Growth Is Not Linear

We spend a great deal of our lives learning how to build things.

We learn how to begin, how to work harder, how to improve, how to make something grow. We are less often taught what to do when something we worked very hard to build no longer fits the life around it.

For many years, growth at YogaSutra was easy for me to recognise. It had a physical shape. One studio became another branch, then another. There were more students, more teachers, more classes and more rooms in which to practise. Each new space felt like progress, and at the time, it was.

What changed was not that those branches suddenly became wrong. What changed was our relationship with what we had built.

With time, I became less interested in how much YogaSutra could expand and more interested in what I wanted it to become. Maintaining several spaces required attention, and eventually I began to question whether preserving the size of what we had built was still the best use of that attention.

“Effort creates its own kind of attachment. The more we have invested in something, the more difficult it becomes to imagine not continuing it. Years of work begin to feel like a reason to keep going.”

This was difficult to admit because effort creates its own kind of attachment. The more we have invested in something, the more difficult it becomes to imagine not continuing it. Years of work begin to feel like a reason to keep going.

I see a version of this in teaching yoga. A student may spend years working towards a particular posture. At one stage, that work may be useful. It may build strength, confidence, patience or awareness. Then something changes. There may be an injury, a change in the body, a different stage of life, or simply a different reason for practising. The posture itself has not become bad, and the years spent learning it were not wasted. But its place in the practice may have changed.

Age does not necessarily mean that we can do less. Bodies do not change in one direction. Some capacities diminish, others develop, and years of intelligent practice may allow us to do things we could not do when we were younger. The question is not whether the body is becoming better or worse. The question is whether we are paying attention to the body—and the person—that exists now.

“We cannot keep giving someone yesterday’s practice simply because yesterday it worked. And we cannot keep practising what no longer fits our present condition simply because it once did.”

As teachers, we cannot keep giving someone yesterday’s practice simply because yesterday it worked. And as students, we cannot keep practising what no longer fits our present condition simply because it once did.

Perhaps we should not do that with the things we build either.

Abhyāsa and Vairāgya

This is where abhyāsa and vairāgya have become meaningful to me. In the Yoga Sūtras, abhyāsa is sustained practice: staying, returning and doing the work. Vairāgya is non-attachment: the ability to loosen our hold.

We need both. Leaving when something becomes difficult is not necessarily letting go. Sometimes we need to stay, work and give something more time. But staying is not always perseverance either. Sometimes we continue because we have invested too much to imagine stopping.

Letting go does not mean that something was wrong. Sometimes it means recognising that something can have been right without needing to remain right forever.

That was the difficult part of deciding to close two YogaSutra branches.

I would like to say that once I understood this, the decision became easy. It didn’t. Part of me wanted to keep them because they were ours. We had built them and invested years in them. There was ego in it too. Closing something you once chose to open makes you question yourself. Could we have done something differently? Should we give it more time? Does closing it somehow mean the original decision was wrong?

No philosophy makes those questions disappear.

But the branches taught me something I probably could not have learned without opening them. They taught me that a studio is not multiplied simply by putting the same name above another door. Each space develops its own rhythm, its own community and its own demands. Expansion creates possibilities, but it also divides attention. The question is not only whether we are capable of running more, but whether running more allows us to become better at what we actually care about.

I learned that I cared less about how many classes we could put on a timetable than about what happened inside those classes. I wanted students to understand what they were practising and why. I wanted teachers to have room to develop. I wanted YogaSutra to become clearer rather than simply larger, and I wanted the School of YogaSutra to have space for the deeper study and education that I increasingly wanted to build.

I could not have known all of this when we opened the branches. In a way, we needed to grow in order to discover what kind of growth mattered to us.

So closing them is not a return to where we started. We are coming back to fewer spaces with knowledge we did not have before.

There was no dramatic moment when everything suddenly became clear. We looked at what the spaces required from us, what they gave back, where we wanted to go next and how we wanted to use our attention. Eventually, the balance had changed.

Closing two branches does not mean that opening them was a mistake. They were part of the practice too. Abhyāsa asked us to stay long enough to build, learn and understand what the work required. Vairāgya eventually asked whether we could honour everything those years had given us without insisting that their physical form continue indefinitely.

There is no philosophy that can tell us exactly where that moment is. No Sanskrit word makes the decision for us. Practice does not remove uncertainty, and experience does not guarantee that every decision will be right. We can only pay attention to what is actually in front of us and try not to let yesterday’s investment become tomorrow’s obligation.

When I think about those branches now, I do not think first about what we closed. I think about what happened while the doors were open: the people who came, the teachers who grew, the friendships that formed, the mornings and evenings that became part of our lives. The rooms held all of that for a time. Then the time came to let the rooms go, without letting go of what they had made possible.

That is what releasing a posture can feel like. We do not abandon the practice when we stop asking it to remain in one particular shape. We carry forward the strength, understanding and attention it gave us. We allow the form to change because the practice is larger than the form.

People came. They practised. We taught. We learned.

And then we had to recognise that the posture had done its work.

Not because there was nothing left to hold.

Because holding it was no longer the practice.

“We do not abandon the practice when we stop asking it to remain in one particular shape. We carry forward the strength, understanding and attention it gave us. We allow the form to change because the practice is larger than the form.”