Denise
Yesterday during class, I noticed one of the other
students staring at me. Afterward, she came up
to me. She said she’d only been doing yoga for
three weeks and was like, “How do you do all of
those things?”
The answer is, by practicing every day, for fif-
teen years.
Yoga is really time-consuming. You’re not going
to get it in ten hours, ten thousand hours, or a
hundred thousand hours. But when you put effort
and thought into it, it’s rewarding. I don’t have to
think about the poses as much as I used to; I just
do them. There’s something liberating about that.
Not that I can do every pose. I’m thinking it
might take me twenty years to be able to press
up into a handstand, and there are some things
my body will probably never be able to do.
I’m at peace with that. Ten years ago, I wasn’t
at all.
And after a while, the revelations get really
subtle. Recently I was talking to one of my
teachers about my Warrior II, because she keeps
coming over to me in class and making the
same adjustment. I said to her afterward, “I feel
like I just don’t understand Warrior II,” and she
explained that I should be using my leg muscles
in a slightly different way.
I had never thought of that, and it made total
sense. To me those revelations are pretty elusive,
but they’re why I stick with it.BOUND HALF MOON POSE