Advance asana - Why You Are Not Advancing in Your Practice (And What To Do About It)

3 days ago
3 min read

Timeea Kadar, the 500h yoga teacher from Romania

This is the real advanced yoga practice mindset.

Every day, students are asking me this same question only, 'Mukesh ji, when will I be ready for advance postures?' And every time, I am telling them the same thing: it is not the body which is holding you back. It is the mind.

You can do hundred backbends daily, still if your mind is fearful, you will remain where you are. This is truth of yoga, and nobody is telling you this in fancy Instagram reels.

The Mindset Problem, Nobody is Talking About It

In Yoga Sutras, Patanjali is saying abhyasa and vairagya, practice and non-attachment, both must go together. Most students, they are only doing abhyasa. Practice, practice, practice. But vairagya part, they are skipping completely.

What is vairagya actually meaning here? It means you are not attached to outcome. You are not doing the pose to prove something, not to yourself, not to your Instagram followers, not to your teacher even. You are doing it because body and breath are ready in this moment, that’s all.

Linda Inocan, The Shala owner and Ashatnag teacher

Advance practitioner mindset is having these things:

• Patience with process - not patience like waiting for bus, but patience like farmer waiting for crop. He is not digging soil daily to check if seed is growing.

• Comfort with discomfort - this is different from pushing through pain. Discomfort of unknown, discomfort of falling, this you must make friendship with.

• Surrender without giving up - Bhagavad Gita is teaching us this balance. Krishna is telling Arjuna, do your karma fully, but leave result to higher intelligence. Same in asana practice.

Why Courage Must Come Step by Step Only

Now here is the mistake I am seeing so much, students, they want courage in one day. They are watching some reel, seeing person doing scorpion pose, and next class they are trying same thing without preparation. This is not courage, my friends. This is ego wearing courage’s clothes.

Real courage in yoga practice is built layer by layer, like this:

1. First you build trust with your own breath. If breath is shaking, mind is shaking also.

2. Then you build trust with small failures, falling from tree pose, wobbling in crow pose. Falling is not failure, falling is data only.

3. Then slowly, body is remembering safety even in unfamiliar shape. This is where real backbend, real inversion is starting to open.

4. Only after this, advance posture is coming naturally, without force, without fear-hiding-as-bravado.

You cannot skip steps and call it courage. Skipping steps, that is recklessness, and body is very good at reminding you the difference, usually through injury.

This is exactly why in our “mind-on adjustments” approach, we are not only correcting the physical alignment. We are asking, what is happening in your mind when I touch you here, when you are going deeper in this backbend? Fear response, past trauma, old belief “I cannot do this”, all this is coming up in the body, and unless we are working with mind also, alignment correction alone will not take you far.

So What To Do From Here

Stop chasing the pose. Start chasing the steadiness. Steadiness in breath, steadiness in mind when things are uncomfortable, steadiness in showing up even when ego is wanting quick result.

Advance practice is not about how deep you are going into backbend. It is about how much of yourself, fear, ego, impatience, you are willing to see clearly and work with, little by little, every single day.

That is real sadhana. Everything else is only decoration.

If you are feeling this in your own practice, and you are ready to go deeper, not only in postures but in this whole mindset piece, this is exactly what we are building together in our Teacher Training.