This month I’ve asked you to stay with a lot. To hold a breath a little longer than comfortable. To notice the pull toward your phone mid-practice and stay anyway. To meet whatever pranayama stirs up with friendliness instead of turning away. To find what’s already good in the body before reaching for anything else. This week’s practice, a thirty-minute standing sequence, adds one more piece, and it might be the simplest and the hardest one yet.
There’s an old teaching I come back to more than almost any other: we suffer twice. Something happens — a hard conversation, a missed flight, a triangle pose held a beat longer than we’d like. That’s the first thing, and it’s real, and sometimes it’s genuinely uncomfortable. Then, almost without noticing, we start building a story on top of it. How unfair it is. What it says about us. How long it’s going to ruin the rest of the day. That second layer is the one that does most of the damage, and it’s the one we actually have some say over.
This practice is built from simple Hatha shapes, the kind that don’t look like much on paper. Balance on one foot. A triangle pose. Warrior two. An arm sequence that gets surprisingly spicy the longer you hold it. None of it is complicated. All of it asks you to stay a little past the point where some part of you wants to leave. And in that staying, you get to watch, in real time, whether you’re meeting the actual sensation in front of you or already halfway into a story about how much you don’t like this.
I told you all last month that my first teacher used to say, do it anyway, whenever something got uncomfortable. I understand it more every year. He wasn’t asking me to muscle through pain. He was teaching me that the moment is almost always smaller and more workable than the story I’ve already started telling about it.
One more thing this practice reminded me of: once you press play, that’s the easy part. The hardest thing you’ll do all class might be the decision to show up on your mat in the first place. Everything after that, even the parts that get spicy, is just staying with what’s actually here — which, it turns out, is rarely as bad as the story.
Steady Ground is in the portal now, thirty minutes, standing the whole way through. Come find out what’s real and what’s just a story you’re telling yourself, with me.
