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On the other hand, if the student pay no attention, fail to watch the
body, an opposite phenomenon may occur.
He shifts to ease himself
without knowing that he has done so.
To avoid this, choose a
position which naturally is rather cramped and awkward,
and in which slight changes are not sufficient to bring
ease.
Otherwise, for the first few days, the student may even imagine
that he has conquered the position.
In fact, in all these practices
their apparent simplicity is such that the beginner is likely to wonder
what all the fuss is about, perhaps to think that he is specially gifted.
Similarly a man who has never touched a golf club will take his
umbrella and carelessly hole a putt which would frighten the best putter
alive.
In a few days, however, in all cases, the discomforts will begin.
As
you go on, they will begin earlier in the course of the hour’s exercise.
The disinclination to practise at all may become almost unconquerable.
One must warn the student against imagining that some other position
would be easier to master than the one he has selected.
Once you
begin to change about you are lost.
Perhaps the reward is not so far distant: it will happen one day
that the pain is suddenly forgotten, the fact of the presence
of the body is forgotten, and one will realize that during the whole
of one’s previous life the body was always on the borderland of con-