Now in to my 14th year of practice, and oh how that has changed over the years
At the end of a class last week I was asked how long it would take to ‘hold the poses’. My immediate surface level response was ‘which ones’, so we picked the question apart, and specifically it became ‘how long until I can hold a handstand’.
Ok, now we have the appropriate parameters and variables.
I have also been asked recently ‘how long does it take to improve’ and ‘is x amount of classes per week enough to make a difference’.
The latter part of 2024 and January have seen me welcome some new faces in to class. I love this, I feel like the Statue of Liberty; Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…and I shall show them the energising joy of nadhi shodhana and joint mobility!
There is never any shade on these questions, especially as they are often paired with the delightful compliment ‘you make it look so easy’.
Of course, I appreciate this. And once again, let us check in with the parameters and variables - I have been learning to move my body in a skilful and performative way since I was 4, and I have taught/practised yoga asana pretty much every day for 8 years. There is no shortcut for time and study when it comes to movement, regardless of how many ‘hacks’ you may learn.
This reminded me of the ‘10000 hours to master’ concept, originally discussed in a 1993 study by Anders Ericson about violin students before being popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers in 2008. The basic premise of the rule is that it takes 10000 hours of intensive practise to master a subject. Of course this has been rebutted by plenty of others including Ericson himself. For me however, the core of the idea, is wholly accurate.
You will grow where you focus.
And this is not necessarily always positive. I remember filling up a tea pot at a bar I worked in once, when a coworker came up to me and said ‘have you ever added up how many minutes you have spent doing that?’. My next thought - fucking hell, I have to quit this job.
I never did add up the hours, but I knew already I was spending too much time in places that I did not want to be, doing things I did not want to do, for fear of leaving them. This behaviour was strengthening a muscle, the one that told me I was stuck and I could not do anything else but be here and be in despair. I racked up a lot of hours of that exercise. It did not quite make me bitter, but it definitely did not make me better.
Around that time I was practicing yoga religiously from YouTube videos. I remember the first time I saw a lithe yogic body press seamlessly in to a handstand. It looked so easy, so effortless, that I figured it must be something everyone can do they just did not realise. So I put my handstand on the floor and waited for my body to fly up…I have been waiting for around 11 years now. I jest, I can sort-of do a handstand now, and on occasions I manage to hold it. A while back I pondered why after all this time I still could not press in to it, so I asked handstand extraordinaire Sammy from Yoga Soul, whose instant response was ‘because you don’t practice’. Nailed it.
An important side-bar for me to mention here, is that my desire to want to be ‘good’ encapsulated a couple of different elements. The first was that it was cool and I wanted to do cool shit. The second that I had become obsessed with how this made me feel and the philosophy behind it, so I wanted more. The third was a crippling imposter syndrome and desire to fit in to this ‘nice girl’ aesthetic I had seen on instagram.
When staring in to my rectangle (read - phone), I saw amazing lives, perfect bodies, effortless happiness, fresh mangoes etc. Not the chaos that surrounded me. I have said it before, and I will say it again, I genuinely though that I was the only person who could not handle the lot I had been dealt and everyone else was doing fine. I was the ‘broken’ one and all of you were perfect and normal, so I aspired to position myself as interesting and figured if I doled out enough headstands and banging tunes we could become co-dependant - lol!
During Covid, I opened up to one of you about my Dad, to which you responded with ‘oh Kate, everyone had their shit’, and proceeded to share yours with me. I know now that our squad are agents of chaos, who make Rock n Roll life choices, live on their own terms and do it all with excellent hair.
I cannot speak for you, but part of how I quelled my ‘not-enough-ness’ was figuring out how to do things with my body that seemed impossible. Not only that, how to make them look effortless. What would being ‘good’ at Yoga feel like…and how would it translate in to the rest of my life?
A natural affinity for something will get you so far. But as we know from practically every dance movie there is, to get really good, you have to practice. Yoga asana, however, in my opinion, can be treated differently to simply learning a movement skill, as it is underpinned by walking the spiritual path. In asana, we use the body as a gateway to turn in, to create a mind-body connection and explore our inner landscape. For me the practice is part of a deeper process of svadhaya or self-study, to stoically ask myself ‘why am I like this’ as opposed to an emphatic ‘why am I like this!’.
This is how I practice now, and as I relayed above, it was not always like this. The thing with that is, you are not going to get ‘better’ at physical yoga by only going to yoga. You will likely need to lift weights, do additional mobility training, learn about flexibility and breathing. There will be hours of effort, injury, rehabilitation required to ‘master’ the poses, provided that mastery to you is floating in to each one effortlessly with ease. It is a journey, one with pretty much no ending, because there is always something else that could be refined or an extension of the pose. It will be arduous, repetitive, often frustrating and definitely rewarding. Because learning about yourself is just that. The movement is a mirror for life. Inevitably you will feel silly and let out a little wind or burp mid-class, you will accidentally flash a nipple or fall arse-first on to the person next to you.
And in the immortal words of Chumbawumba, you will get knocked down and get back up again…
So really, you cannot put a time scale on it. I leave you with this quote from the slightly more credible Martha Graham -
I believe that we learn by practice…to learn to dance by practicing dancing or learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same
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