NOTE: This was originally published as part of my newsletter in May 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive the next Om Letter direct to your inbox once a month.
A few years ago, while I watched one of my Feldenkrais teachers demonstrate the play-by-play of a Functional Integration lesson (these tend to centre around physical touch) he noticed himself leaning his elbows into his thighs. He paused to say: “It’s okay to lean like this, but over the years I’ve come to learn that, later down the line, there’s always a price to pay for convenience.” Words that have been ringing in my ears ever since.
Over the past decade, an odd constellation of things has happened. We collectively lived through a pandemic and somehow emerged more divided, less compassionate towards one another and, what I personally find most noticeable, less patient.
At the same time, we let ourselves be charmed into using a new generation of technologies that promised to make our lives easier. They would do all the mundane tasks we no longer had the patience for, and they would do them faster and better than we ever could.
Instead of delving into an archive, scavenging for information through bibliographies, galleries or libraries we would ask a search engine, and the clickable answers would come tumbling out. Alas, there would be no more ‘real’ research, no serendipitous discoveries and side quests, but we traded them in for speed, which seemed like a worthwhile exchange.
And of course, all good things come in threes so the final nail in the coffin of our patience and attention spans arrived with the advent of social media. The name sounded promising enough, but these platforms quickly learned how to lock us into algorithms that sent us further down the rabbit holes of our deeply-held beliefs. Suddenly, the time we were saving through automation was being swallowed whole by these platforms.
Now, with the world’s knowledge available at the click of a few buttons, our tasks increasingly automated, and computers capable of creating things from nothing more than a verbal prompt, we are encountering the world as a finished product at the point of consumption. What we’ve lost is the bit in the middle; what the creative world calls ‘the process.’
Nowhere is this more palpable than in yoga land, because what is yoga if not process? Unless you attain enlightenment, there is no final level to complete, no neat endpoint at which your quest is over. You’re still somewhere in the thick of it: wading through practice, personal development, self-inquiry, in-depth study, and assimilating to a philosophical outlook that you may not have been born into. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that in recent years yoga classes have been quieter than they have been in a very long time.
Perhaps we are simply living through a moment in which the very qualities yoga asks of us (patience, attention, repetition, uncertainty, discipline) have become countercultural. We have become increasingly accustomed to the idea that anything difficult, slow or uncomfortable is something to be optimised away.
But convenience is never free. The cost might lie in the patience we no longer have, the attention we can no longer sustain, the curiosity that gets crowded out by the first available answer, the tolerance for uncertainty that disappears when everything can be instantly resolved. So yes, we are saving time, but we are losing the experiences that used to fill that time, and once enriched our lives.
Thankfully, you know what to do if you want to inconvenience yourself: come to class, be ‘bad’ at yoga, let yourself get bored and uncomfortable in the silences, meet other people there who are willing to be inconvenienced by being in the process with you, start a revolution, etcetera.
With love,
OM x
Monthly Mantra
“If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads”
Anatole France
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Copyright © 2026
Oceana Mariani
