My practice has changed a lot lately. A lot of the change has been mental and emotional, and the biggest part of the physical change has been that I’ve dropped back to barely doing yoga at all. I teach my classes, and I do 20 minutes or so of yin when I need to relax after a challenging day, and sometimes I get home early enough and make dinner quickly enough that I can do a whole practice one day a week, but I have been to a single class in about two months, and I do a real practice less than once a week.
This has caused other physical changes, which I’ve complained about recently on the blog. The tone on the sides of my waist is gone. My manly delts are gone. Some of the strength of my hamstrings is fading. My good posture is mostly gone and my leg pain has intermittently returned.
What remains: my balance, a good deal of my flexibility (although my shoulders are suffering), and all the knowledge and confidence that came with teacher training. My hips seem to limitlessly open even as my hamstrings shrink. My back is a little less flexible but feels a lot stabler (which is actually a relief). The exactness with which I do the poses has not changed, and this is the quality that I would pin down as the thing I’m proudest of about my practice.
But the way I feel about all this is…fine. I feel fine. Although I’m not content with the situations that have led me to do less and less yoga every week, and not content with doing it so infrequently, I seem to have lost the obsessive drive that took me through nearly the first two years of this practice. Suddenly I’m not so sure that it matters whether I can put my leg behind my head, whether I can do arm balances that elude me, whether I’m the most flexible or strong yogini in any given room.
I think what’s changed is that I somehow don’t care if my practice is impressive, even to myself. I admit that the person I was trying most to impress with my yoga was myself, to show myself that I was capable of doing all the things I wanted to do. But what others thought of my yoga mattered, too. Where I was in the strata of students, and then later of teachers; whether I looked awkward in poses because of a lack of flexibility, whether I was straining because of a lack of strength. But I think that’s starting to matter less to me.
The reflective yoga class I went to a couple of weeks ago was taught by a woman who was very low on the scale for both strength and flexibility. She would never have been on the cover of Yoga Journal. But she still taught beautifully, and she had an inner light and strength that was wonderful to see. For a while, in that class, I felt proud of my own abilities (as I usually do), but soon I saw they didn’t really matter much there. It was just about what you could enjoy, not how far you could go.
This has always been an attitude that I knew was there in yoga, and that I knew was extremely valuable, even as I scoffed at it just a tiny bit. I loved the peace and sweetness and energy that yoga gave me, but a small part of me wondered what the point was if you weren’t turning your body into rubber bands. That may sound terrible to those of you who are enlightened, but that’s what I thought, and yes, I still feel that way just a little. They say that the point is to find inner peace, but if that’s the case, why integrate a physical practice? Why not just meditate? You can be as fat as you want to meditate. Just ask Buddha.
But in beginning a small, inexpert yin practice, I’ve embraced a style of yoga that I never thought I would. Yin has always seemed unbalanced to me – way over on the side of flexibility, and without any strength. I also didn’t think my prana could flow particularly well if I just sat in paschimottanasana for a million years. I worried that I’d be thinking too much for the practice, that I wouldn’t be able to sit still either physically or mentally, and that the noise would intrude on the practice.
The thing is, it’s gone the other way, and the practice has intruded on the noise. Yin suits me perfectly at this very yang time in my life. And I’ve started to question all of my attitudes about yoga, started to wonder if how strong and fit I can make my body makes any difference at all. If I can enjoy a quiet, calm practice this much, and if I don’t need to be able to do jumpthroughs to feel good about myself, why on earth should I work as hard as I’ve been working in the last two years to get even better, even stronger? If I can still do yoga, and still teach, what the hell difference does it make if I can’t pike up into a handstand?
I still want to be able to do those things, of course. I still have goal poses in yoga. But to be very frank, I’ve met the goal that mattered most to me: full king pigeon pose. I can do it even semi-warm now. I am proud of that. But even that matters less than the happiness that doing yoga brings me when I get the chance to do it – even as I see my muscles shrinking, my flexibility waning. I still feel content. Because – even despite the fact that I gained those muscles once, and can gain them again in time, since life is long – I can still breathe, I can still move my limbs and feel the blood and the life coursing through them. If I have that, do I really need to impress anyone with my practice?
I think the answer is no. I think the path to contentedness lies in that no. And although it’s brought me a lot of instability and fear, because that is not how I was taught to live my life, I am so glad that I’ve found it.
I was talking to BF about this and many other things on Saturday afternoon. He told me that I have many paths at my feet right now, and it’s very hard for me to choose the one that’s going to make me happy. I’m confused. So the yin practice is teaching me to sit down by the river, under a tree, and enjoy where I am. Rather than climbing up a hill, or crashing through the woods, or striving in any other way as I have been, it is time to sit. And rest. And prepare for what’s next, so that I can make a genuine choice rather than picking the path of most resistance.