"In order to be truly free, you must desire to know the truth more than you want to feel good. Practicing in a way that supports our lifestyle and everything we already know is not a challenge to our basic patterns of conditioning in body, mind and heart, because if feeling good is our goal, then as soon as we feel better, we will lose interest in what is true.” - The Inner Tradition of Yoga by Michael Stone

As a yoga teacher, I find that the following story gets repeated over and over.

I was approached by a student the other day. She wanted to know what she could do to improve her ability to do yoga. She hadn’t been coming to class lately because she had a fall and injured her hand. She did physical therapy for her hand and had gotten better to a certain extent but still found it difficult to do positions where she was weight bearing on her hands. She has been doing pilates and other exercise classes to keep her strength and conditioning up but she has not been able to come back to yoga. I suggested modifying by doing postures on her forearms, which did not seem like a satisfactory answer. I asked her if she still did the exercises her physical therapist told her to do and she said no; she seemed rather bored with that. I suggested that perhaps there were some things we could do to improve the range of motion in her shoulders. Often the site of the pain is not the cause of the pain and students who have pain in their wrists while doing yoga may actually have restricted motion in their shoulders. But she shrugged that off saying that there was not an issue with her shoulders. I suggested other styles of yoga and other teachers. I teach a vinyasa style of yoga where we use our hands for Down Dog and Low Push Up as well as Side Planks and Handstands. Perhaps she needs a style of yoga that didn’t do those things? No, none of that seemed to be satisfactory. I felt somewhat flattered that she wanted to take classes with me. But then I wondered if it was that or was it simply not wanting to let go of what used to be. I get that. Letting go is hard. But, in not letting go we get stuck, bound up in an attachment to something that had previously brought us pleasure. We want that hit of pleasure and we don’t want to be told that we can’t do what we used to be able to do.

Or, maybe we don’t want to be told that we have to do some work to get there. The other side of her dilemma is the idea of doing the work that she needs to do. For her, it might be to continue the exercises for her hand. Maybe she got 80% better and needs to keep going to get 100%. Maybe she will never get 100% better. (I don’t know the extent of her injury. But, as someone who has broken her wrist I do know a thing or two about rehabilitating a hand injury.) There is something entirely monotonous in doing the ground work to rehab an injury or keep ourselves in shape and our bodies functioning optimally. For myself there are certain remedial exercises I need to do to maintain healthy alignment in my hips and back due to my scoliosis and to make sure that my wrist stays feeling good. Those exercises are boring, but they work. I am tempted to skip them because they take up a lot of time. But I know if I do that I will eventually fall into my patterns and habits and be back in pain, again. These exercises are part of my work. They may not be exercises that you should do. Your remedial exercises would be entirely different depending on your body, your issues and what you want to work on.

A common quality we all share is a sense of impatience. We all want to be able to do things now. We don’t want to do the remedial actions, the baby steps, we want the end product, the final result. I once had a yoga student who would get frustrated because she couldn’t do what I could do. She took privates with me, once a week for a couple of years. She never practiced on her own outside of class. I thought she was doing very well for the amount of effort and work she put into her yoga, but that wasn’t good enough for her. She wanted me to tell her what to do to get better. I told her that she needed to do more yoga. I suggested that she take privates with me more than once a week, come to public classes, or practice on her own. But that was not what she wanted to hear. She eventually got frustrated and quit. I felt like she wanted me to tell her the “secret” of yoga, that one thing that would change everything; the one thing that seemed to be hidden from her and did not require any great effort. She wanted to feel good. She wasn’t interested in the truth. Of course, there is no such secret. There is only the work that we each must do.