Discipline Required

I am feeling more and more that my mission is more or less a failure. There is some small success here and there with one or another student but from a wide view, I was unable to convince most of the students to do a serious steady practice. There are many reasons for this. Some are the student's fault. Some are due to the culture of the time. Some are due to my own underestimation or overestimation of the absorption rate of the student.

In any case, it all falls on the shoulder of the teacher in the end, because he has to account for his influence and work with the student. He is held responsible for the lack of seriousness.

Arthur Beverford, my first physical yoga teacher in this life, was of the opinion initially, that nobody could do what I was doing. He would smile look at a few students whom I had and then say that they could not do that. Mostly his remarks were about my concentration and internalization ability. He felt that the student was not likely to have that much psyche control. His view was that people might begin with something to develop focus and what’s was better than martial arts, because after all everyone wants to defend himself and wants to be sure that no one can take advantage of him in some way or the other, and on the physical level at that, because that is where everyone naturally focuses.

Of course that won’t do for yoga, but Beverford point is to be taken seriously.

The struggle in yoga is internal between the core-self and its adjuncts. So it is not as easy because there is no clear cut opponent as in martial arts.

Look at the training in this video: