Do It Anyway: A Practice for Staying Present With What’s Hard

My teacher used to say something that used to drive me a little crazy. 

Whenever a pose or a breath practice got uncomfortable, I’d tell him — this is uncomfortable. And every time, without fail, he’d just say: do it anyway. 

I didn’t love hearing it back then. I understand it now. He wasn’t asking me to push through pain, or to grit my way past my own limits. He was teaching me something much more specific — to stay present with whatever was actually happening, instead of turning away the moment it got hard. 

That’s the whole heart of October, and it’s what I built this month’s sixty-minute class around. We call it Staying Power, and it opens with the pranayama we spent September building together — breath of fire, kapalabhati, dog panting, lion’s breath — leaning a little further into each one than we did last month. There’s a practical reason for that timing, too. This kind of breathwork genuinely supports the immune system as the weather turns and we all move back indoors, right into the stretch of holidays where sleep gets shorter and the treats get more plentiful. But the deeper reason is simpler: the breath is where staying gets taught first. Right at the edge of a held breath, some part of us always wants out. That edge is the practice. 

From there we move into a full standing and floor sequence built around holding — long squats, held chair pose, a little balance sequence that will show you exactly where your own edges are, and where one side of your body might be steadier than the other. Nothing about it is about getting it perfect. As I said near the end of class: what even is perfect? It doesn’t exist. 

What I keep noticing, in myself and in this community, is how specific the impulse to leave really is. It isn’t dramatic. It’s small — the reach for a phone mid-practice, the thought that maybe today isn’t the day, the quiet decision to stop one breath before we needed to. I said it out loud in class because I think it’s worth naming directly: is there an impulse to check out right now? To reach for your phone because you’re home, alone, and no one’s watching? See if you can stay instead. Not forever. Just one breath longer than you think you can. 

We don’t push through pain. But we do get curious about discomfort, and we lean into it a little. That’s staying. That’s the whole practice, on the mat and off it. 

If you make it all the way through Staying Power, you’ll have stayed — imperfectly, breath by breath, however you got there. And I think that’s worth something. I think most of us get to the end of a long stretch of our lives and wonder if we were really present for it. It’s a good question to sit with now, while there’s still time to answer it differently. 

Staying Power is in the portal, whenever you’re ready to practice staying with me.