Break your limits and make muscle memory
You have to extend yourself beyond your limits. Even in the practice of asanas, you practise one asana for maybe 10 rounds, then you get bored and move on to the next one. Then you feel that your body is slightly tired, so you lie down to relax.
There is often more relaxation in an asana class than the actual practice of asanas. You don’t do an asana class, you do a relaxation class. Every time you feel a little tiredness, you say, ‘Oh, I am going to practise shavasana.’ That is incorrect.
When you go to the gym to build up your body, do you fall flat after five rounds of lifting the dumb-bell? On the contrary, you try to increase your capacity by increasing the number of times you lift the dumb-bell. If it is five times today, you make it six times tomorrow, seven times the day after, until you are able to do one hundred lifts. Then you say, “I feel healthy. I have improved.”
Here you increase the effort every day, and in yoga you decrease the effort every day. That should not happen. In yoga too you have to increase the effort, from ten times this week to fifteen times the next week, to twenty times the second week, to twenty-five times the third week, to thirty times the fourth week, to fifty times the fifth week.
If you do this, you will see what happens. Within one month you will be flying in the air, for the muscles of the body will develop a positive memory. Right now your muscles have no memory of any posture except that of shavasana.
I was talking to a senior sannyasin as to when was the last time he had done vrishchikasana. He said, “Oh, that would be in the sannyasa course in 1973.” I said, “Can you do it today?” He said, “Let me try. So many years have gone by, I don’t know if I can do it, but let me try.”
He tried, and in one go he was back in exactly the same posture. This was due to muscle memory. This is an important thing to know: that muscles have memories. When you practise an asana, you are training your body. You are not merely guiding the body to come into a posture, you are creating an unconscious memory.
That memory is the real reason for improvement in health. Therefore, the practice of asanas has to be extended. Not that you do ten rounds and then shavasana. Keep on increasing the number of rounds.
In our training with Sri Swamiji, we used to do each asana for half an hour. How many rounds of pawanmuktasana can you do in half an hour? Practically one hundred rounds of each movement, and our body became completely flexible in three days without any aches or pains.
That is how Sri Swamiji trained us to do it, and therefore in the first practice of an asana we were able to master it. Due to the repetitions, the body developed its own asana memory. Even today, although I haven’t done many of the advanced asanas for years, I can do them without any preparation as the memory is there and a condition has been created.
Can you say the same of your own yoga practice, which consists of going into shavasana after ten rounds of anything? The memory being created is that of shavasana, not of the asana. You have to take that extra step.
You have to go beyond your limitation, but not exert yourself. It has to be done in a proper, comfortable and easy manner, yet it has to be done. This is called sustained and continuous effort. It leads to a deeper experience of yourself and you again become a learner of yoga.
Munger, 25 October 2018
From the book “Yoga Chakrodaya, Munger Yoga Symposium 2018, Book 2, Satsangs on the 2nd Chapter”, pg 22-23, Sw. Niranjanananda Saraswati