My best guess is that I spent about 20 hours over about a week preparing for my New Years Day workshop on intention and making change. As always, the basic idea comes easily, but working out the details - that's the challenge. Plan, review, revise, rethink, redo. Eventually I had a workshop planned that I was happy with and confident about.
Then the workshop was cancelled. But I immediately knew that the work had been worth it, because after the intensity of preparation faded, the work began bubbling up in many ways. I knew how it was going to transform all of my yoga teaching, taking it to a new level of depth and value for the students, going beyond the physical poses to a deeper level of meaning. With several classes now behind me this week, I'm still experiencing the newness of the transformation. I'm well aware of differences in my teaching, and the students can tell, as well.
The process of deeply immersing in a subject, studying it with intensity and purpose, and then coming up for air on the other side and finding the work blossom out in unexpected ways, seems for me to be how the most dramatic change occurs.
The intensity perhaps burns deeper through layers of habit and complacency. There's a word in yoga - tapas - the fiery intensity that burns away our ingrained patterns and the impediments to the experience of yoga.
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