Have you ever seen the movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”?
Definitely not a cinematic masterpiece but a chuckle worthy early 2000’s rom-com that I think is worth a watch on a dreary afternoon.
Check out one of my favorite scenes…
My celeb crush on Paul Rudd aside, I feel like this SO often when it comes to my yoga practice.
What does it mean to find the right balance between effort and ease, as Patanjali recommends to us in the most oft-quoted lines in the Yoga Sutras? How do we know when we are doing too much?
If you’ve ever come to my class, even just once, you know my favorite answer is…
IT DEPENDS!
And at the same time, our practice doesn’t have to devolve into an amorphous sea of relativism.
In fact, I’ve come up with a (totally click-bait worthy) list of questions for you to answer that will help you sort out the “it depends.”
1. Are you able and willing to pay attention?
When we are working too hard, it is as if our mind says to us, “This is miserable! I’d rather think about anything else than pay attention to this intense stretch/emotion/painful thought.”
At the other end of the spectrum, if we aren’t working hard enough, it is as if our mind says, “Oh, this is easy. I can do this pose/meditation/breath practice and still solve the worlds’ problems and make my grocery list while I do yoga!”
2. Do you have access to your breath?
And we should definitely and especially be able to pay attention to the breath. When we are working too hard, the breath could become short, shallow, ragged. Or we can’t even begin to notice that we are breathing.
So if you can’t breath well and be able to observe your breath, then you are doing too much.
3. Is this a whole person experience, or just a sharp sensation in your hamstring?
First of all, modern postural practice is obsessed with hamstring stretching. Am I right?
Not to rag on the hamstring stretchy asanas, really you can substitute any part of your body for hamstrings here. The point is, the posture should be a whole person experience for you. Well distributed sensations are a hallmark of just right effort.
That sharp bright tug that you can point to means that something is not quite right. And first thing to adjust is your level of effort.
4. Does what you are doing feel like your intention?
We talk a big game about intention in yoga, especially at the beginning of our classes and sometimes at the end.
But what does it really mean to connect our practice to our intentions?
For example, if your intention is to cultivate compassion but you berate yourself for losing your balance in tree pose… Well, you get my point, right?
So the bottom line is:
“Do less. Try less… No. You gotta do more than that….”
#ThanksKunu and happy practicing! Can’t wait to see you in 2019!