Practising Falling

It's 2010. I'm 25. So many things are not coming together in my life. Nothing I understand seems to change how I feel. I'm trying to get it "right." But in truth, I feel completely lost.

By then, I had spent almost a decade in the psychotherapeutic field — through studies, trainings, seminars and workshops. That year, I dropped it all, including my psychology studies. It had begun to feel like an endless collection of mental frameworks and loops, systems trying to explain life from a distance.

But something had started to show up in my partner acrobatics practice. At first, I did not have language for it. Then there

was a moment when I realized I was meeting the same challenges there that I had been meeting in my inner world — the same themes I had spent years exploring through psychotherapy.

Only now, I was not analysing them. I was inside them.

So much is happening between two acrobats trying to create a complex balance together. There is listening, adjustment, trust, timing, responsibility. There is the willingness to support, and the capacity to receive support. There is the balance point between allowing myself to be held and maintaining my own ground. I learned to ask for what I needed: more support, less, softer feet, slower. I learned to sense when to hold, when to soften, when to speak, and when to stop. I learned about consent — not as an abstract idea, but as something living and continually negotiated between two bodies.

And within all of that, I wanted to build the capacity to leap into new positions — positions that frightened me. And do you know how I built the capacity to leap? I practised falling.

Again and again, I let my body discover that falling did not have to mean collapse. That I could lose balance and find myself again. That I could be supported without disappearing, and hold my ground without becoming rigid. It was all about play, exploration and practice. There was no need to understand everything before I moved. I could try. I could lose balance. I could fall. I could notice what happened — and try again.

That year, I began to realize how directly my body was speaking to me. I tapped into something I had never accessed before. I later returned to psychotherapy, but I returned differently. I was no longer interested only in understanding experience. I wanted to meet how experience was living in the body.

Today, I see it again and again in my practice: how deeply we have been trained and conditioned to analyse ourselves — to repeatedly circle the same stories in our minds, trying to finally figure them out, and how easily this can keep us trapped inside an endless loop. I know now how draining it can be to try to create change cognitively by repeatedly circling the same stories. Understanding may give us language, but language alone does not necessarily create a new experience.

There, in my acrobatic practice, I was not talking about trust — I was practising being supported. I was not analysing my fear — I was building the capacity to move with it. I was not trying to convince myself that falling was safe. I practised falling.

Through play, repetition and exploration, my body began to discover possibilities my mind could never have reasoned its way into.

A field opened. What had lived as thought and explanation began to move.

It began to speak. It began to be Felt.