After one of my Yin classes recently, one of my students said she always feels like she’s “the rubbish one in the class.” Because some of the Yin postures don’t suit her body, she often practises different versions of the postures from everyone else or has to choose an alternative altogether and she’ll sometimes leave class feeling as though she’s somehow not as ‘good’ as everyone else.
I know exactly how she feels because for many years I felt exactly the same. My knees were in such a bad way that I had to modify countless postures in a class. I’d put cushions under my knees, take them away again, straighten one leg, bend the other or skip certain poses completely because my body simply wouldn’t allow them. I usually chose a place at the back of the room, hoping nobody would notice what I was doing. Looking back now, the saddest part isn’t that my body needed those modifications. The saddest part is that I often left yoga feeling worse than when I arrived — not because of the pain in my knees, but because of the story I was telling myself.
At the time, I genuinely believed everyone else was doing yoga ‘properly’ and I wasn’t. I thought being ‘good’ at yoga meant being able to get into the same shapes as everyone else, or perhaps even a little deeper. If someone could comfortably sit cross-legged while I needed blocks and cushions, surely they were better than me. If someone could breeze back to Child’s Pose with ease while my knees refused to cooperate, I assumed I simply wasn’t cut out for yoga. It took me years to realise I’d completely misunderstood what yoga was asking of me.
Letting go of posture aesthetics
It’s very easy to believe that yoga is about the shape of the posture. You only have to go on social media and notice beautiful photographs of people in deep back bends or in forward folds where they’ve literally folded in half. It’s hardly surprising that we start to believe those images are what success looks like. Without even realising it, we begin measuring our practice against everyone else’s, assuming that if we can’t do what they can do, we’re somehow falling short.
The irony is that yoga has never really cared what the posture looks like. The purpose of a posture isn’t to achieve a particular shape; it’s to create a particular experience. If one version of a pose allows you to breathe steadily, notice sensations in your body and remain present, while another version simply creates pain or frustration, then the first version is the better posture for you. Your body isn’t interested in whether your Warrior II looks like the picture on Facebook, it simply responds to the load you’re placing through your joints, the stretch through your muscles and fascia, and the quality of your breathing and attention.
Once I understood this, my whole relationship with yoga changed. I stopped chasing the appearance of the posture and became much more interested in how it felt. I realised I could be making a completely different shape to the person next to me and still be receiving exactly the same benefits. In fact, sometimes my modified version was giving me more than the traditional pose would have done because it was designed for the body I actually had, not the body I wished I had.
The stories we tell ourselves
I also realised something else that I think many of us forget. We spend an awful lot of time assuming everyone else in the room is finding yoga easy. We look around and see calm faces, steady breathing and beautiful postures, and our mind tells us that we’re the only one struggling. But that’s simply another story our mind likes to tell us. Every single person in that room is working with something. One person may have stiff hips, another may have chronic pain, someone else may be battling a busy, anxious mind, while another is simply trying to stay focused on their breath for more than a few seconds. We only ever see the outside of someone else’s practice; we never see what’s happening inside.
So the next time you find yourself comparing, come back to your breath. Notice what you’re feeling rather than what everyone else is doing. Because the moment you stop trying to practice somebody else’s yoga and start practising your own, that’s when your actual yoga practice has begun.
Best wishes
Michelle x
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