“Trust Your Struggle.” Street Art. Temascal, Oakland.

I love the Mysore room. It’s one of my favorite places to be, whether it’s practicing or teaching, I can’t help but feel alive in such a space. I love the victories after some long-fought challenge, but I also have a great respect and appreciation for the power of practice when I see a student near tears. It’s very real, this hot house of human action, people moving within a small portion of rubber mat. It’s steamy and there is a palpable thickness in the air. There’s a lot of love here–but it’s not the love of fluffy bunnies or candy-colored unicorns–it is often a love forged from gritty, sweaty, face-all-twisted struggle.

Struggle? That seems like a paradox, right! Ashtanga is a yoga practice, after all, so shouldn’t it promote a deep sense of peace and calm, physical ease and mental equilibrium?

Ashtanga is a very honest practice, reflecting back at its practitioners their life in concentrated form. When life is hard, practice takes on that hardness. When life is easy, sometimes (when we’re lucky) it’s easy, but often practice will dig a little deeper to find a soft spot. It’s a tradition designed to make you strong and also flexible–and a component of that is to whittle away at what’s unnecessary: shame, fear, pride, all forms of ego–these are not easy things to be grappling with, thus, the struggle. The struggles are there for a reason: for us to understand ourselves better.

I think it’s important to note that I’m not speaking of binding in maricasana D, suptakurmasana, learning to drop back or getting the leg behind the head but rather the human struggle that comes with the challenges that are presented by certain postures, sometimes by practice as a whole. The struggle isn’t actually getting past the pose but getting past the challenge/turmoil that the pose creates. It’s not about moving forward in any particular series, it’s about moving beyond it.

As practitioners, we are responsible for the struggles that present themselves on the mat. We must meet them, rather than run from them. And with practice, meeting them means getting up close and personal with them through our bodies pretty much everyday with as much equanimity as we can muster until they loose their power. We might relax into them, melting into some mythical grace, or we might fight them tooth and nail in some epic shit fight, there’s no blue print for how exactly we are meant to face these moments. But I think we must trust that the struggle is there for a reason, that it serves some greater purpose other than to annoy or frustrate us, it isn’t getting in the way of our ease and happiness–rather, it is the way.

Continuing to grow here in Mysore SF. It is such a pleasure to be working in such a space where the practice and the teaching is so very alive, so very real–real in the struggle as much as the joy of practice. There’s an alchemical force in the room. The potential for transformation is there. Very grateful to be taking part in it. Mysore is Mon-Thur, 6-9am. Led Class is Fridays 6am and 7:30am. Sunday Mysore is 2nd and 4th Sundays (no class September 27, it is moon day).