You said, "You should practice to learn as well as practice to consolidate." Can you delineate on that?
I said that there are two aspects in practice: one is to learn the poses and the other is to consolidate the poses. Your practice must have two channels. But usually, all of you, all of us are practising in one channel. We want to learn. We want to do more. We want to do better next week than this week, next month than this month, next year than this year. And that is why we want learning and learning and learning, doing and doing and doing. We never consolidate.
For consolidation, you are not supposed to be doing more. If you are doing every time more and more, and new and new, where do you consolidate? For consolidation, you must see that you are not doing more and that you are consolidating and assimilating; you must assimilate what you have done and not take another morsel. For consolidation, the first thing you have to learn is that the brain should be quiet. It doesn't matter if you are not taking the hand down to the floor in Trikonasana. If your brain is to be quiet, maybe you require the support of a ledge to keep the hand raised up.
Sometimes you must practice in such a way that you are maintaining the parameter, that the brain remain quiet, un-tensed, not hardened. Find how far you can do and that is your optimum level. You always go for the maximum: "What is my maximum? How much can I do at maximum?" But you never try to strike the optimum level. The optimum level is where you can do almost effortless, where you don't put pressure and forces, will, etc. That is how you must sometimes do your practice for consolidation. The principle of consolidation is "don't do more but do better." Do with less effort and more composure. If you try to do more you do worse and not better.
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