Two Months on My Feet — And What It Taught Me About Change

A couple of months ago I started working with a new yoga teacher.

His whole thing is foundations. Before you build into anything more advanced, the body needs to be solid underneath. Which sounds completely reasonable — until you find out what that actually looks like in practice.

For the past two months we have focused almost entirely on my feet.

My feet.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t a bit impatient about it. I came to yoga to move, to breathe, to work on my body. And here we were, session after session, talking about how my weight was sitting across the ball of my foot. Whether my toes were gripping the mat. What the arch was doing.

But something was shifting. Slowly, quietly — not always visible but starting to be felt. The foundation was changing. And because the foundation was changing, everything built on top of it was too.

The story we tell about how fast we should change

It got me thinking about how much suffering comes from the gap between where we actually are and where we think we should be by now.

Most of us carry some version of this: if I were really on top of things — really committed, really capable — I’d have sorted this out by now. The anxiety should be gone. The mindfulness should be working. I should have figured this out already.

It’s a setup. And it piles self-criticism on top of whatever you were already dealing with. Now you’re not just anxious — you’re anxious and annoyed at yourself for still being anxious.

Change doesn’t move on the timeline our minds prefer. And the pressure of expecting it to creates its own kind of pain, separate from whatever we were originally trying to shift.

What’s actually happening in the brain and nervous system

The brain doesn’t rewire quickly. This isn’t a pep talk — it’s just how it works physiologically.

Patterns that have been laid down over years, often decades, don’t change because we’ve understood something or decided we’d like to be different. Understanding is a starting point. The actual rewiring takes time, repetition, and lived experience. New ways of responding need to be practised enough that they become the default — and that takes months and years, not sessions.

This is especially true for anxiety. The nervous system has been practising its particular patterns for a long time. It’s very good at them. Changing them isn’t really about willpower or insight — it’s about slowly, patiently building something new alongside what’s already there.

Two months on my feet. Still a work in progress.

Patience isn’t a personality trait — it’s something you practise

I’m not naturally patient. Most people aren’t — especially with themselves.

But I’ve started to think of patience with change as something you build rather than something you either have or don’t. It’s not about lowering your standards or giving up on getting better. It’s about being honest about what change actually requires.

That means noticing when the critical voice shows up — the one that says this should be happening faster — and getting a bit curious about it rather than just taking it at face value. Where did that voice come from? What would it feel like to take the pressure off, just a little, and focus on the next small thing?

It means letting small shifts count. My feet are genuinely different than they were two months ago. That matters — even though I still can’t do a handstand. Even though there’s still a long way to go.

And it means trusting that some of the most significant change is happening underneath the surface, in ways you can only really see looking back.

What this has to do with anxiety

Anxiety is one of the places where impatience with change tends to cause the most extra suffering.

Because anxiety feels urgent — that’s part of what it is — the desire to make it stop quickly makes complete sense. And when the breathing exercise doesn’t immediately calm things down, or the mindfulness practice doesn’t quieten the racing thoughts right away, it can feel like you’re doing it wrong or that nothing is working.

Usually it’s neither. It’s just that you’re a few weeks into rewiring a nervous system that has been running its current patterns for years.

The question worth sitting with isn’t why isn’t this fixed yet — it’s what would it look like to stay with this long enough to see what it can actually do?

Small. Consistent. Patient. That’s how feet change. That’s how nervous systems change. That’s how most real change happens.

Something to notice

What stories do you carry about your own capacity to change — particularly around anxiety?

What does the critical voice say when you try something and don’t feel different straight away? What judgements show up when progress is slower than you wanted?

Just notice them. You don’t have to argue with them. But getting curious about the stories you tell yourself about change is often where something starts to quietly shift.

If you’re working on anxiety and finding that things aren’t moving as quickly as you’d hoped — and that gap is starting to feel discouraging — that’s worth bringing to counselling rather than taking as evidence that you can’t change. It isn’t. Available in Squamish and online across BC.