"What kind of human being gets up from the mat?"
Maybe the real question is not:
"How much better can I perform this posture?"
but:
"What kind of human being gets up from the mat?"
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For a long time, I think one of the biggest obstacles in yoga was my own expectation of what yoga was supposed to give me.
We create an image of the outcome.
We expect a certain experience, a certain transformation, maybe even a certain version of ourselves.
And when reality doesn't match that image, disappointment comes.
But with time, I started noticing that some of the most important things happening through practice were not the things I had been looking for.
The biggest change was the state from which I was experiencing my life.
The day outside might be exactly the same, but something inside is different.
There is a sense of health.
A little more peace.
More contentment.
More space between what happens and how I respond to it.
And slowly, when the state inside changes, life itself starts to look different.
Not necessarily because yoga magically changes the circumstances around us, but because the person entering those circumstances is no longer exactly the same.
You react differently.
You notice things you didn't notice before.
You don't enter every conflict.
You stop repeating certain patterns.
Your perception becomes subtler.
Your decisions change.
And when your decisions and reactions change, the chain of events that follows them can change too.
In this sense, I sometimes feel that the practice removes obstacles from the future—not by controlling what will happen, but by changing the person who will meet what happens.
There are also things about yoga that I simply cannot explain.
And perhaps they shouldn't be explained.
It is a little like love.
You can read a thousand descriptions of love and still not know what love is until something happens inside you and you experience it yourself.
Yoga is similar.
It has to be experienced.
This is why, for me, the posture was never supposed to be the final destination.
The posture assists us.
The breath assists us.
The practice creates certain conditions.
But what matters is what happens within those conditions.
Maybe the real question is not:
"How much better can I perform this posture?"
but:
"What kind of human being gets up from the mat?"
This is also why I have become less interested in speaking about yoga only through its physical benefits.
Flexibility is beautiful.
Strength is useful.
A healthy body matters.
But we have to move deeper than that.
And perhaps one of the best ways to approach practice is without deciding beforehand what it is supposed to give us.
Not with an empty mind in the sense of having no thoughts, but with no predetermined conclusion.
Practice.
Pay attention.
See what appears.
See what disappears.
See what becomes quieter.
See what becomes clearer.
Don't tell yoga what it has to give you.
Experience it, and discover what it actually changes.
Because sometimes the deepest transformation is not that your life becomes different.
It is that the same life is now being lived from a different inner state.
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