Allow Yourself a Rough Draft

“We shall not cease from exploration, 

and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” 
-T. S. Eliot

I teach yoga, but I also teach middle school English. One of the toughest things I have to encourage my students both on the mat and in the classroom is that nothing is perfect when it starts. 

Getting kids to write can be tough. They are too concerned with judgement on what they’re writing. They think the have to crush a piece into the perfect thing before it can be read. They don’t realize that it’s a process. Teaching my kids that writing is a process that takes time, patience, awareness, and regular practice is the most important part of my job as an English teacher. It’s the same for yoga. 

People expect that they must look beautiful and graceful as soon as they start to practice. They don’t understand that we all start out feeling awkward and as if we’re working too hard for something we can’t quite reach yet. It’s a process that develops over time. First draft, second, third, so on. Forever. 

On the mat, people come into a yoga class and expect that they should already be through the drafting and revision process. They expect to be able to hit the asanas perfectly, or at least make them look beautiful, on day one. When they fall short of that expectation, they get frustrated and may never come back.

Allow yourself to approach yoga as a drafting process. 

We get the rough draft done. Get it out of the way. Once you have that draft, you can start to get feedback, either from the teacher, your classmates, or most importantly, feedback from yourself. Nobody is in your body with you. It’s just you, so you will naturally learn to give yourself feedback.

Once you have that feedback, you can start to revise, or refine, the asanas. Each day, we shave off an unnecessary movement, or we start to connect with our breath. We may realize that if we engage a muscle, it gives us the sweetness of the pose we were looking for. 

The drafting process can take a long time. Sometimes my kids will work on essays for a month. That’s a long time to look at the same essay, especially for a 14 year old. But that’s what it takes to work towards something that’s polished. 

Your practice will always change, allowing you many new rough drafts.

At different points in our practice and in our lives, we will be working from a different draft. If we learn a new asana after a year of practice, that’s an opportunity to start with a new rough draft. What a beautiful opportunity. Finding something new that you can work to refine and revise allows us to apply the skills we learned in our first month of practice. 

After an injury or an extended period of time off the mat, we have another opportunity to approach our practice as a knowledgeable beginner. 

The beautiful thing about writing and yoga is that the final draft never truly comes. At some point in writing, you have to say, “This is as good as I can make it for now. On to the next idea/story/poem.” But with yoga, you’ll never get a new body, so you have the opportunity to continue to revise your drafts indefinitely. If you give yourself permission to start your practice as if it’s something you will revise over time, you won’t deal with the frustration of not being a final draft. You continue to sharpen that sword throughout your life.