When Your Yoga Practice Feels Flat
BKS Iyengar began Tuesday's session by talking about the inevitable plateaus one experiences on the path of yoga. You may make progress for a long period of time and then you find yourself in a flat spell, where despite your ongoing efforts you don't seem to improve at all. In this plateau you may be tempted to quit your practice entirely, he warns, but if you persevere you may find yourself ascending again. Yoga can be disappointing but if you can hang in, Iyengar quipped, your disappointment could turn into an appointment.
This philosophy is entirely consistent with Pantanjali's teaching that success in yoga comes to those who practice consistently over a long period of time. I find this to be particularly important for people who come to yoga for therapeutic purposes. We are a society in love with quick fixes. People go to the doctor and want a pill or an operation to cure them, preferably something that requires no work on their part.
Yoga is the opposite of a quick fix. While tangible improvements in your health and well-being can begin almost immediately the deeper benefits come to those stay with the practice, to those who have patience and are willing to put in the work over the long haul. Yoga is strong medicine but it is slow medicine.
In order to realize the deeper rewards of yoga, including improved health and less suffering, you need to be able to get through the inevitable dry spells in your practice. This is where tapas, the fire or zeal that you bring to yoga--and which a steady yoga practice can fuel--comes in. Sometimes, your mind may tell you that it doesn't want to practice or that your not making any progress, so why bother? It takes tapas to hear those voices and to practice anyway.
