Patience

We've all been to yoga classes where everyone around us seems to be doing postures "better" than we are. We know that yoga is not a competition and yet...

What we probably have not considered is the amount of time that person has been practicing. How much effort has gone in? How much patience has gone into creating the posture we covet so much? From my experience, the answer to this is - a lot!

Many of the postures in the Ashtanga Primary Series and beyond are very challenging for the average person. Here's a secret, not everyone can do these postures naturally, even if it seems to you like they can. It takes work - you need to find a way into these, either by lots of preparatory stretches, modifying the posture, or using props. In my case sometimes I do all of these at once.

People don't start with instant, Instagram-able postures, that's not even the point of yoga. There's a great quote about yoga which sums it up for me: "it's not about reaching your toes, it's what you learn on the way there."

Hopefully by documenting my journey in deepening these postures, it can help other practitioners. Rather than refuse to examine and explore challenging postures, we should be welcoming them. It's in these postures that we really learn yoga. What is learned will be different for everyone.

We may learn to be kind to ourselves. We may learn to be truthful in our abilities. We may learn it's a marathon and not a sprint. Some of these postures may take us years to master. Some we may never get to where we want to go. That's ok, it's the journey that's important.

This is where we need to be patient. If we're really lucky, this patience will spill over into our everyday lives too.

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