Like most things in life, the truth is often far less glamorous than the world would like you to believe. Take yoga. Most people’s exposure to yoga comes through Instagram, where they see photos of people gracefully holding a forearm stand or some equally challenging pose without any visible kind of effort. In reality, yoga is nowhere close to easy.
When I first started practicing yoga in 2014, I wasn’t good in the slightest. I trembled in downward dog and my wrists hurt no matter how much I tried to fix my alignment. Certain poses like headstand and handstand, I simply wasn’t able to do. Granted, I’m still progressing to those particular poses. But that’s one of the things that yoga has taught me: progress takes time. How can you expect to jump into a perfect handstand without falling a thousand times first? How can you believe your body will magically be able to do poses without practice?
My favorite example of this is plow pose. It’s a fairly common pose in Vinyasa yoga practice. You generally start in shoulder stand and then lower your legs behind your hand, so that you’re balancing on your shoulders and your feet touch the ground behind you. For the longest time, I couldn’t get myself to bring my feet to the ground. I was happy to hover them at 90 degrees, but when I felt my chest cavity compress — it terrified me. For four years, I would oscillate between wanting to go to plow pose and being too terrified that I would break my neck.
It was one of those ‘I’ll never get there’ poses.
But regardless of that fear and apathy that I couldn’t reach down, I still tried. Every class, I would think to myself “Just a bit further.” But still, for four years — I never felt like I was getting close at all. Then one day, I decided I would reach a bit further than I usually did — and suddenly the floor was there to support me.
I froze because I could hardly believe that my toes were brushing the mat behind me. All that fear that had paralyzed me before faded away. Four years of steadily trying finally gave way to reaching the pose that I had wanted for so long. In retrospect, it occurred to me that I had been slowly trying and giving the pose my effort for so long that the process itself had become my pose versus the actual expression of it.
Sometimes in yoga, we have these little realizations, moments of clarity that remind us that the goal of yoga isn’t to do asanas perfectly. Yoga isn’t reflected by the Instagram tags and the perfectly posed photos. It’s a process, a practice where you learn to clear your mind and mindfully exercise your body.
The first moment of clarity I had for plow pose was that in fact, progress does take time and that the journey towards getting into a pose is more beneficial than the actual pose itself.
Two weeks after getting into plow pose, I attended an inversion workshop to practice getting into headstands and handstands. As we practiced, I reflected on how much I wanted to get into headstand. It was another of those ‘I’m never going to get there’ poses. But this time, my mindset was different. Much as I wanted to get into the pose, I was reminded that getting into yoga poses takes time and practice.
Was I practicing my headstand everyday? Um… no. Far from it. So why then, should I be expected to get into it after just one day of intense practice? The short answer was: I shouldn’t.
This whole series of reflections and thoughts culminated last weekend, when a teacher of mine was talking with us about using yoga blocks. She told us a story about how when was in teacher training, she used to just throw her sweater to the side when it would get too warm. Her teacher would then come and carefully fold the blanket day after day. Finally, one day she asked him: why do you always come to fold my sweater?
His response was, the way you do something is the way you do everything.
Consider, my teacher said to us, what a shame it would be to throw around your blocks carelessly when you’re aiming to have a mindful and conscious yoga practice. All of this, naturally, a long drawn-out story to remind us to place our blocks mindfully during our practice.
Since that class, I’ve been mulling that phase over in my mind, ‘The way you do something is the way you do everything.’ And it’s really stuck with me. The way you care about the smallest things in your life is the way you should take care of everything. Say you always pay more attention towards getting into a pose rather than appreciating the journey towards reaching it. Aren’t you saying that you care more about the result of all things in your life rather than the journey?