Balancing in the dark...

An interesting thing happened on the mat yesterday.  Now that school is out and I have a short respite from shuffling my children around after school, I have more time to take yoga classes at the gym (where there's childcare for said children). I was taking Josh's Thursday afternoon session, which started off boringly similar to his Wednesday morning session: lying flat on the mat, breathing in and out for the first 5 minutes of class.  As he usually does, Josh redeemed himself by mixing it up a bit, although it did take a while to get to the stuff that usually gets your heart rate up.  (This is what happened on Wednesday - after a long, slow warm up, we were doing plank to chaturanga to plank again, which is basically a hard-core military push up.  Trust me, it is  h-a-r-d.).  Thursday's class transitioned into some abdominal work - not as hard as the Wednesday arm work, but enough to make you feel it where it counts.  By the time we transitioned into the standing postures, I guessed that this would be a more introspective practice, and that's just where Josh went with it.
Sometimes, all you're meant to do in a yoga practice is "notice" things.  Notice the way your body responds to certain postures;  notice which postures force your mind to wander, and which bring attention back to your center.  When the flow of the class moved on to Tree pose, I knew that's what this practice was about, and I was determined to "notice" how my body responded to Tree.  The class was guided to stand firmly on the left leg, and bring the heel of the right foot to touch the left ankle.  This is called a "grounded tree", and with your right foot acting like a little kickstand, it isn't generally that challenging to balance.  BUT, Josh asked us to flutter our eyes closed - and I lost it (balance, that is!).
This simple action of removing visual cues really challenged my sense of balance.  I was surprised at how much I wobbled around, how much I was forced to engage my core to stand still, how I was so tempted to peek an eye open.  Following this, we opened our eyes and put ourselves into regular tree, with the right foot coming up the left leg as far as is comfortable.  We kept our eyes open this time, and I found this usually very challenging posture to be quite a bit easier compared to the eyes-closed-kickstand tree!
We repeated the pose on the other side, but this time I knew what to expect.  I changed my drishti (focus of gaze), just to see if I would notice any differences.  Wouldn't you know it, I did!  The first time around, my focus was on a spot on the horizon (well, the place where the wall meets the ceiling, as we were indoors) - I was looking out into the future.  I didn't know what was coming, figuratively and literally, so when our eyes fluttered closed, I was unstable, unsteady, wobbly.  The second time around, I purposely focused instead on the tip of my nose.  This time, I was looking at the present - where I stood at that moment in time.  I knew where I was, I knew what I was doing, and I wasn't nearly as imbalanced.
How did this speak to me?  It brought awareness that whenever I feel imbalanced, it may be better to shift focus - instead of worrying about what's coming next, think instead about the here and now.  Focus on where I am and what my purpose is, and I'll have a much better foundation (in practice AND in life).

Either that, or I just have better balance on my right leg!

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." - Henry David Thoreau