Find Your ‘Edge’ and Flow
When it comes to sports, my motivation has always been the same: do my best, give it my all, and push as hard as I can.
Over the years, this has resulted in a lovely assortment of concussions, sprains, pulls and dislocations, and yet, I didn’t stop pushing. Why? Because, quite honestly, pushing as hard as I could, yielded results.
So when I started practicing yoga and the teachers instructed us to ‘find your edge,’ in other words—try your best without going too far—it sounded like a nice way of giving the more ‘casual’ students an excuse to give up. As for me, I kept right on pushing.
I wanted to do a good job. I wanted to do my best at yoga.
The point was to do the postures, wasn’t it? The deeper I could go and the more the posture looked like my teacher’s, the better I’d be doing yoga and the more I’d benefit, right?
Well, my tendency to push yielded pretty much the same results in yoga as it had in everything else: tension, stress, injury and… improvement: I often got deeper than I would’ve had I taken it easy. I thought, “so what if I sometimes hurt myself? It’s a small price to pay to do a good job and reap the benefits of yoga.”
It was only years later when I read Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that I realized ‘finding your edge’ wasn’t some sugary sweet yoga instruction designed to keep ‘non-serious’ people from hurting themselves. It was a recipe for flow.
Finding that sweet spot.
In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi explains that the flow state is achieved when you strike a perfect balance between the challenge demanded of you and your skill level. If your skills are too great for the challenge, you get boredom and no improvement. If the challenge is too great for your skills, you get anxiety, or in my case, injury. But when you find that sweet spot, where the challenge demanded of you requires an effort just beyond your abilities—and you reach without falling over your edge—then, my friend, you get flow.
Not the goal—the result.
When I understood this, it changed the way I approached my yoga practice. I had been thinking that the benefits came from performing the postures as fully as possible. So, I relentlessly pushed myself toward the fullest expression of every posture I came in contact with. But this was a misunderstanding. The full expression of the posture wasn’t the goal of the practice. It was the result of the practice.
If I consistently sought my ‘edge’: that sweet spot where challenge forced me to reach just beyond, my body opened naturally. And, over time, with consistency and patient effort, the fuller expressions of the postures happened. But without the high risk of injury that giving 110% had always brought with it.
A Shift in Perspective
So, for all you pushers out there, I offer you this as the goal of yoga—find your edge. With this simple redirection of your energy, the whole game changes.
First off, your goal is no longer some eventual physical attainment that you’ll one day get. It’s accessible every time you practice. Anyone, at any physical level, can find their edge. Everyone can achieve flow.
This isn’t to say that it happens overnight or that it doesn’t take practice. It means that flow takes more than physical prowess. You can be an incredible athlete and still not flow. This is because it takes self-awareness, sensitivity, honesty, presence, and effort.
Flow is the artful balance between giving your all and respecting where you’re at. Not easy, but accessible.
The other thing that changes, is that the advanced postures are no longer something to achieve. They simply become necessary as your skills advance.
As Csikszentmihalyi says in Flow, the more you hang out in the flow-state, the more your skills improve. The more your skills improve, the greater the challenge must be to bring you into flow. If you stagnate and stop increasing the difficulty—you fall out of flow.
The advanced postures give you a direction to move towards, true, but they aren’t the goal. From the flow perspective, all postures are simply opportunities to continually challenge yourself just beyond your ability as you continue to improve.
Not the only Perspective
I’m not saying that this is THE reason for practicing yoga postures (asana). It’s an approach that I, as someone who struggles with pushing himself too far, find helpful.
Do I still hurt myself? Lol, yes, sometimes I do. But it’s never due to my physical ability. It’s always a result of whether I choose to push for results now or find my edge and flow with what is. And I’ll tell you this—the days when I practice this way, and really stay aware of that place where effort meets ease, something happens that I can’t explain. I may not have gone as deeply as I think I should have, but I feel lighter and expansive.
Try it out. Be patient with yourself and let me know how it goes. And if you’re interested in learning more about flow from the source, check out the video below.
Peace out –
Joe Germinario
