The tyranny of shape & form (and the obsession with them)

My IG feed used to contain a few Ashtanga teachers and advanced practitioners whose poses were too "intimidating" for me to like, and their accompanying texts did not help either. I no longer follow them because they are not an inspiration, they do not give me a motivation towards improvement, quite the opposite.

I can appreciate the beauty of a posture and enjoy the neatness of their execution, but that is all – and for me it is not enough. The flame of their painstaking accomplishment does not light the candle of a driving force towards the evolution of my practice.

This is not a matter of not making comparisons, but rather of understanding that the plastic form of a perfectly executed posture corresponds to their body - and only to theirs.

Clearly, we have no idea of the time and fatigue, sometimes the weariness, which costed them to reach that statuesque execution of postures. We take it for granted that they enter and exit those asanas just like that - even if deep inside we know that it isn't that simple and that the ease, simplicity, and flawless ergonomics of movements conceal a great deal of work and effort.

And it's not about living in constant mediocrity either... 😊 or just browsing the posts of those like you, since you can learn little from it.

What it is about here is to understand something that for me is key: one thing is the form of a pose, as you can see in a manual for example, and another is "your" form of that pose, which to a substantial extent will depend on the “shape” (in all senses) of your body when you execute it, on your constitution and structure, and on what your body allows you in absolute terms as far as joint mobility, history of injuries, and a long etcetera are concerned.

“Practice, practice, practice and all will come”, indeed, but what we have to be very clear about is what exactly that “all” is to us 😉