Work on your strengths
The 2 wolves inside:
There is a Navajo folk tale about two wolves that are always at odds with each other. One wolf is completely blind to everything except evil in the world. He is vicious and jealous and feeds on negative energy. The other is a compassionate, loving creature.
So who wins?
The one you feed . . .
Like the wolf in the fable, we all have a critical inner voice that feeds on the seeds of doubt and thrives on our low self-esteem. This voice takes away the joy of life and discourages us from making progress.
This voice comes up when we compare ourselves to others. It arises when we compare our bodies now to what they looked like 5 years ago, before kids, or whenever we had that youthful shine. It’s a common default in the mysore room, but it exist in every aspect of our lives, not just yoga.
If we want to achieve our goals, we must train ourselves to ignore this negative voice by eliminating the bad habits that feed it. But that’s not what we are taught in school.
In school you have tests every week to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses. My parents would have to sign any test below a C and then I would have extra ‘homework’ to improve those grades in that subject.
Imagine having to sit inside and write out ‘because’ 10 time and then use it in a sentence 5 times while the only hours of daylight are escaping behind the tree that you want to climb and build rope swings on. Because spelling is my kryptonite.
Stop striving to improve your mistakes!
If you got shit grades in math, your parents or teachers may have pushed you to go deeper in the subject, stay after school, summer school, etc. And you wasted a lot of energy trying to make up for this weaknesses, which only made you feel worse.
Here is one piece of advice I can give you: Do what you love. Doing what you are good at makes you happier, more confident.
If you love handstands, do them. If you love backbends, do them! But get damn good at doing them, in a correct, non-harmful way. Do you!
It is better to be proficient in a few areas at a high level, than to be proficient in a multitude of areas at a low level.
So if you suck at being flexible. Work on your strengths. Can’t back bend? Strengthen your glutes in a lunge to work the hip flexors. Tight hamstrings? Develop strength in your quads. Climb stairs or bike crazy distances, and keep the quads actively engaged when lengthening in a fold.
(did an authorized ashtanga teacher recommended doing an activity that isn’t asana?!?!) Hell yes I did!
Yoga can be everywhere. It should be everywhere, in every activity. That’s one of the strengths of yoga!
Another bit of negative food that we are often fed, which in turn feeds that negative wolf, is listening to bad advice and holding onto it like it’s a sutra, or something engraved on the tomb of Hammurabi.
There are some great teachers out there, but some have warped ideas of what is ‘correct method’ for practice. Perhaps they drank too much kool-aid or really need to hold onto dogma, but if the advice is leading to average results, I want to encourage you to trust your instincts and stop listening to your self-doubt.
