What is an "Advanced" Yoga Practice?

The Internet is a wonderful thing. You can find nearly anything and everything there, including a ton of posts, pictures, and instructions for making your way into "advanced" yoga poses. There are special training courses for arm balances and inversions, for increasing your range of motion rapidly in order to make your way to a full split (Hanumanasana), or how to do all those spectacular poses.

Nobody seems to tell you what an "advanced" practice or pose is, though. It's implied that anything you can't do now is better than what your body is capable of at this moment. And I think that's a terrible shame. Let's be really really clear here: there is no hierarchy of poses. There is no pose that is "better than" or more "advanced" than any other. We live in a very competitive society, and we're even in competition with ourselves most of the time. More is better. Harder is better. Next-to-impossible poses are the best.

How about fitting the poses to the body that we have right now? And being satisfied with that? Did you gasp a little? Do you feel that if you're not working towards something it's not worthwhile? Do you wonder now why you feel that way?

Rolf Gates has said that "yoga is not a work out; it is a work in." The physical poses are fantastic for getting into our bodies, for maintaining and building strength, range of motion, and endurance. They help us to settle and sort of burn off stress. But they're intended, in Patanjali's yoga, to allow us to settle into more meditative shapes. The Asanas are meant to let us sit still for longer periods of time in order to meditate. Not a peep about headstands, arm balances, or tricky transitions.

Those kinds of poses are a ton of fun, but they're no more or less advanced than any other pose. Can you try noticing where you are giving enough effort to a pose, or too much? Can you focus on finding that balance, even if your body falls from an arm balance? Becoming so in tune with your body that you can more easily find that dividing line between enough and too much is far more in line with what I might call "advanced." Feeling like your body might need the support of a block or strap, AND THEN USING THAT PROP, is more in line with an advanced practice in my mind. Accessing the nervous system and giving yourself the tools to calm when you need to be calm, or ramp up when you need to do that is far closer to an advanced practice than a handstand in my book.

So if you're the kind of person who keep practicing but never "progresses," please don't lose heart. It's never been about the fancy poses.