Foot print in the snow

I walked the dogs today on a dirt road that took us to the Avon River. The road had a light layer of snow on it from the night before. The puddles were still frozen and still had snow on them. I found it funny how my younger dog Maddie would run around and then suddenly hit one of those frozen puddles. Even though she has 4 legs she still would lose her footing for a second and then regain it.

In standing balance poses, footing is very important. I imagine that I am putting a footprint in the snow, my foot settles into the snow with a firm stability. Then the poses seem to grow from there. But other times there is ice under the snow and one moment I’m balancing perfectly in the pose and the next I’m awkwardly trying to keep my balance.

One thing I learned from Maddie is that even if she loses her balance on the ice, it really doesn't faze her. It is all just part of life.

A long Road

Sometimes it seems that there is a long road ahead of us in the practice of Yoga. You know, like when you say to yourself, “will I ever be able to do so and so pose?” It seems like such a long road. I guess it is like any thing else; it doesn’t come all at once, although sometimes you want it to happen all at once. But then how would we learn without going through the process?
We do learn by going through something over and over again until it is engrained in our nervous system. That is change over time. But then there is change that is instantaneous. This change is from something that you observe or something that happens to you that you cannot describe. It engulfs all of you; it isn’t learned from a process, meaning it doesn’t have any thing to do with time, that is why it is indescribable.
So I think that there are two ways of learning, one that involves time that has the quality of “a long road ahead of you” and the other which is “immediate” learning.