If you practice at the same studio a lot you’ve surely noticed that many teachers tend to teach a similar sequence throughout the week to save themselves the stress of having to come up with an entirely new set every day. For some practitioners this can be a little disappointing because they’re looking for something different to stimulate them every time they practice.
But there are a lot of positives to taking the same class twice, making it easy to change your perception and in fact purposefully repeat a class once in a while. Psychologically speaking, it’s really nice to have an idea of what the sequence is going to be because your anticipatory anxiety automatically goes down. You don’t have to worry about what’s coming next because you already know, which actually helps you stay grounded in the present.
You can decide to go a lot deeper on certain poses because you know about how much energy it’s going to take to get through the whole sequence. When you’re going in blind, you’ll likely leave some of that energy in the reserve tank. Sometimes you just don’t push yourself as hard as you could, even if it’s largely an unconscious process, because you want to make sure you don’t run out of steam.
Finally if you just did a similar sequence then you’ll probably notice that you’re more flexible on all of the poses the second time around and that you’re also more confident and comfortable with them since you just did them, letting you take those same poses even further.
There are a lot of good reasons to take the same class twice so there’s really no reason to be disappointed when this situation comes about. Just embrace it and decide you’re going to use it as a unique chance to take some aspects of your practice deeper than you could have otherwise.
