We live in a world where the results of most of our actions are instantaneous and we get really impatient when we’re forced to wait even a little bit. Think about how quickly you bounce off of a site these days if it doesn’t load fast enough, for example. Everything needs to be instant.
But your yoga practice is not instant and no amount of wishful thinking will change that. It will take many years to fully unfold, and by ‘it’ we mean both the asana side and the philosophical side. If you can think of yoga as a marathon not a sprint you’ll increase your chances of staying with your practice through the ebb and flow of your motivation levels, and you’ll appreciate your progress even when it’s slow because you were already thinking of yoga as a slow but steady process.
You prepare differently for a marathon than you do for a sprint and you act differently during the race. To us the heart of the metaphor is that you slow down your pace to a sustainable level and then dedicate yourself to the long haul.
