There Is No Finish Line
Why We Practice the Poses and Why It Doesn’t Matter If You Can’t Do Them All
It doesn’t matter if you can’t do all of the poses.
Because there is no finish line in yoga. You don’t master every pose and then declare yourself having “finished” yoga.
Yoga is less about the actual shapes we make and more about how we relate to the experience of making those shapes.
Our asana practice is showing up again and again and welcoming what arises each time. Tuning in, listening, witnessing, developing awareness. Building trust with your body, your breath. Feeling connected to yourself and to others and to the universe, and it’s all in service of the ultimate purpose of yoga, the calming of the mind.
This is the actual yoga. You don’t need to be able to touch your toes or balance on one leg or hook your foot behind your head to do it.
Yoga is meeting each moment with awareness and then maybe acceptance, even when things aren’t going our way. A wobbly tree pose may not be what you want, but here it is. How will you respond to the experience that is here? Maybe that wobbly tree may be your best tree ever, because it’s the one you learn the most from.
We know that asana helps prepare the body for the stillness that meditation requires. And, there’s more. In The Wisdom of Yoga, Stephen Cope, a psychotherapist and longtime Kripalu yoga teacher, frames the purpose of the poses like this:
In the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali, the classical text which defines yoga and tells us how to do it, Patanjali only names one pose: A seated position, for the purpose of meditation.
In meditation, the seat is the spot from which we witness our mind, so that we may begin to calm it.
The Sanskrit word asana, which now refers to the physical postures, literally translates to “seat.” Asana is the seat.
So each asana, or pose, becomes our seat in which to witness.
As we flow in our practice, each pose we land in becomes our new seat, our place of witnessing. Warrior I - what is arising in my mind here? Open to Warrior II - what am I witnessing here? Reverse Warrior - what is this experience?
This is why it doesn’t matter if you can touch your toes in forward fold or not - wherever your body lands in forward fold is your seat of witness. As long as you are aware, you are doing yoga, and doing it well. Just keep proper alignment in mind. Alignment helps prevent possible injury, and it also provides a path of greater ease. Things move more easily when everything is lined up correctly.
Even if you did manage to physically master every single pose and could execute each one perfectly on demand, it’s no guarantee of a calm mind. Maybe your mind would be full of thoughts of how great you are at yoga and your ego and pride would leave no room for awareness.
So please don’t let fear of not being able to do a pose that looks “right” stop you from yoga. Yoga meets you and your body wherever you are.
Poses are not the end all and be all of yoga, but they are an important tool to help us calm our minds. Thousands of poses, thousands of seats from which to witness. What a bounty!
And doing cool things with our bodies is fun! Our bodies do awesome stuff and it feels good to move them in all sorts of ways. So often we just move from desk to car to couch; stand up, sit down, lay down. Twisting and bending and stretching feels good. And it feels good to practice and improve, and to sometimes surprise ourselves when our body shows us it’s capable of something we didn’t think we could do.
Can we quiet our minds without using our bodies? Maybe. But why would we when the incredible tool of our body is right here. Our body is here to help us, why would we ignore it?