Yoga is not the path of least resistance.
When I was going through the process of reflecting on my “lessons learned” around my birthday, I had a flashback of one of my first asana teachers. I started studying with Christina Sell in 1999 on Gurley Street at Kelly Grey’s studio Suranadi Kula. She was teaching about the importance of doing the hard work on the yoga mat and the practice of meeting and owning the resistance that surfaces when we do the hard and scary work of transformation.
Years later Christina and I spent multiple summers at Feathered Pipe Ranch in Montana on retreat with Patricia Walden and John Schumacher, two Senior Iyengar teachers. Besides being amazing yoga teachers, they are both pretty funny, especially in a retreat environment. Over those few years, I heard them refer to the practice as “doing the donkey work”. I really loved that. To me it was a reminder of the fine print of the practice on and off the mat. Our practice and our life doesn’t have to be glitzy, shiny, perfect, or polished. It’s not about the perfect pose, the perfect outfit, the perfect hair, the perfect social media post.
It’s about the hard work – the donkey work.
Yoga is not the path of least resistance. It’s about doing the hard work. It’s the path of transformation. It’s about bliss-ipline (bliss + discipline). This is a word a recently learned from reading The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, by Vishen Lakhiani. I’m loving this book and all of the fun words he makes up to redefine our relationship with concepts like discipline and rules. Blissipline is the bliss we experience from living a life of discipline, from a life of transformation, evolution and change. Discipline is a dirty word for many people. There’s a kind of grit involved.
Transformation:
- It happens in the physical practice when we work on alignment: when we work on the poses, the poses work on us.
- It happens in the mind when we challenge the ego: when we evolve our identity, our habits start to align with our values
- It happens in the heart when we act from vulnerability: when we stand for what’s right versus what’s easy, we settle into ourselves.
Instead of doing what is easy and habitual we build new pathways of knowing ourselves. Sometimes we need a teacher, a coach, a supportive community. It’s why many of us show up to group yoga classes. The path of least resistance rarely takes us where we want to go. There is a need for a kind of spark, fire or what is referred to as tapas in the yoga tradition. Since transformation is the fruit of a yogic life and lifestyle, many times there is a need for us to reframe our relationship with what’s uncomfortable. Many scholars even define hatha yoga in that way – to strike, to transform.
There is a need for a specific kind of heat to be created in order to change and it doesn’t take place by simply wanting it to, yearning for it to or intending it to. Christina used to say (and likely still does) “this is not a zen koan” when she was teaching something deep that we could really take action on in the relative world. To me this is the core of an alignment-based practice. It’s about anchoring my consciousness, my deepest intentions in the physical form. We do it on our yoga mats and there are about 23 other hours in the day we have choices to do it as well.
What I took from that was we have to DO more than just think about things, or write about them, or even “sit” with them. We have to actually DO something. And the reality is that most days the doing doesn’t have to have any particular kind of mood about it. It doesn’t even have to take that much time. It doesn’t have to be 90 minutes of yoga everyday, 10 minutes is going to be a game changer. You don’t have to be facing east while you meditate, if you sit in silence for 5 minutes every day no matter where you are, you are going to feel changed. You don’t have to be a vegan, although eating more veggies is going to give you more energy, but simply planning meals around vegetables will increase your energy.
When we make these small changes and maybe even automate what time we do our yoga, or walk our dog, we don’t have to spend too much mental energy on it any more, we just have to do it. I see it time and again in yoga and in my 10 Weeks to Easeful Living Course.
Most of us aspire to improve some area of our lives whether it’s on our mat or off. Desire and intention alone isn’t enough to make those improvements. They are a boon, don’t get me wrong. I just believe there’s more to it. There is a need to match our actions with our desire. It’s our actions that lead to results and directly shape our future..
It’s a practice on and off the mat. You’re invited to join me on the mat starting August 18th and off the mat starting July 31.
Click here to book a time to chat with me to see which one might be best for the transformation you yearn for in your life.
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Rachel Peters is a yoga teacher, yoga health coach, lifestyle and habits expert, easeful living advocate, and lover of wild places. She leads others towards Embodying Ease through a yearlong wellness & lifestyle journey to dissolve perfectionism, embody daily habits that promote mental clarity, overall ease, and deeper connection to life on this wild ride of modern living. Learn MORE today!