What Makes a Yoga Practice Challenging?

Aug 22

By Maile Wicklander, MA, C-IAYT®, Qualified MBSR Teacher

We often describe yoga classes as beginner, intermediate, advanced, gentle, or challenging, but those labels tend to focus almost entirely on the physical demands of the class. They might tell us something about the pace, the complexity of the postures, or the amount of strength, mobility, balance, and endurance that may be required. What they do not necessarily tell us is how challenging the practice will actually feel to the person taking it.

A yoga practice can be difficult for many different reasons. It can be challenging because the teacher is moving quickly and it is hard to keep up. It can be challenging because our legs are shaking in a standing posture or because a particular movement asks for more strength or mobility than we currently have. It can be challenging because we are tired, distracted, injured, anxious, or simply having a day when our body does not feel especially cooperative.

But yoga can also be challenging in quieter ways that are much less visible from the outside.

I was talking with a student recently who shared that the slower practices are often the most difficult for her. When there is less movement and more time to pay attention, she has to stay with herself in a different way. There is less momentum carrying her through the practice and less opportunity to become absorbed in accomplishing the next posture.

Moving slowly can ask a great deal of us. It can require patience, attention, and a willingness to feel what is actually happening in the body. It may ask us to notice tension we usually move past, the impulse to hurry, the tendency to hold the breath when something becomes difficult, or the restlessness that appears when there is not enough stimulation to occupy the mind.

A physically gentle practice, then, may sometimes be considerably more challenging than a physically strenuous one.

This is part of why I think our ideas about what makes someone “advanced” in yoga can be misleading.

In many contemporary yoga environments, we tend to associate advanced practice with increasingly complex physical postures. Someone who can balance on their arms, stand on their head, move into a deep back-bend, or put a leg behind their head may understandably be recognized as physically skilled. Those abilities can require years of practice, strength, mobility, coordination, and discipline.

But physical proficiency in asana is only one kind of skill, and asana itself is only one part of yoga.

The traditional eight limbs of yoga include ethical practices, personal disciplines, posture, breath regulation, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, and deeper states of integration. From that perspective, our ability to perform a complicated posture tells us relatively little about the fullness of our practice.

A person may have tremendous physical ability and find stillness almost intolerable. Someone else may have limited mobility and be developing extraordinary patience, concentration, self-awareness, and discernment. Another practitioner may be learning how to recognize when effort is useful and when the wiser choice is to stop.

It becomes difficult, then, to rank one of these practitioners as more advanced than another.

And yet our minds do this all the time.

The comparing mind looks around the room and notices who can balance longer, bend farther, move more gracefully, or perform a posture that we cannot. From there, comparison can quickly become judgment. We may decide that someone else is better at yoga or that we are behind, incapable, inflexible, weak, or somehow failing at the practice.

These judgments can be so automatic that we may not even recognize them as judgments. They simply begin to feel like facts.

One of the deeper challenges of yoga is learning to notice these mental habits without immediately believing them.

That requires more than awareness alone. It requires curiosity and self-compassion.

If every time we become aware of a habit we criticize ourselves for having it, awareness can quickly become another tool for self-judgment. We notice that we are comparing ourselves, and then judge ourselves for comparing. We notice that we are distracted, and become frustrated that we cannot concentrate. We recognize that we pushed too hard in a posture and then tell ourselves that we should have known better.

The practice can become one more place where we are trying to get ourselves “right.”

Curiosity offers another possibility.

Instead of immediately deciding that something is good or bad, we can begin to ask: What is happening here? What do I notice when I become uncomfortable? What happens to my breathing when I am trying hard? What do I feel when the person next to me can do something I cannot? What story does my mind begin telling me about myself?

Curiosity creates enough space for us to see a pattern without immediately having to defend it, fix it, or condemn ourselves for it.

Self-compassion is equally important. As we begin noticing our habits more clearly, we inevitably encounter parts of ourselves that are imperfect, reactive, fearful, competitive, impatient, distracted, or uncertain. These are not failures of practice. They are part of being human.

Giving ourselves some grace does not mean ignoring our patterns or pretending they do not matter. It means being able to see ourselves honestly without turning that honesty into cruelty.

In fact, I would argue that compassion and curiosity are what make real self-awareness possible. When we feel safe enough not to attack ourselves for what we discover, we can become much more willing to look.

This is where yoga practice can become far more interesting than simply mastering increasingly difficult postures.

The practice begins to show us how we meet challenge itself.

Do I automatically push harder when something becomes difficult? Do I disengage when I am not immediately good at something? Do I compare my body with the person next to me? Do I become impatient when the pace slows down? Can I remain present with something subtle, or do I need constant movement and stimulation? Can I notice a limitation without turning it into a judgment about myself?

There is no single correct answer to these questions. The point is not to create another set of standards that we can use to evaluate whether we are practicing yoga properly. The point is to become interested in what our practice is revealing.

This is also why the most beneficial practice may not always be the one we naturally gravitate toward.

We often choose practices that reinforce what we already know how to do. Someone who is strong, driven, and accustomed to pushing may feel very comfortable in a fast, athletic class where effort is obvious and measurable. For that person, slowing down, softening, resting, or staying with a subtle sensation may be significantly more challenging.

Someone else may be very comfortable with quiet, reflection, and gentle movement but benefit from a practice that asks them to develop strength, confidence, or a willingness to remain with physical effort.

Sometimes the challenge is doing more. Sometimes it is doing less. Sometimes it is staying when we habitually want to leave, while at other times the practice may be recognizing that our habitual tendency is to push through and learning that we are allowed to stop.

There is an important element of self-compassion here as well. The practice that challenges us today may not be the practice that challenged us five years ago, or even yesterday. Bodies change. Lives change. Energy changes. Injury, aging, grief, stress, illness, caregiving, and countless other circumstances affect what we bring onto the mat.

A compassionate practice leaves room for that reality.

Rather than asking whether we are doing as much as we used to, or whether our practice looks like someone else's, we can ask a much more useful question: What is this practice asking of me today?

Perhaps it is asking for strength. Perhaps it is asking for patience. Perhaps it is asking us to notice the comparing mind without being pulled into it. Perhaps it is asking us to soften our expectations, become interested in a sensation, or extend a little more kindness toward the body we actually have rather than the one we think we should have.

This is why I am cautious about defining yoga solely through physical levels. Those descriptions can certainly be useful in helping students understand the physical expectations of a class, but they become problematic when we turn them into a hierarchy of who is good at yoga.

An advanced practice may have much less to do with the shape of the posture and much more to do with the quality of attention we bring to it.

Can we notice effort without immediately pushing harder? Can we recognize judgment without turning it into another judgment? Can we meet limitation with curiosity instead of shame? Can we feel discomfort without assuming that discomfort means failure? Can we recognize our habitual patterns and offer ourselves enough compassion to see them clearly?

These capacities may not be particularly impressive to watch from across the room, but they may tell us much more about how the practice is affecting the way we live.

Over time, perhaps yoga becomes less about proving what the body can do and more about developing the ability to meet ourselves honestly. The postures give us a place to practice strength, mobility, balance, and coordination, but they also give us a place to practice patience, curiosity, non-judgment, self-compassion, and choice.