When someone turned on Do You Want More? during a stuffy, boxed-in car trip of eight young men in a midsized sedan heading to Lowell, Massachusetts in 1993 for a Jack Kerouac festival, I was taken by Black Thought’s lyrics. There we were en route to a poetry festival, and with the Roots I had found another poet, one that would long outlast my Beats fascination.

This week while bumping Game Theory in my iPod, a few of his lines from “Don’t Feel Right” jumped out:

Look, my eyes open ‘cause I’m really a watchman/And when inviting my thoughts out, really I’m boxin’/My main adversary in this silly concoction

They were so fitting to my yoga classes. Any time challenging arm balances arise, such as the handstand practice we are working with this week, students drop out immediately. Not the majority, mind you, sometimes none. Sometimes a bunch. Some stare around and gaze; others remain in the standing split that transitioned us; others sit down, frustrated, or grab water, towel off. Anything but attempt to do something they might not succeed at, the most overwhelming notion many can envision.

That’s one of the hardest ideas to get across in an asana practice: “getting” the pose is secondary. Your relationship to your mind when something challenging is being asked of you is much more important than whether or not you rock a handstand in the middle of a humid studio. There could be any number of reasons one does not attempt the posture: wrist injury, dizziness, fear. There’s a huge difference between not being able to do a posture out of injury and out of anxiety about the pose, however.

For example, due to a hiatal hernia, inverting is not the best thing for me to do. A tear in my esophagal lining just above my stomach allows acid free access to my throat. Backbends such as Bow and Wheel also create extra pressure; I’ll be fine until I attempt them, when suddenly the burning swells of heartburn commence. Thing is, I love to invert. I still do, but for shorter periods, and not if any fire lingers. Instead of shoulderstand, I’ll put a block under my sacrum and lift my legs. It’s a limitation I’ve learned to live with, despite occasional internal protestations.

So that’s something I don’t have to box myself with while on the mat. And that mat is essentially a six-by-two foot ring where you spend an hour or ninety minutes doing battle. The postures are almost benign. Yes, they have anatomical and physiological benefits. It’s the mental and emotional training that really drives people there, whether or not they recognize it. There are many ways to work out, stay in shape—I cycle, lift weights, do cardio, and so forth. Those too have their mental focus, their emotional patterns. Nothing is an intimate and immediate as yoga, at least to my constitution.

When I first understood that I had patterns of movements that were bound up with habits of thought, my practice deepened. When the tension of toe-picking and clock-staring shifted to a more reflective space—a continual discipline—I really started to enjoy my yoga practice. To sit back and watch yourself watching yourself; something Buddhist in that sentiment, primal and commendable. It’s difficult. It’s one of the hardest things we humans are called to do: get out of the way of ourselves to understand who we are. Not that the process ever really ends. Most of the time we never even get our gloves on. Those moments we do, and we land that one solid punch—that’s why we unroll the mat; that’s why we continue.