Rubber Bands

There Is No Flexibility Without Stability.

In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali calls asana a pairing of effort and ease, or effort and release. He’s trying to point out is that life is full of seemingly opposing experiences. Besides effort and ease, there is pleasure and pain, day and night, loss and gain, like and dislike, the list is endless. For any experience to exist, though, there must be an opposite or contrast to it for our minds to hold on to. Think about that. There would be no black without white, no day without night. There wouldn’t be flexibility without contrasting stability. Limitless flexibility without balanced strength and stability ignores the need for the duality to exist. Just as the tighter, more stable yoga student must learn to become more flexible, the already-flexible student must work to increase strength and stability. Yoga teachers would never encourage a student to become so strong that they eliminated all range of motion in their joints. And likewise, I believe teachers must wisely teach students that there is a limit to beneficial flexibility.

Take a rubber band for example. A new one is stretchy and can extend a lot, but still strong enough to hold whatever it’s wrapped around. But the more you stretch and use a rubber band, the less strong it gets. Over time it’s stretched out so much that it’s rendered useless. Same goes for muscles. While most people could stand to lengthen their hamstrings and glutes, there is a limit to how far is wise. At a certain point, your muscles stop being strong enough to hold your skeleton in proper alignment. The result: injuries galore.

Yoga is not all about flexibility. Ultimately, Yoga is about the discovery of balance within and of your self. Yoga in its fullness is a practice that teaches us how to develop mindfulness, how to listen to your body, reduce stress, aligns the physical body and discover new ways of relating to the world so that we can give up the attachments to our sufferings.

🙏🏼 Namaste, K.