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The Thinking Yogi by Kerry Maiorca August 2005: Practicing the tough stuff Picture this: you're in class, struggling to relax into an intense hip stretch, when you look across the room and notice another student effortlessly flopped down into the pose, looking like she could fall asleep there. Then your teacher says, 'Everyone finds some poses to be easy and some poses to be difficult. The key,' she says, 'is finding a balance so that you practice not only the poses that come naturally but also those that challenge you.' But that's not always fun, is it? Sometimes it just feels good to practice your 'easy' poses, the ones you can do without a wobble, using very little physical or mental effort. But consider the long-term repercussions of this type of practice. First, practicing only poses in which you are a star inflates the ego and is a sure path to a loss of humility. ‘I'm awesome!’ you think when you look around and see other students falling out of the arm balance in which you are perfectly perched. And then when it comes time for the deep hip stretch, you conveniently have to leave the room to use the bathroom. Secondly, this type of practice can lead to imbalance. If, for example, your body is super flexible and all you ever do is harp on that flexibility, you'll not only neglect to develop the important elements of stability and strength, but also you're likely to injure yourself. Yoga practice is about creating a balance, both physically and mentally. By working on poses that challenge you to move into uncertainty or wobbliness, you're taking your practice beyond the physical. You're practicing humility, learning to observe the workings of your mind, letting go of the desire to out-pose fellow students or to compare yourself to the pictures of scantily-clad people in extreme backbends on the cover of yoga magazines. You must develop a taste for working on the poses that don't come easily, the ones in which you look less like a superstar and more like a regular human being. When you practice poses that challenge you, it reinforces the idea that trying new things in daily life may require some wobbling and uncertainty, but these challenges are crucial to the development of yourself as a vibrant human being. If all you ever do is stoke the fire of that which you're good at, you're likely to be doing the same thing at age 70 that you are today. You're likely to become one dimensional, to lack in stability and substance. If you wish to continue to grow as a person you must try new things, whether that means something as simple as a new yoga pose or something more difficult like changing a long-held habit in your daily life. When you begin to see things in this light, when you take the long view, it suddenly becomes unimportant how you look in a pose. Over time you'll observe that your body begins to balance out, there isn't such a huge disparity between your strengths and weaknesses. Plus you may find your thinking has changed a bit, too. Ideally, practicing in this way will allow you to feel yoga poses from the inside out, rather than simply judging them based on how they look. In yoga practice, the little things are really the big things. By practicing poses that are difficult for you and by observing your thoughts as you do so, you are learning to embrace new challenges as opportunities to learn and grow, both on the mat and in your daily life. |
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