Over the past two years, I have begun to practice asanas in an entirely different way than my previous three decades of Yoga. There have been certain stages that I went through that I consider to be growth-oriented changes, and the progression has been an interesting journey. Here’s a short timeline of change:
· 2021: Sensing that my old ways of practicing were no longer making me feel nourished.
· 2021: Shifting towards incorporating other asanas or adjusting standardized sequences, but still trying to maintain some of the fundamentals of structures I had become habituated to.
· 2022: Leaving out entirely the old structures and replacing them with my experiments with asanas and pranayama.
· 2023: Stating within myself as a conscious declaration, “I no longer practice the way I used to, nor do I have a desire to do so again.”
The last stage has been extremely liberating and was the culmination of not so much letting go of something that didn’t serve me anymore, but of seeking and finding what did serve my spiritual needs as well as my physical body. In doing so, I have recaptured the joy and open eyes of curiosity that captured my heart when I started doing yoga many years ago.
For a long time, I would go through what I perceived as ups and downs in yoga practice. Whenever there was a down, or I had to pause because I didn’t have the energy to maintain the intensity of long practices, I would think to myself, “I want to get my practice back.” I hear this a lot from people when they’ve had an injury, gotten sick, or just stopped practicing for whatever reason. The words are invariably the same, “I need/want/have to get my practice back.” Even during that two-year timeline, and for a few years before, I was struggling to maintain what I thought of as “my practice” and each time I would attempt to recapture the level with which I used to be able to do things, the outcomes did not lead to consistency or even greater levels of happiness or awareness.
But to get a practice back is to live in the past, an attempt to recapture something that we identify with. It’s not forward-looking or even focused on the present moment. It’s almost as if we are saying that what was before is better than what is right now. That causes resistance to the present and is the root of grasping, which is exactly what we are trying to not do in yoga. Maybe there was a reason why we got tired, sick, or injured, and to understand how to be, and how to live, within those situations is what spiritual practice addresses; not the doing of some practice, but of how we can be, with presence and awareness, in challenging times. On an even more practical level, the certainty of change is the only certainty that we have in life because the nature of being alive is change. So, if our practices change over time, it is to be expected, and we should learn early on to listen for the signs and follow them, and not spend years building an identity around one, specific form that we hold above all other approaches.
Structure can be good, and structure can be useful. But we also have to be honest about what happens when imposed structures do not work for you or stop working for you. It might mean that structure has brought you to the point where you need to be, and you no longer need it. It might mean that you’ve learned the many tools that you need to create your structure on your own and thus find freedom and autonomy within yourself.
We should also keep in mind that just because a particular structure doesn't suit us anymore, it might still serve someone else wonderfully. So, we cannot let the letting go of old structures become a platform for judgment or blame. This is called allowing space. We allow others the space they need for their growth and allow ourselves the space that we need for ours. Conflict does not need to arise within us over differentiations in practice, towards ourselves or other people or groups.
The ingredients of the structure that we adopt are the important factors, not the techniques so much themselves.
While on the surface of life, and indeed within the chemical makeup of life, change is the driver of existence, Yoga and other spiritual philosophies hold that there is another aspect of existence that is not change but observes change. It is the dependable, enduring, consistent support of awareness, always present, never decaying.
Yoga Sutra 1.32 says that to manage the obstacles that are certain to arise in life, we should practice the awareness of one principle. This principle is the power of seeing, the power of listening, and the power of observation; it is the power of awareness which can take many forms. We can listen with our body, our breath, our ears, our heart, but the listening itself only occurs from awareness.
If we adopt the attitude of awareness in all spiritual disciplines, and of course in our daily lives, then we can use the structure of any practice to understand the nature and character of our minds and learn a measure of self-sovereignty. This is our ability to choose where we direct our minds and what is happening within them. Sometimes thinking that if we “do” enough, it will free us from whatever we are trying to escape or purify—like our minds, or our past behavior, or somehow magically change us into something new. We forget that the attitudes we take are the fabric of the structure we practice, and so if we replace compulsive doing, discipline, and determination with awareness, then the substance of the fabric changes, and we create a new garment to inhabit. Intensive discipline and determination can create stubbornness, which reinforces grasping, and in the end, we hold on to whatever it is we are trying to heal ourselves from.
So new modes of action need to be engaged in, to break that cycle. Patanjali’s suggestion is simple: practice the one, coherent truth which underlies all form. Practice awareness
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