What Yoga Taught Me About Letting Go

by Oct 15, 2018

If you’ve practiced yoga for a while you’ve had a nemesis pose. That pose that you just can’t get. It’s like your body (or your mind) just can’t work it out no matter what you try. During my early years of yoga, my nemesis pose was Crow.

I’d sit on mat watching other people pop into Crow Pose with ease. I tried and tried to perfect it – to the point where it wasn’t fun because I was beating myself up. One day after another failed attempt, I decided to let it go. I said to myself, I may never get into this pose and that’s ok because I can still enjoy trying. In that moment, I made peace with where I was and shifted my focus to enjoying the process.

The next week I got into Crow pose. 

Read More: 6 Poses to Build Up to Crow Pose

I learned an important lesson that has served me both on and off my mat –

Sometimes you must let go to go further.

When you focus more on perfecting a pose rather than enjoying the process, you’ve lost sight of the spirit of yoga. Yoga is a discovery process. If you worry too much about being perfect, you become rigid and may miss the beauty of the journey. So what if you never get your leg behind your head or hit that perfect headstand, you can still have fun along the way. Be easy about it and see where it takes you. You may just discover that can do far more than you thought.