[00:00:00] Foreign. [00:00:11] Hello and welcome to Deep in your yoga practice. I'm Lauren Leduc, the owner, founder and lead teacher trainer at True Love Yoga in Kansas City, Missouri. And this episode is about the beginner's mind. We'll talk about why the more we learn about yoga, the more there is to discover. Discover. I remember when I signed up for my first teacher training for my 200 hour. I didn't think I knew that much about yoga. I just knew I loved practicing it. And I thought maybe when I was finished with this training, I would have a solid grasp on yoga and what it is. Maybe I would know yoga. But really the opposite happened. I realized how little I actually knew. And still to this day, the more I study, the bigger yoga becomes. And instead of answers, the I find more questions and maybe better questions. So today's episode is about why that happens, not just in yoga, but in any lifelong practice. Why is it that the more we know, the more it feels like we don't know? Earlier this year, I talked about my kind of intention or my sankalpa for the year, which is mastery. [00:01:16] And I want to say that I wholeheartedly believe in it. But I also think that mastery is somewhat of an illusion. We live in a culture that loves completion. [00:01:28] We graduate, we finish the course, we cross things off the list. But yoga doesn't really work that way. You can complete a teacher training, but you can't complete yoga because it's a lifelong practice. So we're always in a state of learning. There's never this true mastery of something because there really is always more. Certificates definitely don't equal wisdom or experience, and expertise can really create this. This deep sense of humility. Often the best teachers out there are lifelong students. They're in this space of humility, and they're always willing to learn more, maybe to accept that something they had learned before needs revising and to change their practice and methods with new information. Talk about the beginner's mind. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. Think about the fool card in the tarot deck. It's not about necessarily, necessarily being foolish. It is somewhat about being naive, though. But it's also about starting a journey. It's about freshness and possibilities and curiosity. The expert mind might form identity around what it knows, but the beginner's mind might think, what else is there? There might be this sense of curiosity and of openness. And even if we've learned so much, there's always still so much to learn in life and in yoga. Of course, in asana or posture and meditation and breath, maybe in relationship with ourselves and others in our yoga teaching, if we're teachers and in our lives. I think that rather than ever really reaching a sense of expertise or mastery, we just get new and new layers of yoga. The first layer might feel like getting to know movement and stretching, enjoying a sense of exercise and maybe feeling, feeling better without quite knowing why. And then we want to go deeper, right? This is called deepen your yoga practice or deepening our layers. Maybe the next layer we find more alignment, we feel more befriended with our breath. Maybe we understand technique more because we have increased our strength and our proprioception, or knowing where our body is in space. Maybe we've become more mobile and then we want to go deeper, right? Maybe we learn more about anatomy and fascia, biomechanics, maybe about the nervous system and about individual differences in practice. And we want to get deeper and learn more about philosophy and ethics, meditation, pranayama, history and texts. And then we might go even deeper into another layer of who am I becoming? How do I live yoga? Maybe how do I teach yoga? How do I lead? How do I serve? So as we go deeper, the poses probably become a little less important and the practice becomes much, much bigger. But I think it's important once we get to this point, maybe this deeper layer, to always go back to the movement and the stretching and to feeling better, to just experiencing the practice without over intellectualizing, because that's going to remain this beautiful fuel that we can always draw upon. And I'd say when we're asking things about the philosophy or the history, when we're asking who am I becoming, how do I serve? That these questions are never answered in a final way in our lives. They're something that we can keep coming back to over and over again. We can really keep coming back to every layer of this practice and learning more. We can really be in the mystery of life and of yoga, in the awe, in the humility. [00:05:13] And I think we can embrace being full and master at the same time. It's important to know that as we go deeper that advanced yoga doesn't mean advanced postures. [00:05:24] This is a misconception that is worth dismantling. Many people hear advanced yoga and they picture handstands and pretzel like poses and extreme flexibility. But instead, an advanced or mature practice might look like remaining calm during conflict, knowing when to rest, to hold space for grief, maybe knowing how to listen deeply, to let go of certainty. Maybe it's teaching compassionately, maybe it's this willingness to change one's mind. And yes, can it mean increased strength and mobility and proprioception that comes with practice? Of course it can. But also that has diminishing returns. It's going to fade over time as we become old. So what is left? Is it this deep inner inquiry? Is it connection to consciousness and spirit? And with those things, there's never any precise concrete answer. There's just comfort in the unknown. It's perhaps love of learning, following our curiosity, following our hearts and trusting that we'll never know it all. But it's worth trying. There are questions that never seem to end. Like how do philosophy and neuroscience intersect? How do we teach different bodies? How do breath and emotion influence each other? How do we preserve yoga's traditions while making it acceptable? What is samadhi? What is enlightenment? What is bliss? Is it attainable? [00:06:48] Is it worth grasping onto? Or should I just enjoy the ride? [00:06:52] These are just examples. But there are things I remain endlessly curious about. How yoga happened, how different cultures intersected. And we can know some, but we cannot know all. And there's something so exciting about that to me. So you might ask yourself if you're ready for a deeper study. You might be ready if you ask more questions than you used to, or you're fascinated by how things work. Maybe you enjoy studying between yoga classes. Maybe you like to notice subtleties. You want to refine rather than accumulate. Maybe you love talking about yoga. You find yourself reading yoga books for fun. You don't necessarily want more poses, but you want a deeper understanding. So where are you still curious? What questions won't leave you alone? [00:07:38] And where are you being invited to become a student again? Yoga isn't something we finish. Instead it's a relationship. Some years we focus on movement, some years philosophy, some healing, some teaching. And if we're paying attention, the practice keeps unfolding. There's never this moment of arriving. [00:07:57] Instead, we are continuously discovering, layer by layer, knowing that we'll never fully get to the core. I'd like to add for the yoga teachers listening to this and you've thought, yes, this is exactly how I feel. I want to share that. Enrollment for our next 300 hour yoga teacher training opens on September 1st. I meet teachers and dedicated practitioners who aren't looking for necessarily another certificate, but for a place to ask to deeper questions to refine their understanding, to continue growing alongside an amazing community of other curious teachers. So if you are a 200 hour grad from any yoga school and that resonates with you, keep an eye out. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be sharing more about the program as enrollment opens. And whether you join us or continue your studies in another way, I hope this episode reminds you that yoga is a lifelong practice of yoga curiosity rather than mastery. So thank you so much for joining me today. If you're Interested in our 300 hour training, you can learn more in the show notes. Until next time, Om Shanti, Om Peace.