After one of my classes a while ago, a student came up to me, properly frustrated.
“I want longer hamstrings. I want my hips to open. I want stronger arms. And in your class I push myself, and I get somewhere. Then I read that in yoga I’m not supposed to strive. So which is it, am I meant to give up wanting it?”
No, you don’t.
It’s in our nature to strive towards something, we want to grow, and which direction is up to each of us. When I step on my own mat, I want my body to progress too, to get stronger, to refine the postures. Thirty years in and I still want that.
So how do you progress without pushing yourself?
The wanting is what gets you to your edge. What goes wrong is when the wanting carries on past it, and you end up with a niggle or an injury, frustrated with yourself, further from the posture than when you started.
I know the objection, if I stop trying so hard then surely I stop progressing. No, you stop straining, and those are two different things, which is what Patanjali means by a posture being steady and comfortable at once, stable without going rigid and at ease without collapsing (sthira sukham asanam, Sutra 2.46). In practice that means, if you can breathe comfortably in the posture, you’re doing it. The moment the breath goes, you’ve left the posture and started fighting it.
Your physical limits are different tomorrow and different again the day after, nothing stays the same, which is the whole reason the pushing is unnecessary. One practice you feel stiff, wooden almost, everything catching. Two days later the same sequence flows, feels soft, and you’ve done nothing differently, you just slept better. The hamstrings that wouldn’t move on Monday are a different set of hamstrings on Thursday, and you had nothing to do with that.
The tendency to push ourselves beyond our edge shows up on the mat in real time. And it’s far easier to see it in a forward fold than at eleven at night, when you’re thinking about whether you’re doing enough with your life, or whether you have to push yourself harder, stressing yourself out with nothing more than the thought of it. Same habit, different room.
The moment we stop trying so hard to progress is the moment we progress most, not because we’ve given up, but because we’ve cleared the tension that was in the way.
You can feel all of this happening in a single posture. There’s the edge itself, the place where you’ve got intensity but not pain, and growth only happens right there, it stops the second the body braces and gets tense. There’s the sentence running underneath it, “I have to get this,” which is why we push beyond. Swap it for “I wonder what I’m finding out here” and it changes almost nothing about the posture, and almost everything about the tension in it. And there’s the breath, which never lies about any of this, steady means you’re still in the posture, straining means you left it a while ago and you’re now just fighting your own hamstrings.
If you’ve been quietly cross with your own hamstrings lately, that isn’t a fault in your practice, it’s the attachment finally showing itself somewhere you can see it. Which is, if you’re looking for the useful part, exactly why the mat is worth getting on in the first place.