Trust Is A Muscle

What four astronauts on their way home from the moon reminded me about the back body — and why practicing matters…to remember.

Trust is a muscle.

And like any muscle, we have to train it. We have to find it first — feel where it lives, learn what it's capable of, practice returning to it when the effort gets hard.

Right now, four astronauts are on their way home from the moon. The first humans to travel that far from Earth in over fifty years. This week they flew around the far side — a place no human has ever seen with their own eyes — and trusted the spacecraft, the training, the thousands of people on the ground they could not see or touch, to hold them.

That is not just courage. That is trust as a practice.

From that distance, Earth is not a country or a continent or a city. It is one sphere. One breath. A spaceship carrying all of us together through the dark. Held by forces none of us can see or control.

We forget that we are on it.

The human body is built the same way. Everything we use to navigate the world — our eyes, our ears, our nose, our mouth — faces forward. We walk forward. We reach forward. We effort and strive and move through life oriented toward what we can see, touch, and measure.

This is the front body. Our individual self. Our singular thread. The contribution that only we can make. It is important. It is beautiful.

But it is only half the picture.

The back body is the universal. The part of you that you cannot look at directly, cannot easily find without intention, cannot effort your way into. And here is what is remarkable — the most powerful muscles in the human body live there. Hidden. Unwitnessed. Holding you up whether you acknowledge them or not.

This is not an accident. The thread is individual. The tapestry is collective. And we cannot weave ourselves alone.

Most of us simply never visit the back body. Not because we haven't tried — but because nothing ever brought our attention there. We go on living in the front, mistaking the thread for the whole cloth, our individual effort for the only thing holding us up.

Today in class we started with a block between the shoulder blades. Not to fix anything. Just to say hello. To breathe into that forgotten territory. To feel what has always been there — waiting, holding, larger than we remembered. We became explorers inside our own spaceship, bringing awareness and breath into uncharted places.

Then we took that into half moon pose — a one-foot balance, named for the moon, arms reaching in opposite directions, suspended between earth and sky. We did it first the hard way. Don't look down. Face forward. Find your edge with nothing but your own effort holding you there.

Then we went to the wall. The entire back body received and supported — from heel to shoulder blade. And something in the room shifted. One student said afterward that it gave her hope. That feeling the support — even for a moment — let her believe she could hold the tension of effort and ease together. That she didn't have to choose.

That is the invitation. Not to abandon the effort. Not to stop striving. But to discover that something is already holding the parts of you that you cannot see.

When we bow our head to our heart the back body naturally expands. The surface area widens — like a cloak settling around you. Like remembering something ancient and close.

The breath lives here too. The inhale is individual — arrival, yours, the manifestation of your reality. The exhale is universal — return, dissolution, the great mystery breathing you back into itself. We begin our lives on an inhale. We will complete them on an exhale. Every breath in between is a small rehearsal of both.

A drop of water does not stop being the ocean simply because it took a shape.

When asked to describe the Artemis mission in a single word, astronaut Christina Koch said humility. "We would never be here if it weren't for so many people who came before us."

From 240,000 miles away, looking back at the spaceship we all live on together, that is the word that found her.

It found us today too. In a yoga class. Against a wall. In a body that has been holding more than we knew.

Trust is a muscle. We flex it by leaning into what we cannot see. By turning toward the back body. By letting something other than our own effort be enough — not instead of effort, but alongside it.

Little by little. Again and again.

Kimberlea Smarr is a therapeutic movement specialist and the creator of the BeWell Method™ — a clinician-directed nervous system regulation protocol. Rooted in yoga. Built for clinical use.

Learn more at kimberlea-smarr.mykajabi.com/bewell-method-founding-member-1