The Asana Trap: It’s Not About The Pose

We don’t practice yoga to get good at postures; we practice yoga to get good at life.

Well, maybe not good, just better.

We practice yoga to get better at handling the hard, real-life stuff. 

Like weird tech problems popping up out of nowhere. 

Or relating to difficult people. 

Or managing negative feelings like impatience, frustration, or fear. 

Negative feelings that surface with your kids, for example. Or people at work. Anxiety about your health. That kind of stuff.

That’s what practicing yoga can help us with.

How?

When we practice the same postures over and over again, it’s like doing a drill. When we can breathe smoothly through our nose when our quads are on fire in chair pose, we practice how to keep it together when we get irritated at work or mad at the kids.

When we practice keeping the mind and the breath steady while holding a routine strap stretch, not only do we notice subtle changes in the body, but we notice the quality of the light in the room, the smell of food cooking,  the sound of wind in the trees, the color of the sky.

We notice life.

We become friends with reality.

When we become friends with reality, we don’t worry about the future so much. We stop catastrophizing.

We understand we can’t control much of anything anyway, so it’s best to stay present and just breathe.

If we do that, we have a much better chance of making good decisions. Because decisions made when we’re breathing consciously and deliberately tend to be much better than the ones we make when we’re short-breathed and angry.

That’s what we’re practicing when we do down dog. Or boat. Or any other posture. The postures are ancient and road-tested. But you don’t really master them; they master you. 

The other night, I had a tech glitch, and my online students could not access the class.

It was like I could hear them knocking on the door, but the door wouldn’t open. 

It was incredibly frustrating. 

I also had live students in the room. 

I had to make a decision:

Do I diddle around with the locked door, or just focus on the people in the room?

For about ten minutes, I tried to do both. I kept my class in down dog for waaaay too long. Multitasking is a myth. (And hard on the arms.)

So I consciously decided to turn the computer off and teach the people in the room. 

I controlled what was in my power to control.

I re-joined the present moment, already in progress.

I took a deep breath.

The class came together. It was good. 

And I don’t know if I could have transitioned from frantic to fully present so nimbly, if not for years of practicing yoga.

You know what I think about all the time? I think: How do people who don’t have some kind of daily spiritual practice live? 

And by that, I mean, How do they negotiate the daily hassles of life without losing their shit. They must be on the verge of losing it every single day.

Because I know I would be. I’d be nuts without my practices. One hundred percent certifiable.

So what is my point?

My point is if you ever get sad because your yoga postures suck, try to think of postures as opportunities to practice qualities you want to exhibit in your real life.

Serenity in the middle of chaos, for example. Or grace under pressure. 

If you struggle to breathe easily in triangle pose, use triangle pose to practice doing your best under constraints.

We don’t practice yoga postures to get good at postures; we practice yoga postures to get good at life.

So what if your handstand sucks? It’s not the point, anyway. 

Just breathe. Really. You got this.