‘Not practicing is practicing’ by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Sometimes I like to point out that not doing yoga is the same as doing yoga, although I hope people don’t get the wrong idea and think I am saying it’s the same whether you practice or not. What I mean is simply that every time you come back to yoga practice, you see the effect of not having done it for a while. So in a way you learn more by coming back to it than you would by just keeping it up.

Of course, this is only true if you notice things such as how still your body feels, how hard it is to hold a posture, how impatient the mind becomes, how it resists staying on the breath. These things are really hard not to notice when you are down on the floor holding on to your knee as you draw your head up toward it. They are much harder to be aware of when it’s life itself that we are talking about rather than yoga. But the same principle applies. Yoga and life are different ways of saying the same thing. Forgetting or neglecting to be mindful can teach you a lot more than just being mindful all the time. Fortunately, most of us don’t have to worry on that score, since our tendencies toward mindlessness are so robust. It is in the coming back to mindfulness that seeing lies.

From Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn