Doing the Sequence, or Practising the Method?

Every so often, a student walks into the Mysore room already knowing the Primary Series by heart. Every jump back, every drishti, every count. (Some have learnt it from a led class, some from a book, and a few, bless them, from YouTube.)

And at some point, usually a few weeks in, I find myself asking them a question.

Are you doing the sequence … or are you practising the method?

They sound like the same thing.

They aren't.

Doing the sequence

Doing the sequence is mostly about output. What you can show. What you can finish. What you can hold, and for how long.

You get the asanas right. You memorise the order, vinyasa by vinyasa, and you follow it faithfully. You get stronger, more flexible, better aligned. And, quite naturally, you start measuring your progress by which posture you've reached, or how many you can get through before the bell rings on your morning.

None of this is wrong. It's necessary groundwork, and I'd never tell anyone to skip it.

But you can know the sequence inside out and still not really be practising Mysore.

Knowing the poses is one thing. Knowing how to practise is another thing altogether.

So, what does it mean to practise the method?

Mysore is less about what you do on the mat, and more about how you do it.

At its heart, it's a relationship … between you, your breath, and your teacher. And it unfolds slowly, on its own time (which is very rarely the time you had in mind).

You practise on your own, moving to your own breath rather than someone else's count. Your teacher watches, and gives you what your body needs on that particular day, which may be very different from what it needed yesterday. Postures are given one at a time, when you're ready for them, and not a moment before. You repeat the same postures, morning after morning, for months and sometimes years, refining them a little at a time.

And somewhere along the way, if you let it, the practice stops being about chasing the next pose. It becomes about observing … the body, the breath, the mind, and all the little stories the mind likes to tell about where you "should" be by now.

This is also why trust matters so much in the Mysore room. Knowing when to move on, when to stay, and when to modify is part of the teaching, and it's passed from teacher to student in a way no book or video quite manages.

Patanjali calls this abhyasa: practice that becomes firmly grounded only when it's kept up over a long time, without interruption, and with sincerity. Not quickly. Not occasionally. Not half-heartedly.

The real teaching doesn't happen when I adjust your backbend. It happens in the slow, unglamorous, daily cultivation of attention.

The sequence is the container

You can finish Primary Series and never really practise Mysore.

And you can spend years on the first handful of postures and be practising more deeply than someone who has already "moved on" to Second, or even Third.

Mysore was never simply about getting through the sequence. It's about learning how to practise … breath by breath, posture by posture, with discipline, awareness, and guidance.

The sequence is just the container. The practice is what we learn inside it.

As Guruji used to say, practise, and all is coming.

So the next time you step onto your mat, maybe try a different question. Not "how far have I gotten?", but "how am I practising what I've already been given?"

Worth sitting with, I think.

Or at least, worth breathing with.