"Practice and All is Coming"
But is practice alone enough?
If you practice yoga, you have probably heard a teacher at least once say, “Practice and all is coming.” Perhaps you have even shared this phrase yourself. This quote, attributed to the founder of Ashtanga Yoga, Pattabhi Jois, reflects the emphasis on consistent, embodied practice that the yogic traditions have continually emphasised throughout history. As the Dattātreyayogaśāstra – the earliest, fully dedicated, and systematised Haṭha Yoga Text (dated to approximately the 13th century CE) – states:
“Success comes for one who performs the practices. How could it come for one who does not?”
(Dattātreyayogaśāstra, 2.25).
But what, exactly, does success mean in yoga or spiritual practice more broadly? What is the purpose of practice?
Hearing quotes like this shared in the modern yoga studio, we might imagine our focus being on achieving ‘hard’ poses like a handstand. If we practice, we will eventually succeed. This very well may be true. But really, the success we are looking for is a deeper kind of transformation. In more traditional understandings of yoga philosophy, the ‘success’ at the end of the road is not just achieving a new pose, but liberation: enlightenment. According to many of the traditional yogic texts, abhyāsa – a regular, committed practice – is essential for success on this path.
Yet there is another side of the coin we often forget about. Yes, yogic traditions have long emphasised disciplined individual practice. Yet practice never occurs in isolation: we are also shaped by – and shape – the worlds and communities we inhabit.
So, while an emphasis on practice can conjure the image of the isolated yogic figure meditating in a distant cave, we would do well to remember that it is not just our individual spiritual practices that create us, but our relationship to a wider whole.
After all, practice not only transforms us; it forms us. But so does the repetition of everyday practice, habits, actions and thoughts. We are not just produced through individual practice, but through our participation in the whole.
I have been reflecting on this topic recently, as here in the UK we have just had our local elections. Alongside some deeply worrying currents in our political climate, I am also sensing a renewed desire for hope and meaningful change, reminding me of something that we all too often forget today in the world of modern yoga: that, in cultures of the past, spirituality and politics – the state of the individual and the collective – were deeply intertwined.
”[I]n cultures of the past, spirituality and politics – the state of the individual and the collective – were deeply intertwined.”
While the word ‘politics’ today can evoke images of ideological division and bureaucratic administration, in many ancient and premodern traditions, the soul of society was understood to be deeply connected to the soul of the individual. For the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, “the city is the soul writ large” (Book II of Republic): the macrocosm of the city reflecting the microcosmic psyche of the individual. Central to Indian yogic traditions, we also find ideas about the cosmic order of the whole (ṛta, dharma), expressing a vision of practice oriented not only toward individual transformation, but toward participation in the harmony of the universe.
In other words, these visions depict a view in which individual practice alone is not enough. Rather, practice – and life – always takes place within the context of a greater cosmic and civilisational order. Practice is never a purely individual endeavour; it is one of participation, transformation, and formation in relation to a greater cosmic and meaningful whole.
This cosmic, participatory perspective we find in many of the ancient and premodern traditions fundamentally challenges many aspects of our taken-for-granted modern worldview, including: hyperindividualism – the prioritisation of the autonomous individual above wider relational or communal orders – and ontological flatness – the reduction of reality to a single level of material existence devoid of deeper symbolic, spiritual, or cosmic meaning. Yet this assumed vision of reality forms the context within which much modern yoga and spiritual practice takes place, often reducing the cosmic, transformative, and political potential of practice to an individualised venture of self-improvement and wellness, without consideration of the broader whole.
Yet there is hope. This is the gift that studying yogic and contemplative philosophies gives. Not as fixed doctrines to blindly follow. Not as spiritual concepts with which to superficially garnish our otherwise unchanged ways of living. But as invitations to reorient how we see ourselves, the cosmos, and the work of our practice, from the inside out.
Perhaps, practice and all really is coming – if we are willing to radically expand our understanding of what our practice is all about.
By Floss Harry
Yoga Teacher and Embodied Philosophy Facilitator
Thank you for reading.
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