Practise, practise, all is coming.

When we start to practise astanga vinyasa, most often we are very concerned with the scaffolding. That is, with physical technique – with alignment, bandhas, jump-through, jump-back, strength, stamina, flexibility and so on. This is appropriate, because until we have built the structure, we cannot fully inhabit the house. Very often, though, we translate this priority for engaging with some basic principles into the notion that there’s somewhere ‘we’ (usually meaning ‘our body’) have to get to – and as soon as possible. We construct ‘somewhere’ according to whatever we feel our own physical deficits to be. So the nirvana of arrival may involve stretching our hamstrings, losing weight, jumping back without touching down, getting into a more challenging variation or a more advanced posture, being able to do padmasana, sirsasana, urdhva dhanurasana ... and so it goes on.

Gradually, though, over the months and years, our attitude starts to shift. We become more engaged with what’s happening now than what with might (maybe) be happening in the future. We begin to dwell more often in the reality of the moment. This shift begins to happen when the mat becomes home, a place we need to go to regularly in order to re-find ourselves. It is therefore an outgrowth of a regular self-practice (something that cannot result from attending no-matter-how-many classes).

When we are engaged with practice in this simple, regular way, ‘progress’ is no longer something that we reach for, but something that occurs, quite ordinarily and routinely, when a space opens up and we move, quite ordinarily and routinely, into that space. Space opens out of the act of stepping onto our mat, with a willingness to be present (and a willingness to be present to our inability to be present), day after day. It may manifest as a tiny increase in strength or flexibility. It may manifest as a little more capacity for abiding through difficult emotions. It may manifest as the opportunity to catch sight of the place that bores us, frightens us, brings us so much joy we just can’t bear it, and, for a second, look it in the eye. It may manifest as the growing tendency to get onto our mat even when the loudest voice in our head is telling us that there isn’t time and our life is too busy. It may manifest as injury and the need to find new ways, both physical and psychological, of being in our practice – and the willingness to look for those ways rather than roll up our mat and have a break.

Progress can look like going backwards. It takes a certain bigness of mind to embrace this kind of progress – and it’s the bigness of mind that makes the difference, the bigness that recognises the prince in the frog. The miraculous thing is that, even in what appears to be a setback, spaces are always opening out. We just have to be able to see them and expand into them – and with time and practice, this way of responding becomes our natural impulse.

If we really set out to boil hatha yoga down to the bones, maybe what would be left at the bottom of the saucepan is the principle of edge. Working on the edge isn’t the same as going to our limit. Particularly in the dynamic forms of yoga, there’s a lot of confusion about this. It’s in the nature of astanga vinyasa, because of the degrees of escalating physical challenge that it presents, to attract people who like to dance on the brink of the precipice. It may be only when injury or exhaustion forces us to re-evaluate our practice that we begin to question the wisdom of habitually hanging on by our finger-nails. As we start to explore our physical, psychological and emotional experience more subtly, we may discover that the brink is not the only edge, that in fact there is a spectrum of edges, each one representing a different degree of intensity.

Eric Schiffmann describes the multiplicity of edges like this:

He suggests that we can approach each succeeding edge as a gateway. Once we have fully experienced the sensations at a particular gate, we may pass through and onto the next. The intention is not to race through the final gate, but to be as present as we can to the threshhold where, in each moment, we find ourselves. In other words, edge is not one place or a single arrival; it’s never discovered, mapped, done and dusted. Edge is an ongoing process, an endless dance of shifting experience. Nor is the edge really separate from us. There’s no thin black line out there against which we in here pit ourselves. Edge is intrinsic, a unique product of the interplay between our individual body and psyche with a particular asana in a particular moment in time.

Cultivating an awareness of how we relate to edge is important not just because it enables us to practise yoga without injuring ourselves, but also because our relationship with edge on the mat directly reflects our relationship with edge in our life. If we are unconscious of our edge in yoga postures, we will also be unconscious of our edge in our life, habitually redrawing the same patterns in the sand and wondering why they never look any different. Those of us who routinely back away from challenge in our yoga practice, choosing postures that we find easy and non-threatening, remaining in the shallows emotionally and physically, will pitch ourselves on the same kind of edge in life. Likewise if we practise yoga constantly on the verge of pain, at the outer limit of our endurance, our flexibility, our capacity for emotional presence, this will be the way we lead our life.

It’s easy to see how the backed-off edge can be a form of avoidance. So too, though, can the far-out edge. For one thing, many of our knottiest challenges lie in the intermediate places. If we bypass these locations, we can circumvent the often complex and subtle difficulties that they present to us – but then we don’t learn their lessons either. For another thing, the far-out edge tends to be a place of high adrenaline. It may give us access to states of intense bliss, but if we are not securely grounded, these experiences can bring in their wake an unwanted backwash, leaving us feeling wired, strung-out, over-excited, and full of emotional and energetic static.

This is not to diss bliss – definitely not. In my experience, though, the ecstatic states that arise from yoga serve our well-being when they are fully integrated rather than pursued at the expense of the rest of our emotional experience. The edge here lies in our ability to continue offering our attention to what’s happening for us in the here and now: in our capacity to stay present to our experience without seeking to change it, disocciate from it or manipulate it. When we notice that we are absenting ourselves in this way, we know that we have overshot our edge. We bring ourselves back by simply accepting what’s happening now – which doesn’t mean that we have to try to like it if we don’t, just that we allow ourselves to look at it. If there’s an emotional reaction, we notice that too; if there’s a desire to escape – into fantasy, drugs, alcohol, boredom, complaining, food, TV ... anything that can distract us, temporarily, from what’s actually going on – we also notice that. We notice all of our writhing and squirming, all of our drama and our resistance and our desire to coerce things into a different form than the one they are currently taking, and we let it be. As Godfrey Devereux explains:


Astanga vinyasa involves a process of dynamic surrender. ‘Dynamic’ means hanging on in there, offering the best of our energy and our sense of direction. It means staying awake. ‘Surrender’ means letting go into the reality of exactly what is in each moment – which may be that we don’t have much energy, we’ve lost our way and we’re falling asleep. Learning to walk this edge skillfully requires a lot of practice – which is why we need to get onto our mat every day. The more we practise, the more we find there’s space around the edge to play. We develop finesse and audacity. We may choose to pitch ourselves against risk, without inner compulsion but because danger is a facet of human experience and so we include it in our exploration.

My favourite image of edge is Philippe Petit wire-walking between the Twin Towers. For me, it represents the point at which the edge dissolves and we find ourselves abiding in the still point at the centre of the posture, suspended in pure presence.



The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness, Erich Schiffmann (Pocket Books 1996).
Dynamic Yoga, Godfrey Devereux (Thorsons 1998).