Measuring Progress in Yoga

When I started practicing yoga nearly 20 years ago, I was a bag of skin and bones and I could easily rest my forehead against my shins in a forward fold. Now I have to bend my knees slightly in a forward fold. I told some friends this recently, saying in passing, “oh I am not that flexible,” and they were shocked and somewhat disappointed.

I found their reaction interesting. My hamstrings have changed but I really don’t experience a sense of loss or disadvantage. I started using my body in different ways, hiking, weightlifting, and skiing. I also stopped stretching as much and became more focussed on meditation, particularly loving kindness meditation. My body adapted, I can spend all day on a pair of skis and wake up fresh and ready to do it again the next morning.

This is not an argument about how strength is more important than flexibility or a throwback to the centuries old argument that posture practice or Hatha yoga is not really yoga. Someone who loves doing aerial arts, gymnastics, or yoga poses that require great hamstring flexibility would be very likely to make different justifiable decisions about their body than I have. Flexibility is a useful asset worth developing for many people. But what did my less flexible hamstrings mean to my friends?

We measure what we can see; how far we can bend, how much we can lift, how long we can balance. In yoga we also measure what can not be seen; how well we can “let go” and how calm we can be. Are we becoming the perfect version of ourselves?

Of course tracking our experience in the practice is important, but when I look at my own journey through life and practice, not one part of it is linear and I know that is true for most people. We may execute a killer handstand with tremendous focus and still struggle to make our bed before we leave the house in the morning or scroll mindlessly for hours on social media. We may show up one day, radiant and joyful and show up the next depressed and angry. So what is the purpose of practice if it can not be measured in physical tricks or by the lightness of our being?

Our experiences can deepen our understanding of our minds and bodies but if this exploration does not include compassion for one’s self how can one gain any wisdom? Practice often makes life harder, not easier. We begin to see patterns we mistook for personality and we begin to see the limits of our own knowledge. We become aware of our own hypocrisy without necessarily being able to fix it. We learn lessons and gain tools just to have them slip through our fingers at the very moment we need them most.

It can be an incredibly frustrating process. Sometimes we lose a physical or spiritual capacity we once had. Sometimes we behave in ways we thought the practice had cured us of and sometimes our hamstrings get dense. There is no trajectory to the perfect self and a practice that includes a neat quantification of our progress can end up feeling like punishment.

Yet we are surrounded by images, information, and messages that we should always be optimising ourselves. We just need to follow the right program, the right work out, take the right supplements, stretch this, eat that, manifest this, and correct every deficiency. If everything can be evaluated and measured, if everything can be “fixed” where is the compassion in our practice and what are we losing in its absence?

Recently I taught a very sweet young couple a flexibility and mobility class. I designed this class for people who just wanted to stretch and move and did not want the spiritual practice of yoga. We were balancing on one leg and I saw that the young man was struggling, not just with the movement but with his body, forcing himself past what was safe and easeful. I paused the class and guided a brief breathing practice and a short grounding exercise. We began again. This time he had greater control and more ease. It’s not that he had a problem I needed to solve, I just had a person in front of me I needed to respond to. The capacity he displayed when we began again was not a remarkable physical achievement. It was the simple ability to start over.

I do not offer this as proof that I am a great yoga teacher. I am still learning and I am wary of any story that implies I am wiser than I am. I am simply sharing something I love with others, but the story has stayed with me because it points to something important about the practice that is impossible to measure and easy to overlook.

The body and the mind will learn without all this tallying. It’s not that achieving advanced poses with ease and grace do not indicate an impressive and dedicated practice, sometimes it does. It’s not that outward displays of the benefits of practice are not important at all, it’s just that they are not more important than what is happening where no one can see.

I am reminded of the question someone asked a Tibetan monk visiting Placerville, California many years ago, “don’t you want to attain the highest state?”. I do not remember the answer because the assumption of the question was so shocking - what is the point of spiritual practice if there is no destination? What is the point of the practice if we can not measure how much closer we are getting to the person we wish to become?

When we get quiet and wrap ourselves in a familiar practice with compassion our minds can settle enough to get a glimpse of freedom and a glimpse of peace. Without compassion for ourselves there can be no peace, there is only a war we are waging with our own anatomy and our own racing minds.

I can no longer bend as I once could and I have no desire to become more flexible than I am. What does that mean for my practice? Absolutely nothing.