my practice is built on a mountain of failures

There are two of me.

I'm someone who struggles to stay consistent in moving my body.

I'll practise for a week, feel the difference in my body, and then I get distracted. I miss a day. Then two. Then it's been ten days. I've been lost in Chinese Medicine study and practice and yoga and qigong teaching — doing my daily job.

Then I get a sore neck.

I'm also someone who's practised almost every day for decades.

Both of these are true. I'm not the struggling version who somehow became the consistent version. I'm the same person, still. My back still complains some mornings. I still have days where the last thing I want is to get outside and do some qigong. Nothing about my wiring changed.

What changed is that I stopped being upset with the reality of failure.

There's a line from pretty much every kung-fu movie... something like "The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried."

It's not ancient wisdom dressed up. It's just true.

Every teacher whose practice you admire has a mountain of missed days, botched poses, and abandoned habits underneath whatever you're seeing now. More often than not, it's normal.

If you think this way, my failure is enormous. I don't talk about it much, because it's not a very marketable thing to admit, but it's the actual foundation of everything I teach.

Here's what I got wrong for years: I thought a missed practice was a detour. Get back on track and the failure disappears, like it never happened.

But there's no track without the missed days. They don't interrupt the path.

They are the path.

Think about how a toddler learns to walk. She falls. Gets up. Falls again. Nobody calls her a failure. Nobody suggests walking isn't for her. The falling is so obviously part of learning that it doesn't even register as failure — it's just what learning looks like from the inside.

Yin practice works the same way. There's no version of building a lifelong practice where you never fall off it. The only real question is whether you know how to get back up without making it mean something about who you are.

The moment you get back on the mat — even for two minutes, even after ten days away — you've already stopped being "a failure who quit." You're just someone practising again. That's the whole shift.

I will passionately continue to miss days. I still have mornings where my inner critic has plenty to say about it.

None of that has changed.

What's changed is that I stopped treating a missed week as the end of the story.

It never was.

Yinside,

Dhugal