Patience

Yoga is powerful.  It has the power to transform us and let us grow into who we are meant to be.   It can also be humbling and teaches patience, which of course also allows us to grow.  In our world however, where instant gratification is so often the goal, learning and practicing patience can be daunting.  I know that it is for me.  I want to be able to do a new yoga pose now, darn it!  Or at least I want to be able to do the pose after a little bit of work.  However, the truth is that it sometimes takes months or years of work and practice just to be able to move an extra inch or finally find a way to accomplish a particular pose  with just a slight adjustment.   Even if you do finally master a pose, it doesn’t mean that there won’t be setbacks.

A week ago I was practicing an Ashtanga sequence.  It wasn’t anything fancy but for some reason my body felt very strong that day.  Towards the end of class I tried two poses that have given me fits for ages.  One of them was head stand, and the other was wheel.  In head stand, I would wobble as I raised my feet to the sky and fall as a result.  Wheel was worse.  For some reason when I would try to rise up into wheel my left hand would always slip out from under me and I would come crashing down.  After awhile it got so bad that I didn’t even want to try the pose anymore.  For the last two months I’ve asked for assistance from instructors as I rose into the pose, and while I could do wheel this way it was a struggle every time.

On this day, I arose into head stand without any problems.  There were no wobbles at all; in fact I felt like I was floating on air.  As for wheel, the instructor was assisting someone else and I decided to try it alone.  I placed my hands in a different location, and shocked myself when I rose into wheel just as easily as taking a step.  I was so surprised that I lowered down and tried it again, and again it was perfect.  The next day it was the same, a perfect wheel pose.  I celebrated for days over these seeming conquests.

The following weekend, I was practicing in a flow class and again we were doing head stand and wheel.  As soon as I tried wheel, I once again had the same issues as before and came crashing down.  I tried again, changing my hand position, and while was able to do wheel it was much more of a struggle.  In head stand I also fell.  I tried again, with my teacher assisting, and again fell.  That was enough.

I felt so defeated!  What had gone wrong?  Why was I suddenly unable to do these poses that, just a week ago, had been so easy to do?

After class I talked with my teacher about what had happened in the head stand pose.  I set up in a different way on my mat so that I wasn’t interfering with someone else, and that might have contributed to the problems that I had.  Another possible cause was that my teacher had just made us do camel pose and the counter-pose had been very short.  She wondered if we needed to hold the counter-pose for longer.  However, one thing that she said made complete sense.  Sometimes poses just go away for awhile.  She told me that once in her practice there was a time when she simply couldn’t do crow pose for a number of months.  She had been fine doing it for some time, and then all of the sudden she couldn’t do crow at all for months.  Then, just as quickly, it came back.

Sometimes we go through phases when our bodies simply don’t want to do something that we’ve done many times before.  It doesn’t mean that we’ve lost a pose, just that we have to be patient and keep working until it comes back to us.  It is so very easy to get frustrated when we encounter these little speed bumps in our practice, or when we’re just so, very, close to achieving a pose.  The best advice is to be patient with yourself, keep working and practicing, and one day you’ll surprise yourself with all that you can do.

A Happy May Day to everyone today.

Namaste

John