Yesterday, before shutting down all of my devices for the night, I noticed a Facebook notification that someone had left a comment on a video of me practicing Flying Pigeon, one of our focus postures in this month’s playlist:

“So tell me the health benefits of that or is it just showy off yoga?”

Though it took me a second to shake off what I perceived as the harsh tone of the comment, you know what? I actually thought it was a really good question. 

Because yes, Flying Pigeon looks fancy. It’s an arm balance, your legs are doing something that probably makes very little sense to anyone who doesn’t practice yoga, and your feet are off the floor. There are certainly easier ways to strengthen your arms, hips and core without folding yourself into Flying Pigeon first.

So why do we practice it?

Flying Pigeon asks A LOT of your body. You need external hip mobility to create the shape, strength through your upper body and core to support yourself, balance and body awareness to figure out where your weight needs to go, and enough coordination to make all of those things happen at the same time.

But there’s another piece of this that I think becomes incredibly important as we move through our 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond: your brain has to learn something new.

When you’re learning a posture like this, you’re problem-solving the entire time. Your brain is taking in information from your body, figuring out where you are in space, coordinating movements that probably felt completely foreign the first time you attempted them, making adjustments when something doesn’t work and then storing all of that information for the next time you come back to it.

That process has value whether your Flying Pigeon ever leaves the ground or not.

And THIS is one of the reasons I have absolutely no interest in watering down our yoga practice simply because we're getting older.

There is tremendous value in continuing to learn new things, asking our bodies to move in different ways and giving our brains problems to solve. We get to stay curious about what our bodies can do instead of deciding that at some arbitrary age we’ve learned enough and now our job is simply to maintain what we have.

That doesn’t mean every woman needs Flying Pigeon in her life. You can live a very happy, healthy, strong life without ever balancing your shin on the backs of your arms.

But this space will also never be about doing fancy yoga simply for the sake of doing fancy yoga.

When I choose the postures we're going to spend an entire month exploring, I have thought A LOT about what they're going to give us along the way. What strength are we building? Where are we creating more usable mobility? What does this ask us to coordinate? What are we learning about how our individual bodies move? How will the work we do here show up somewhere else in our practice, and ultimately, how does becoming stronger, more mobile, more coordinated and more confident in our bodies help us move through our lives off the mat?

Sometimes the big, ridiculous yoga posture at the end is simply the fun reason we get to do all of that work.

And I LOVE that part of it.

There is something incredibly satisfying about working on something that initially makes you think, How the hell am I supposed to do THAT? and then slowly figuring it out. 

That experience changes more than your yoga practice.

Because every time we learn something new, struggle with it, laugh at ourselves, make adjustments and eventually surprise the hell out of ourselves, we're collecting evidence that we're still capable of learning and changing.

I can't think of a better thing to keep practicing in midlife.

Even if sometimes it looks a little fancy. 😉