Progress in Yoga
If you’ve been in class with me this week, you’ve heard me working through some of these thoughts already. These days, I often figure out what I’m trying to say somewhere between teaching it, driving home, and writing it down. So thank you for bearing with my half-formed thoughts.
This past weekend I took a workshop online with Holly Kostura, a senior Iyengar teacher based out of PA. The topic of the class was exploring the actions in Adho Mukha Vrksasana (handstand) and Pincha Mayurasana (forearm stand). It was hard! Holly is an exacting teacher and, anyways, those are challenging postures. Luckily, I was joined by a friend, and it is always more fun to suffer through a hard yoga class with a friend.
During the workshop, Holly said something that has since held my attention. She said it is good to practice with an aim toward progression. Without it, we inevitably move toward either regression or stagnancy.
Progression requires you to become a beginner again and again. Learning to kick up to handstand is not really any different from learning to press back into downward dog. When you are a beginner at something, the experience is always the same. You have to approach it with all of your faculties—body and mind—and practice, practice, practice, until it is time to progress again.
As a physical practice, progression in yoga is fairly concrete. Particularly in the Iyengar system, there are clear levels—beginner poses, intermediate poses, advanced poses, and so on. And an interested student likely has their own lists and categories of postures that are difficult and toward which they strive.
But yoga is not just a physical practice. It is certainly also a contemplative practice and, for many, a spiritual one as well. It can be argued that it’s also an artistic practice, a scientific practice, an academic practice…the list goes on.
But I have always been most interested in yoga as a contemplative practice, and so I’ve been thinking—as a contemplative practice, how do we recognize progress?
The answer (or, one answer, anyways) came to me from an old professor of mine, Dr. Jordan Quaglia, who developed a model for defining contemplative practices in which he asserts that all contemplative practices have a combination of three “lasting outcomes”: presence, clear seeing, and compassion.
If these are the contemplative outcomes toward which we aspire in our practice, perhaps they give us a way to notice our progress over time. We might ask ourselves every now and then: How present or distracted am I? How clearly am I able (or willing) to see myself? And how compassionate am I with what I see? Our physical practice becomes the laboratory in which we practice these contemplative aims, which we then carry “off the mat” and into our lives.
And this relationship goes in the other direction as well. Just as the physical practice gives us a place to cultivate these contemplative qualities, those same qualities make our progression in the physical practice possible. I can only learn to kick up into handstand when I am fully present; when I can see clearly what the pose requires of me (and what in my own body is preventing those actions from taking place); and when I am compassionate enough with myself to tolerate the difficulty of learning.
The many facets of practice — the physical, the contemplative, the spiritual, the artistic… — work synergistically toward yoga’s ultimate aim of liberation. With an aim so intangible, these small markers of progress become even more sweet and important to savor. As written in an issue of Yoga Rahasya, we must “taste” and “smell” the effects of our practice so that we are inspired to continue.
