How to Make the Grand Canyon

Sutra 1.13 explains more about practice, abhyasa. Tatra stithau yatno’bhyasah (click here to hear it chanted). Yatnah is effort, exertion, diligence, perseverance, care, zeal, vigilance, pains, labor or difficulty. Sthitau means in steadiness, firmness, devotion, stability, continuance, steadfastness, maintenance of discipline or consistency. So practice is not just effort, but effort directed at continuing—it’s diligence in our diligence. It’s relatively easy to put forth a burst of effort. It’s totally different to maintain and be steadfast in it. In my experience, a little bit of consistent effort over time yields way more than an occasional large effort. It’s like the Colorado River making the Grand Canyon.

One of the things I have done in the last year is to start drinking more water. Like everyone else, I knew I was supposed to. I knew I wasn’t drinking enough, but I could never make the change. I’m sure there were plenty of individual days when I would drink more water, but I probably didn’t notice much difference, so I didn’t continue. When a naturopath suggested drinking a giant glass of water first thing every morning, I thought that sounded like something I could do. I was able to commit to that glass of water and then it wasn’t really that long before I was drinking more water throughout the day.

Starting with a small thing that I could be consistent with, allowed me to experience a difference, which led to a bigger change. This is one of the tricky places with practice—results are what motivate us to continue, but a lot of the time, we only get them after we’ve been continuing it for a while. This is one of the reasons this sutra is so helpful. If practice is meant to get us somewhere, then it has to be maintained over time. Just sitting down and meditating one time, for instance, is not going to change your life. It’s meditating over and over that makes a gradual shift.

The other important piece of perseverance is starting again when we have stopped. Have I had days in the last year when I drank hardly any water? Have I missed days of meditation? Of course! A commitment isn’t as much about the first promise to do something, it’s about the re-commitment when we’ve dropped the ball.  According to Patanjali, that’s what makes it practice—diligence in continuing.

For more info about therapy and yoga with Stephanie, go to www.seattlesomatictherapy.com