Very seldom in our lives do we know that we are at our edge. Almost paradoxically, the ability to recognize a moment as our edge diffuses its intensity, for once we know it and label it, we can move through it or soften around it. With an end in sight, we muster up the reserved energy to make it to the finish line. But when we fail to recognize our pain as temporary, we fall victim to the ruminations and monsters of our own mind that tell us we can never outlast this pain.
Think about this, how often have we given up because of the overpowering, all-encompassing fear of an unknown without a determined end. “I just cannot do this any longer!” we shout, curling into a ball in the middle of a long workout, study session, period of uncertainty about a career, etc. etc.. Ambiguity is exhausting. A potentially endless period of ambiguity is terrifying. But it takes these peak periods of discomfort to let us know that we are rapidly approaching an edge, the mark of a boundary yet uncrossed.
Joel Kramer, an American Hatha Yoga master, describes the edge to have a feeling of intensity, being right before pain, but is not pain itself. Often, the anticipatory mental torment we put ourselves through, our negative self-talk, is much worse than the actual event itself. A study in the Harvard Business Review that measured dread found that “anticipating pain is worse than feeling it.” So what does this mean for us… is it better to do nothing at all than to face our edge?
The answer is no. We just need to reframe our pain to be a bundle of sensation in our body and mind, the signal to our brain that we are growing. In labeling the edge, we move past it, because we have power over it. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you can never simultaneously know the exact position and the exact speed of an object. In measuring and identifying an edge, you push out the frontier of the edge itself, changing the trajectory of our lives merely because we weren’t scared to face the edge head on.
Today I reflected on my edges over the last 6 months, and was amazed by how dramatically I have pushed out the frontier of my own capability. Six months ago, I was struggling to get out of bed, to eat, to put one foot after another. I had been starving myself and making myself throw up for years, had formed such a toxic relationship with food that I could not fathom a time when I could be normal. I saw the way my friends could go out to eat at restaurants and not be paralyzed staring at the menus, calculating numbers and calories. I was so jealous of how they could enjoy food instead of viewing it as poison. I never believed that could be me.
There was a point, when my family wanted to go out to dinner last May, that I reached my edge. I had chosen a restaurant that I thought I could try, having spent hours pouring over the menus in advance. We drove forty-five minutes to the restaurant, and pulled into a parking spot, where I froze. I couldn’t get out of the car, I couldn’t eat there. My mouth dried, my tongue a weight I couldn’t swallow, and I asked if we could go somewhere else. We drove there. Again I froze. My hand wrapped around the door handle but I was unable to move. “Please somewhere else,” I begged. We drove there, at this point my dad and brother hungry and irritated but so sad for me. I felt their pity, a weight I couldn’t carry. “I can’t do this,” I said quietly, surrendering. We drove home, without dinner, to the sound of my muffled sobs. An edge. An edge I failed to recognize.
I look back now and can hardly believe that girl was me. I look at the edges in the past 6 months that I have moved through since then, from an intense internship on Wall Street to my relationship crumbling to juggling 200 hr Yoga Teacher Training and a full schedule of academic classes, and I am amazed by what is possible when we face our edge instead of running from it. With time and small near-death experiences everyday, sometimes as small as taking a shower or making it to class, I was able to push out the frontier of my edge. Celebrating the small wins and little victories, I found myself capable of so much more than I ever believed I was.
The Center for Positive Organizations taught me to celebrate each day a ten-second victory. I began to make my friends and parents share with me their three wins of the day, incorporating a daily gratitude practice into my life. Being able to articulate what my edge was, and how I was standing and facing it each day, was liberating. Brené Brown, my favorite shame researcher, writes that shame needs secrecy and silence to fester. When I began to share the dark parts of myself, I started letting the light in. Calling attention to my small wins of the day gave this light oxygen, letting it breathe and grow.
The Japanese have a tradition with broken things. Every time a vase or piece of glassware breaks, they put back the broken pieces with a binding solution made of gold. Making the broken, shattered object into something much more valuable and beautiful than it once was, this is possible because it had the fragility to break and the strength to be remade. Translated to “golden joinery,” this is called Kintsugi (or Kintsukuroi, which means “golden repair”). Similarly, I have found my edges to become the most beautiful parts of myself. I have started to believe that we are like these remade vases. We must break down and be broken, for it is from that vulnerability and brokenness that we are able to be built up again into something stronger, more valuable, and beautiful than what existed before.
So I now say, “find your edge, celebrate your wins.” In these moments at our edge, our peak sensation right before pain, we are able to act. With small acts of courage, of self-compassion, of piping yourself back together with gold, you remake yourself. Pushing out the edge further and farther than ever imagined, the discomfort reminds us that we are growing. And it is at our edge, these cracks of ourselves, that we let the light in. Filled with gold, we become who we never imagined we could be.