One of my favorite lessons of the past year has been about the power and efficacy of making small efforts to produce change.

My window into this was handstands. I have had a semi-regular yoga practice since 2001, at times going to organized practices 5-7 times a week and at other times backing off that to 1-2 times a week, or no practice for a few months at a time, as my body and mind seem to need. Yoga has been great for helping me work out some issues I've had with my body, and it also gives me an opportunity to observe my mind during the typical 90 minute practice. I find I'm generally happier and emotionally more balanced when I'm practicing regularly.

Part of many Hatha yoga practices (the physical/pose-based part of yoga, what many people in the West think of as the entirety of yoga) is inversions. Numerous benefits are claimed for inversions; as a sort of skeptical Western practitioner, all I can say is that I feel internal change when I'm upside down, and it feels refreshing and good, both during and after the pose.

Any pose where your legs are raised above your torso and head is an inversion, and they come in many varieties. It can be as simple as lying on your back and raising your legs up the wall; the wall supports your legs and you can rest in that position without any effort. Slightly more vigorous inversions are shoulder stands (raising your legs over your head and then supporting your legs and torso above you by pressing your hands into your back) and headstands (pretty much what you'd think, though most people who did headstands as kids did a sort of tripod with their head and hands, and the standard yoga headstand uses your whole forearm to create the base). Barring having a specific injury or disability, anyone can put their legs up the wall; most people can learn to hold a basic shoulder stand within a month or two of starting yoga; and many people will be able to hold a headstand free-standing within a year or two, if not sooner.

Beyond that, you start getting into things that are more acrobatic, such as forearm stand, which is pretty much what it sounds like, and handstands. In these poses you are upside-down, so you are no doubt getting the same benefits of inversion as in other poses, but balance is far more difficult and much more strength is required. There are no doubt physical benefits to learning to maintain balance in inversion, but to me the primary benefit of poses such as these are as challenges to ego. First of all, most people will not be able to successfully hold these poses for some time, which makes them humbling. When you fail at forearm stand, you fail loudly and clumsily; if you're doing it in a classroom setting, the whole room knows you fell over. You have to be willing to accept other people seeing you in that state. Also, wanting to do these poses at all is, for me, pretty much an ego thing. If you're looking for the benefit of inversion itself, you can attain it much more easily in another pose. These more difficult poses are a mountain to climb, something to strive for, something to achieve. In the process, the practitioner can observe her relationship to her desire to do the pose.

So, doing handstand is for me something of an ego thing. Yoga has always given me opportunities to observe my ego in action. Initially I would look around me and see who was doing more advanced poses than me, and I would feel bad about my inability to do those poses. Then, as my practice advanced, I would check to see if I was the most advanced practitioner in the room. Later, I would do my best to shut out other people as I practiced, and congratulate myself for being so lacking in ego, the irony of which is not lost on me. I would also observe people going for more advanced variations of poses before they were ready to do so, while I would sometimes stay in more basic variations of the same pose, and make up stories about those people's practices and their relationship to their own ego, and again feel good about myself for recognizing that. All of this is my ego in action. Lately I've been able to be aware of my ego doing its thing as I practice and to have compassion for myself and for other students for acting on ego. But still, my feeling satisfied about this is coming from my ego.

This is all something of a digression. In short, doing handstands has primarily been a platform for me to observe my relationship to my ego.

Back to the point of the post: about a year ago I decided to try and learn to hold handstand. My entire work on this consisted of practicing handstand before yoga class. I typically arrive 5-10 minutes before class, to set up my mat and settle in. Part of my routine of settling in became doing a few handstands, either with the assistance of the wall or without. No more than 2-3 minutes at a time, 3-6 times a week or so. Handstand is rarely part of a directed yoga class, so these 2-3 minutes a day were the sum total of my efforts towards learning to hold handstand. As I progressed, I quickly learned that the wall was a hinderance to learning to hold handstand; I would rely on the wall to help me establish balance and never get into the right arm/body alignment to hold it on my own. So, I moved myself about 2-3 feet out from the wall, so that the wall was there if I fell but otherwise was unreachable for support. Over time I got better at holding my position, until one day before class I unexpectedly found myself staying upside down, away from the wall. It wasn't very long - maybe about 20 seconds - but it was enough for me to feel that I had successfully held the pose.

This was different from my typical M.O. for trying to learn something new. I typically throw myself into something full-force, spending as much effort and time as I have available. I tend to quickly burn out from my efforts and lose interest. Instead, this time, I only gave it a small amount of time, but I did it consistently, and without any sense of pressure about completing the task or attachment to the goal. And, eventually, I reached some version of the goal, and with a sense of ease rather than struggle.

I hope I'm able to use this type of striving/practice to create change in other areas of my life. Small efforts, consistent efforts, and with no sense of needing to achieve the goal in a specific time frame. It's a different way of going about things than I'm used to, and it worked better than my normal way of doing things.