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Progress in Your Practice

What happens if, after years of yoga practice, you're never able to touch your toes? Or balance in headstand for longer than a few breaths? Or "jump-through" from downward-facing dog to sitting? What if, after years of yoga practice, you discover that your body will not endlessly delight you with new achievements and limitless progress in poses that challenge you?

This month, I invite you to consider your beliefs about progress in your practice. Is your practice just one more domain in which you feel the need to achieve? What is the "value" of your practice if you don't make physical progress in each asana? What is the point of practice, if not to improve? 

Ambition in your practice is misplaced if you aim to "achieve" more and more difficult poses. The main achievement of a yoga practice is the ability to sustain a steady breath and a peaceful, joyous mind, even when you are challenged. Instead of trying to conquer, perfect, or 'achieve' challenging poses, appreciate the opportunity to be challenged. 

Yoga practice is an opportunity to practice qualities like patience, steadiness, and contentment. This opportunity is greatest when you reach your mental and physical edge in a pose. Advanced poses exist to create this opportunity - and challenge - for every person, and every body. The point is not endless, mindless, physical progress. The point is to provide a consistently challenging and focused experience, no matter how flexible, strong, and balanced you become. If you already have that experience in your practice, be grateful for it. Be grateful that have poses that challenge you. Be grateful that you have opportunities to practice relating to challenge.  

If you're not focusing on making physical progress in a pose, what can you focus on? The process of your practice. Make every action intentional and mindful, and enjoy the immediate effects of your practice.

• Focus on action and sensation - not physical accomplishment - in a pose. Create clarity of both. Approach a pose intentionally. Ask yourself, What am I doing in this pose? Then do it on purpose. Experience the pose as a sustained action, not a place to get to and then rigidly hold. For example, a forward fold can sustain the actions of moving forward, rounding, and releasing. Stop worrying about where you're getting with the action. Instead, notice what you feel when you sustain the action. Modify the action to modify the sensation.  

• Enjoy the energetic effects of your yoga practice. Yoga poses influence how you feel, including your emotions and more subtle aspects of being. These effects have nothing to do with getting "better and better" at the poses. A forward bend is a forward bend, however far you reach in the pose. Whether or not your head is on your knees, you can  feel relaxed and protected in a forward bend. A state of blissful flow can be experienced by any practitioner - simply by breathing and moving mindfully. It doesn't matter if you're practicing sun salutations on a sticky mat, or practicing sun breaths in a wheelchair. Process, not progress, creates the experience of flow.

Your yoga practice is an experience that you have while you practice. It does not have to be a means to something else. 

Ambition can be just one more way to postpone happiness. You will not reap the benefits of a yoga practice when you finally perfect that pose that has challenged you for so long. You will reap the benefits of your yoga practice when you learn to enjoy that pose, exactly where you are. 

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