Going Deeper

In the beginning

I was a hurdler, sprinter, and long jumper in college. In track practices and meets, the goal was always to sprint faster and jump farther. When you made progress, the evidence was absolute, even if you’d only beaten your last personal best by one hundredth of a second or a half inch. After college, the sports I engaged in were not so easily quantified. Still, I often compared my 'performance' to the last one: How long did it take me to get from Point A to Point B? What weight did I loft last time? Did I tire out more or less quickly this time? How well did I keep up with my training partner? And so on.

So what is 'Progress' anyway?

Yoga asana being a physical practice, I approached it the same way early on because this is the paradigm I’d grown up with—as have most of us. We look for results in the form of how far the body can move, compared to the person on the next mat and compared to our last practice. When I first started asana practice, touching my toes in a forward bend was but a dream. Six months in, my inborn flexibility had returned and I was nose-in-my-shins in seated forward bends. Progress, right?

If you approach asana practice from our familiar Western paradigm, you could definitely interpret it as progress. But as I came to find out over the years, the concept of progress is a completely different animal in yogic thought. I came to find out that progress in yogic terms was not the continuous push to go deeper into poses—to rest my nose on the floor in forward bends, move ever higher in back bends or stay longer in inversions. Progress in yoga is exactly the opposite:  to rest more deeply in the pose that you are already in, because this is where you find yoga’s greatest promise—the settled mind.

I often tell my students that deepening our practice does not mean adding more Cirque Du Soleil postures or crazy arm balancing. There is not some pose somewhere out there in the future—one where you look more like the bendy gymnasts that grace the covers of Yoga Journal or populate Bikram asana competitions—that’s better than the one you are in now. The pose you are in now is, in fact, the most perfect pose for you in THIS moment. And since THIS moment is all we truly have, our choice is this:

1. to wish it was different and push to make it something different, or 
2.  to relax into it right now just as it is

When all effort is relaxed

Many people are familiar with the following two sutras from Patanjali about asana practice:  

·      Sutra 2.46:  The physical posture should be steady and comfortable.

·      Sutra 2.47 says:  [Asana] is mastered when all effort is relaxed and the mind is absorbed in the Infinite.

Hmmm. Nothing in there about rocking crazy-fancy poses or about pushing your edge. I think what Patanjali is suggesting is to relax into where we are right now. In releasing effort, we cease doing the pose. When we cease doing the pose, we are free to be the pose. If the definition of yoga is “the settling of the mind into silence” (Sutra 1.2), then to go deeper in the yogic definition is to cease struggling against what is and to instead settle into the vast peacefulness that is available in each moment when we stop struggling. It doesn’t matter whether the asana you’re practicing is active and challenging or quiet and restorative. Can you relax into the truth of this pose, right now?

Of course, with all of us being Western yogis, the competitive paradigm is deeply woven into our conditioning. It takes time to rewire that pattern so we can begin to practice yoga asana from a completely different intention. That process is another challenge we can relax into—the truth that the pattern of struggling and striving still has power, and probably will for a while. But that is what is present. Relax into it.

Be patient and kind to yourself. Get curious and explore if you are willing to relax?  If you are willing to let go of the striving and the pushing and the achieving in order to choose to just be—be with what you are, be with what you have, and be in the sensation of the present moment feeling whatever it is you need to feel and the emotions attached to those physical sensations.  Are you brave to sit within yourself with yourself? Are you willing to wrap your arm around your deepest fears and wounds? Are you willing to explore the ‘who’ and ‘what’ you are in the present moment?

After two decades of asana and meditation practice, I can attest to the fact that the mind is much more stubborn about changing its habits than the body is. With patience and softness around the process, your experience of what it means to go deeper in yoga will evolve. Enjoy your present process, because that’s all there is. Be brilliant.