You Can't Be "Bad" At Yoga

One of the things I love most about yoga is how it’s really impossible to fail. The way I see it, you can’t actually be “bad” at yoga.

I didn’t always feel this way.  When I first started practicing, I thought I was doing forward bends like Janusirsasana/head to knee posture “wrong” if I wasn’t touching my toes. I’d round my back and hunch my shoulders and strain forward as far as I could, trying to reach my foot. Sometimes there were a lot of thoughts about my self worth that showed up, too – “why can’t I touch my toes?” Or “I should be able to touch my toes!” Or “when I can touch my toes, I’ll feel better about myself.”

I was lucky to have teachers who patiently reminded me over and over that it’s not what a shape looks like; it’s how it feels. In asana, or the physical shape-making part of yoga, the goal is not necessarily to perfect a shape.  Sure, certain shapes can have certain physical benefits.  And sometimes stringing certain shapes together in a certain order – a sequence – can help focus attention on certain parts of your body to relieve tension or build strength or achieve a sense of emotional balance.

But the way I see it, the broader goal of putting your body into a certain shape is simply to feel what it’s like to be in that shape, and to notice all the reactions that ripple out from being there. If you notice anything—sensations, emotions, thoughts, breath, maybe even the decision that you'd rather move into a different shape—then you’re doing yoga. Maybe along the way you touch your toes, and you notice a sense of accomplishment and self worth from that.  That’s great! But the noticing is the work.

One of the most famous and beloved yoga texts, the Bhagavad Gita, speaks about doing important work without an attachment to a specific outcome.  As a recovering perfectionist, this idea was foreign to me. My entire sense of self worth was tied up in being good at things, at working hard and achieving a specific outcome. But as I found in my asana practice, working in this outcome-focused way actually held me back from what I wanted to achieve. My hamstrings and low back were never going to open up if I kept stubbornly hunching and rounding my spine forward while trying to grab my foot.  When I let go of that end goal and focused on really feeling my hamstrings, low back, and hips, the experience of being in the shape changed for me – and over time, the tension in my body changed, too.

The flip side of this is there’s no way to “succeed,” either, at least not in the way I was used to. Say you do touch your toes: then there’s always something to do next to further explore the feeling and your reaction. You may need different shapes to stretch your hamstrings or your hips. At a certain point, your hamstrings may become so open that you need to start doing exercises to strengthen and tighten them back up. Then the process can repeat again.

It seems like this all would be endlessly frustrating, but I actually find it freeing. I spent so much of my life defining my sense of self (and my self worth) by my achievements or failures. But by shifting the focus of my yoga practice to be more about noticing than achieving, I found a space where I wasn’t defined by what I could or couldn’t do. I felt great the day I touched my toes, but it wasn't because I'd finally "gotten it." It's because I realized I never needed to "get it" in the first place. On some days my body wants to be in certain shapes and on some days it doesn't. I’m still me – and I have worth—either way.