The Same Sequence, Everyday. Why?

We’ve heard it before: isn’t it boring to practice the same sequence every day? It can be, yes. But approaching the same sequence every day can also be invigorating and insightful, because it brings our attention to the context of our experience, which is in fact always changing.

By context, I mean the background that gives rise to our experience: the circumstances that create influence in our experience moment by moment. It’s never the same from one day to the next, and not even from the start of your practice to the end. Something is always shifting, adjusting, leaving a residue. It’s subtlety that allows me to notice that today I feel slightly less balanced than yesterday. Sometimes we know why: I was on a flight yesterday, or have been recovering from a serious injury. Sometimes we don’t know the why, the background that gives meaning to that unsettled feeling. The practice of yoga offers us tools and a path to notice what has shifted, and what’s happening beneath the surface, whether or not we intellectually know the reason why.

We already live by repetition. We brush our teeth, blaze the same trail, and keep the same rituals every day. Sometimes we do it because it makes us feel safe, sometimes because we’re supposed to, many times because it works. It’s efficient. And if we slow down the doing of that daily ritual and bring mindfulness into it, paying attention to what we are doing and how we are doing it, the mind and body become coordinated and (re)connected in the doing. In yoga, when the mind and the breath are synchronized, in unison, they’re said to be like two fishes swimming in tandem. When this happens, the so called “repetitive action” actually becomes interesting, maybe even fun.

That’s the opposite of being stuck in a rut. Getting stuck is natural. It’s easy to do the same thing every day and get lost in a robotic, mindless day-to-day. What’s harder, but far more exciting, is to bring a mindful quality of attention to our day: to notice change, become more comfortable with it, and even start to embrace it. As our practice teaches us, change is always happening, even when the outside looks the same to the untrained eye.

This is where the “fixed” sequence of Ashtanga comes in. Eventually, we don’t need to spend precious energy figuring out which pose comes next, although learning the sequence is an important and delightful part of the process. Eventually, we can truly tune in. We can refine our alignment, notice a new sensation, or pay attention to how a familiar emotion rises up when we place our body in a certain position and the teacher tells us just the right thing at just the right moment.

Over time, a long time, we become so finely tuned into what is changing within us and what our bodies are asking of us, that we realize we are never really doing the same practice twice. We attend to our own selves in that attunement, lovingly. There’s always some adjustment that can be made to support the background present on a given day, in any given moment. A yoga block added here, a bent knee there, a deepening, a holding back… so that the outside reflects what we are feeling inside. The push and the pull of true awakening. Along the way a new pose is added to the sequence occasionally—sometimes several at a time, and we notice how it changes the context, and therefore the experience, of the entire practice.

While on the mat we get to practice a particular mode of attention, one that is sharply focused while calm, bringing mind and breath together onto a chosen object of meditation. We get really good at it on the mat so that it can ripple outward, eventually we become better at it in our “normal” lives. Moment to moment. So even if our days start to look the same, we know they really aren’t. We start to notice the richness and newness of each moment. Even while we are brushing our teeth.