Repetition Over Time
As a child, I ate the same lunch every day: a peanut butter sandwich, carrot sticks, raisins, an apple, and a carton of milk I bought at school. Occasionally, I had tuna instead of peanut butter and an orange instead of the apple. Fridays were pizza day, so I bought lunch at school on Fridays. At any rate, every Monday-Thursday, Mom asked me what I wanted and every day, except for the afore noted substitutions, I asked for the same things.
I was a picky eater back then and so maybe this redundancy reflected the small range of foods I enjoyed at the time. Maybe the repetition was an unconscious attempt to create something predictable in my world. Maybe it was budding OCD tendencies. Maybe it was simply my temperament, because the truth is I feel at home with repetition and routine.
I have been thinking about those peanut butter sandwiches lately as I plan sequences for my advancing back bend class. Well, all my classes, I suppose. At the heart of practice is repetition and an investigation into oneself through repetitious acts done over a long period of time with reverence, which means that a lot of practice is the same. You’ve seen the t-shirt, right? Another day, another dog pose. (Of course, there is another great T-shirt where we are reminded that Dog is God Spelled Backwards, but that is a different blog entry for a different day.)
Every day is also different. We live in bodies that are ever-changing, dynamic organisms within circles of communities and ecosystems that are also in flux. Down dog today is not necessarily the dog you knew yesterday or the one you will experience tomorrow. Injury, illness, news cycles, world events, hormonal fluctuations, and factors too numerous to name affect us and our practices to greater and lesser degrees.
Given that so much of the practice is the same, many of us have ALL the information we need to practice asana for the rest of our lives. Years ago, at a large teacher’s gathering, there was a mood of complaint about how our teacher “wasn’t teaching anything new.” One of the long-time certified teachers looked at the folks who voiced the complaint and said, “Well, chances are if you were really doing all the things you already know, you would be satisfied with what he was offering.”
I think both things are true.
I like learning new tips, techniques, instructions, and ways to approach the poses. Just recently, a teacher gave me a correction about moving my pelvis that was life-changing. Essentially, the instruction isn’t different than taking the top of pelvis back to move out of my extreme anterior tilt, but by teaching it from the hip joint, I had all kinds of new insights emerge. Same goal, different entry point for my awareness— game changer.
Also, I find teachers who continue to learn and evolve themselves quite inspiring. At the time the above criticism was offered, this particular teacher was, in my opinion, a bit stagnant in his own development. To be fair, anyone who has been my student more than a year knows that I cycle through periods of stagnancy and growth, of fresh insight and boring sameness, of enthusiasm for practice and teaching and burnout and cynicism.
At the same time that ongoing development is important, alignment instructions, prop techniques, new cues, different sequences, etc. can function like “shiny objects” that place the answer for progress outside of our current field of awareness, knowledge, and experience. We can fall into consumeristic thinking relative to yoga education where there is a never-enoughness driving our studentship, rather than the love of learning. Always needing something new can also masquerade as a love of learning when sometimes we are just resisting doing the work we already know is ours to do, living in some kind of yoga wanderlust. One of my early yoga teachers used to say, “Many questions boil down to is there something other than the pose that I can do to get better at the pose?” Sometimes the pressure we feel as teachers to offer something new all the time is actually sparing our students from the realities of the day-in, day-outness of regular practice over time.
Growth is not easy, nor is it a constant upward movement of “every day in every way I am getting better,” no matter what the new-age aphorisms promise. Seems to me that much of the path involves staying in place through those times when repetition is marked by a mood of dull-sameness until that very state becomes the fertile soil in which the seeds of inspiration and expanded understanding grow. One day its “the same old dog” and then, all-of-a-sudden-after-a-long-period-of-time you have a new dog!
As our third back bend series is in its final weeks, I can see how the three long-term courses all have a similar descriptions and curriculum outlines. They are kind of the same. On one level, there is no reason to look beyond the first offering. And yet, doing these classes week after week and the investigation into the poses over time has brought new insights and approaches as my understanding and capacity has expanded and because of that, each course is different. The urdhva dhanurasana I have today is quite different than the one I had last summer. I am also different inside myself than I was then.
I am looking at a few changes to my schedule for the summer and will continue to offer some awesome, online opportunities to continue to do all kinds of the same things we always do, punctuated by a few new tidbits along the way. While that is a TERRIBLE marketing campaign, it’s the truth about what I can offer— lots of the same punctuated by every new insight I get, every new lesson learned, and every creative approach I come up with.
Oh, I also will be teaching a live class at Bellingham Yoga Collective on Saturday mornings starting June 12, so I am looking forward to that. June zoom classes are the same as May but July and August will probably bring a reduced schedule to allow me some time to get out in the beautiful Pacific Northwest before the rains come and the days get shorter.
Image on right from last course. Image on left from current course. Same and Different.
