The other day I finally dropped back and came up from Urdhva Dhanurasana (wheel pose).

In a magical alignment of bandha, breath, and backbend, I somehow came to my feet effortlessly, as if some Yogi god had decided to turn on a switch.

“This is what yogi masters must feel like all the time,” I thought. That day on my mat was like any other, and from that day forward, I started coming to my mat searching for that same exhilarating high.

We commonly refer to these days as “breakthroughs.” We wait for them and fantasize about them and come to our mat day in and day out trying to find them. And too often we become obsessed with them, to the extent that we are constantly looking at our yoga watches wondering when the breakthrough train will arrive.

Our high-speed tech world has spoiled us into expecting quick fixes, immediate gratification, and the fruits of our labor paid in advance. We like our coffee to be instant and our rice cooked in minutes. We want TV on demand and our news always to be breaking. We speed date, and speed walk, and speed read. We want our bodies to be lemonade Master-cleansed in weeks and our souls to be saved in 30 days or less.

And if all these things take longer than expected, well then, we want our money back guarantee.

But life doesn’t move like that and nature doesn’t abide by the rules of copy and paste, videos gone viral, and overnight shipping. The universe evolves over an infinite series of minute changes over long periods of time. It took us six million years to evolve into the bodies we have today, and we still have our tailbones, wisdom teeth, appendixes, and fight/flight reflexes to show for it.

Our life follows a similar pattern. Relationships with others are cultivated via incremental changes. What might start as a shy smile will eventually turn into small talk which over a few weeks will turn into real talk, and after enough real talks, numbers will be exchanged and after a few months, hearts as well. Of course the demise of a relationship operates on similar principles of gradualism, as does the evolution of language, and education, and aging, and parenting, and every other human experience.

Our yoga practice operates by the same law of minutia. Every day on our mat might seem indistinguishable from the day before, but in reality muscles are being strengthened and stretched one millimeter at a time, milliseconds are being shaved off of the time it takes us to practice, uncomfortable postures are slowly transforming into tolerable ones, binds hold stronger, breath becomes lighter.

Until one day, after a lineage of small change, the breakthrough happens.

And for some reason, when that day does happen, we suddenly become less concerned with all of the millimeters and milliseconds and milli-improvements that got us there and more concerned with the fact that our leg finally got behind our head.

We tend to view these breakthrough postures as occurring in isolation, in some kind of weird yogic vacuum, when in fact they are a culmination of all the postures that came before it, and the hundreds of times we have performed those postures. There is a subtle gradual change that occurs daily, whether on our mats or at our desks or in bed with our partner, only we are too concerned with radical change to be in tune to it.

We only notice the breakthrough posture, or the promotion, or the day our partner says, “I want a divorce,” and not all of the thousands of little butterfly wing flaps that led to it.

But such oblivion is understandable.

It is easy for us to give more attention to drastic departures from the norm than to incremental changes to it.

From our tiny world view, through our narrow 21st century techno-goggles, our world seems to be moving quickly. And within this scope, we tend to view change as something that comes rapidly, frequently and is drastic is magnitude, and when change doesn’t come, it’s no wonder that we are left scratching our heads impatiently waiting, whether we are waiting for Kapotasana, Mr. Right or that dream job to show up.

But life didn’t start in the technological age, and we must try not to view everything through its version 3.0 lens. We must aim to be gradualists, setting our expectations to small improvements over time.

In our yoga practice, and in our lives, we must be patient while progress is slow and not give too much attention to what might seem like sudden breakthroughs, that in reality, are simply the fruits of our labor which are ready for harvest.

 

 

 

 

Relephant read:

Opening up about Habitual Patterns: Letting go of Impatience.

 

 

 

Author: Lulwa Bordcosh

Assistant Editor:  JoJo Rowden / Editor: Renee Picard 

Photo: Courtesy of Author