Balancing Effort and Ease…and Other Lessons I Learned through Yoga

Even though I have exercised regularly my entire adult life, I was not a fan of yoga until a few years ago. I had taken one yoga class many years ago and after a full hour of soothing music and slow movements, I wanted to…jump out of the window! Quite literally, I didn’t have the patience for it. Additionally, as a practicing Catholic, I was unsure how or if I could reconcile the spiritual principles of Yoga with Christianity. There were questions to ponder but I didn’t think I “needed” it anyway. It was just stretching, right? I usually focused most of my exercise efforts on cardiovascular and strength training and could get my stretching needs met with just a few key stretches.  
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Fast forward to a few years ago and as different aches and pains occasionally cropped up, I knew that more stretching would be helpful on a regular basis. A physical therapist friend suggested I try yoga so I decided to see what I could find online. To my great pleasure, I found that there was a whole world of yoga that did not involve going to a studio for a one-hour class. There were yoga recordings of every length and an endless array of focus areas. I found a 20-minute beginner series that looked appealing. I knew I could handle the soft music and soothing voice for 20 minutes and decided to commit to it daily for a few weeks to see what would happen. Well, in those two weeks, I got hooked and have been exploring and growing in Yoga ever since. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned:

• I’ll reiterate that my first lesson was that yoga doesn’t have to be a 60-minute class. You can do even five minutes of yoga and benefit from it. I now do yoga almost every single day and most days, it’s less than 15 minutes.
  
  
• Doing yoga is called a “practice”. There is no performance and it’s not a competition. There’s just you and your mat and getting better (or not) over time. There’s no finish line. No pressure or timeline. You don’t need to be flexible or look graceful when doing yoga. It’s called “your” yoga practice because it’s for YOU.
  
  
• In yoga, each position is called a “pose”, terminology that helps convey that once you are in the position, you just STAY there! In other fitness or sport settings, you often count the number of seconds you are holding a stretch, which gets you so focused on when you finally get to release it. In yoga, you enter into the mindset from the beginning that you should settle in and stay a while – that’s where the benefits are!
  
  
• There are many kinds of yoga and different instructors will place varying degrees of emphasis on the Hindu origins and spiritual practices vs. focusing primarily on the “asanas”, which are the physical poses.
  
  
• There are many principles of yoga that can be applied to other parts of your life. One of those principles is “balancing effort and ease”. Extreme, tense effort or white-knuckling your way through a yoga pose (or life) is not generally the best way to go. Being loose as a goose is similarly unproductive. How can we put forth a deliberate, measured amount of effort and still find a way to breathe deeply and find a sense of relaxation INTO the pose (or the life challenge at hand)?
  
  
• Another principle – there’s a difference between commitment and attachment. It’s helpful for success to be COMMITTED to the process but UNATTACHED to the outcome. See where THE PRACTICE leads you!
  
  
• I’ve developed an interest in arm balances and inversions. It can be scary going upside down and/or balancing in a way that you might fall on your face, but as it turns out, making incremental progress on the CHALLENGE of it is what I’ve grown to love! Guess what else? It turns out that the BALANCE point in some of these poses is just PAST the point you naturally want to stop out of fear of falling over. Of course it is! The reward is just PAST the point of comfort! I can think of a dozen other areas of life where that principle alone applies. How about you?
  
  

Want to follow along on my yoga journey? Check out my headstand and crow pose PRACTICE along with my commentary! Enjoy!

Update - I have since mastered headstand in the grass! You can watch it here!  :-)