Three to maintain, four to gain

I flirted with yoga for nearly a decade before my body (gently, then more insistently) suggested it was time to stop running.

In my early 40s, I even bought a yoga studio! That’s a story for another time, but it was during this time when I was practicing yoga and Pilates on a (mostly) daily basis that I first heard this phrase.

At the time, as Bikram yoga was making a painful rebranding transition to “hot yoga,” or “Hot 26+2,” instructors broke from script in surprising and unusual ways.

“Three to maintain, four to gain,” my instructor said, and it jolted me out of my awareness of practice and into all kinds of other applications for this wisdom in life. This was somewhere around 2016, but I remember it like it was yesterday — just as I remember my instructor saying yesterday, “If you can’t hear yourself breathing, it’s because you’re thinking too loudly.”

So much wisdom stems from these practices.

Anyhow, I was looking for a way to overlay the idea of three to maintain, four to gain onto the college application process for my students, so I brought it up in discussion with Tom O’Hare, and this video is the result of his continued collaboration with me to share time and talents with students. 😊

—Christine