Dreams of Flight
The following is an article published in Handstand Press Magazine Issue 2, Winter 2021. (Image credit to artist Kelly Draws.)
Dreams of Stasis, Dreams of Flight
How anyone comes to handstand training is its own story. Mine is fittingly non-linear.
Many moons ago, I was writing a Ph.D on sacred architecture and mandala art. I’ll spare you the details, but it was subtly stressful spending hours each day thinking about the unique properties of various 2-d and 3-d shapes and why they symbolized what they did for cultures through the ages.
Months of this work had me hunched over from typing or reading all day; my neck and shoulders were especially tight. It was like having a premature taste of old age. And then the recurring dreams began: I was always situated inside a cube with handles on every wall. Virtually weightless, I instinctively gripped the handles and made geometric shapes with the levers of my body. (I later learned these dream shapes had names: planche, manna, flag, etc. And they weren’t all angular: the Mexican/hollowback handstand is an arc.) Since my dream body was so light, all these postures were effortless, flawless. The experience was akin to static flight—hovering above the ground with only the barest contact through my hands. This strange static flight felt euphoric. Waking up brought an intense sense of disappointment.
After a month of such dreams, I took the hint and began trying to form these shapes with my real, imperfect body in the real, imperfect world. In my sleep, planching, hollowbacking and flagging was as easy as if on the International Space Station. In waking life, my body felt leaden, clumsy, rigid, weak… the task of recreating these shapes in daylight seemed all but impossible.
Years passed. I finished the Ph.D and moved on to other things—a college teaching job, starting a family. But my homegrown lever training had taken a firm hold. In fact, at times it reached absurd heights. I built my own “dream machine” with overhead pulleys to help me hop into perfect planches and mannas, and I often found myself wandering into sports shops to check out their range of bungee and resistance bands. Hmm, this lightweight red one might be just right for flag presses… (My wife referred to my improvised training rigs, with an affectionate eye-roll, as “contraptions.”) Although my contraption days are behind me, and I force myself to take days off here and there, that obsessional drive remains; a day spent without at least a little effort toward those dream geometries feels like a day wasted.
What explains the powerful pull of such “weightless” shapes? I’ve tried to understand how I got so fixated with this practice, and here’s a pragmatic explanation. In my student days I was stressed and unfit, and my unconscious mind generated a workout routine that mimicked my studies. Why not align a conceptual obsession (angles, lines, and arcs) with a physical one that reproduced them?
On this pragmatic level, the “varied diet” of these shapes strikes me as healthy. Every handstand (or lever) variant acts as a cure to the imbalances that could be caused by focusing on just one posture in isolation. Manna, for instance, is unusual in that it requires extreme shoulder extension, and as such is the antidote to the shoulder flexion that characterizes most handstand training. Human flag stresses the midline stabilizers and lats like nothing else and dramatically highlights any strength asymmetries in the upper body. Planche hits the chest, biceps and lower back muscles, and paves the way for challenges like planche press-ups. Hollowback stretches the chest and abdomen, and extends my (still somewhat humped) thoracic spine. And psychologically, moving from one radically different form to another breaks up monotony and lowers the likelihood of burnout. Taken together, working all these variants provides an impressive range of flexibility, strength, and coordination demands. It’s an impressive bang for your buck. The pieces fit together like a psycho-physical jigsaw: antidotes to antidotes to antidotes.
But all the pragmatic reasons I could muster don’t really explain why I find myself running these shapes through my mind in idle moments. I can’t speak for any fellow fanatics, but I suspect my own absorption follows from one fact: handstand variants are compelling aesthetic entities. Handbalancing can be understood as an art that comprises lines, angles, and arcs, all constructed in horizontal and vertical planes. For creatures like me, it is an inexplicably pleasing set of geometric forms, sufficient unto themselves. So a deeper payoff to working variants beyond the straight vertical handstand is in the aesthetic sphere: access to more forms entails a wider palette to work from, and what artist would say no to that?
My young daughter, with her rapidly elongating limbs, performs aerial silks. Suspended in waterfalls of blazing color, she assumes many more complex shapes then the weightless forms I dreamed of years ago, back when I was chained to my study carrel. But while she flies suspended from a rig, I mostly stay earthbound; I like the minimalism of just being a body in a gravitational field. The closest I get to aerial is using gymnastic rings, which one could argue is just another subset of balancing on one’s hands to form yet more linear shapes: front/back lever, iron cross, etc. Watching my daughter on the silks, and talking to her about them, has given me new impetus to examine my own practice. The aerialist wraps and unwraps themselves in complex layers of fabric; my daughter expresses a sense of joy at being supported in her aerial freedom. By contrast, the handbalancer (pulleys and bands and walls and spotters notwithstanding) ultimate isolates themselves from virtually all support except a few square inches of hand flesh touching the ground, a bar, a block. How free from worldly support can I get? the balancer wonders. How open, how straight, how arched can I be with no help from anything but the intersection of gravity and intention?
On the Euclidean plane, physically impossible things may exist. Points can hover with a location but no extension. Lines can stretch in purely one dimension, with no width whatsoever. Rays can point forever. There is no sweaty labor, no noise, and no fatigue in the universe of pristine forms.
But the angles and curves of a human body are frail and finite. The lines are never perfect, and never can be. Our forms wobble, and can’t be sustained for long. I’m not weightless when I train, and do not float into position. But just for a moment, I am totally present, totally here. The chaos of life falls away as I find that point of balance; fleetingly the Platonic form of planche, or flag, or manna emerges through me. When that happens, I am self-inscribed in the center of a mandala. It’s a taste of equipoise; a brush with the eternal; an antidote to something I badly need a reprieve from.
The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa writes in his book Orderly Chaos about the mandala principle. “The Tantric tradition” he says, “talks about preparing the mandala with the five ingredients of a cow [i.e., the cow’s snot, milk, shit, piss, and saliva]. Clean up the holy ground with these, going beyond discrimination… then you can build a mandala on it... It’s a tremendously powerful thing to smear it over the whole phenomenal world, the snot and milk and piss and shit and everything. It’s fantastic! It evens out the whole thing. It’s beautiful!” A mandala is about evening things out, pairing opposites with each other so that they complete each other, heal each other. It displays the flaws and vices, the doubts and the anxieties, and accepts that this is a complete picture of you, as well as the human world. This is important: imperfection is the antidote to perfection.
The paradox of making a mandala with your body is that its dignity comes not from an abstract notion of perfection, but from the non-dual pairing of opposites: focus with distraction; belief with doubt; grace with absurdity. I think dignity is this: despite the wonky, lopsided mess of a person that I am, my crude geometry can be fully realized in the world. The sand mandala draws our attention (and sometimes even our awe) not in spite of its vulnerability, but because it is ephemeral. It is always in the process of blowing away and being remade, remade and blowing away.
Pay attention as you enter the form.
Pay attention as you dwell in it.
Pay attention as you exit.
This is dignity, and it is not a dream.