Preliiminaries

My six-day-a-week Ashtanga yoga practice takes around an hour and a half from start to finish, including about ten minutes relaxing in Savasana, the corpse pose. There remain, in the primary series, even after twelve years of regular work, several poses—notably Marichasana D and Supta Kurmasana—which I can’t get into and lifting myself up and doing the jump back Vinyasa during sitting poses seems to me something that I’ll never be able to do.

In short, the practice is fucking hard and rarely does a day go by when I don’t ask myself why the hell I keep at it.

And yet, the hardest part of all isn’t really during the series; it’s just before, when I’m trying to convince myself to get out of bed and onto the mat.

As challenging as the practice itself is, the difficulties once I’m doing it pale in comparison to the problems I have with it before I start.

I think there’s something to this that relates to what life is like: usually, the preparation, the anticipation, the idea of what’s coming is way worse than what actually is. Once you’re doing the thing you dread, it’s typically not nearly as dreadful as you thought it was going to be.

Anyone whose ever written a paper, or done some public speaking, or even gone outside to ride their bike on a rainy day has experienced this. We’ve all spent sleepless nights worrying about something that may have been hard to do but which wasn’t nearly as hard as it seemed when we were lying there at 4:00 in the morning staring at the ceiling worrying about how hard it was going to be.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that everything gets easy once we set out upon it, but it is a good reminder that our imagination can be way scarier than reality.

My yoga practice is only 90 minutes; this morning, it took 2 hours to begin.