You may have come to feel impatient with your yoga practice, wishing that you were further along. A useful metaphor is to consider your practice to be a flower. It will bloom in its own time.
Think about a real flower. It unfolds its petals when it’s ready, and only when it’s ready, and then it’s in bloom. If you try to speed up the process by pulling down those petals yourself the flower will never bloom.
But this doesn’t make you a helpless bystander. There is still a lot you can do to insure a good outcome by creating the ideal conditions for the flower to thrive, conditions like rich, nourishing soil, the proper amount of sunlight, and plenty of water. If it receives these things in the correct quantities at the correct times chances are it will flourish and eventually bloom. You can’t force it to, and you can’t do the growing for it, but you can be an integral part of the process.
Your yoga practice is the same. If you create the ideal conditions for yourself by practicing regularly, listening to your teachers, really being in touch with your body so that you can ride your edge without slipping over it, and going deeper into the philosophical sphere, good things will happen in their time. Be gentle with yourself, just like you’re gentle with a delicate flower.
But you are doing a lot, everything really, to try to make your practice move forward and it’s natural to want to see improvement. The correct attitude is probably one of hopeful acceptance, not one of negativity or judgment.
