You know these yoga experiences—all touchy and feely. I had a sneaking suspicion that the facilitator was going to dive right in, so I was hesitant. Don’t you think we should find someone of equal height?

In a split second, I thought, “I should partner with someone else.” But we had already made that critical eye contact. The deal was sealed. And looking around, I saw everyone else had a dance partner. Like it or not, I was paired with Jessica. I hoped I didn’t snap her in half.

The facilitator Karen told us to introduce ourselves using just our back body.

Jessica radiated sweetness, like a smiling sprite. She probably wasn’t the least bit concerned that the top of her head barely made it to my shoulder, but I was. I planned on a light touch. Maybe I’d even hold back a bit.

We turned and stood back to back, and I was surprised. In that first instant of touch, it was clear that the match could not have been better. We were a perfect fit; two puzzle pieces coming together. Each curvature in her back was matched by an opposite curve in my back body. That meant her head had a perfect nest in the small curve of my neck to rest. It also meant that my butt nestled quite comfortably into the small of her back.

I hung out with my butt in Jessica’s back and was quite happy with it, thank you very much. And by her relaxed, synchronized breathing, I’d say Jessica was right there with me. 

What my mind had judged as wrong couldn’t have been more right. The mind thinks it knows best. Its job is to judge. To analyze. To weigh, consider, and to compute. But mind is never, ever, a substitute for the actual experience.

Never.

Ever.

The mind maps out the territory, but the body experiences the terrain first hand. Trust the experience over the map and there would be less fear and more enjoyment.

In the book On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers, an influential American psychologist and one of the founders of the Humanistic approach to psychology, wrote:

Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me.

What decision are you mind-wrestling with today? You can throw the argument onto the mat, twirl it over and over, look at it this way and that, and you will never know the truth of it through thoughts alone.  

When your butt is up against the wall (or, in my case, up against Jessica), you’ve got to dive in and live the experience to know it. Live the questions. Experience the sensations. Harvest what comes. There’s just no amount of thinking that can give you your own hard-earned truth.