What are we refining in our posture practice?

Postures are amazing for helping us gain whole body strength, mobility and stability - physically, mentally, emotionally and beyond.
 
We can do the postures in a technical way, follow the instructions, and we will get lots of wonderful benefits. 
 
So why refine beyond this? What does that even mean?
 
Going further
Further doesn't mean more extreme or complicated movements or harder postures. That can miss opportunities for a different kind of depth. See if these steps seem familiar to you:

Step one
When you first encounter a new posture, your body and awareness has to organise itself and figure it out, get engaged in exploring it, and find out how to do it, how it feels and how it effects you. That is an essential first step with the journey of yoga. Doing it, and feeling the benefits. Brilliant! 
 
But there's more if you care to explore ...
 
Beyond this there is a depth to each posture than can remain untapped until we gain enough familiarity in what we are doing to allow more to happen and we get space to become curious in the many layers of yoga. 

Step two - familiarity
Aspects of postures can start to come to the forefront more readily once we have experience taking them and know how to adapt them to suit us well. Our body has learned how to accomodate the challenges and find more stability in encountering them postively. In step 1, we are encountering the obvious challenges of 'doing the pose'. These challenges can become more subtle and more powerful with practice.
 
Step three - beyond
Beyond physical stability in the pose, we can start to noticing postural habits, perhaps blind spots come to the forefront as we discover how to let go or engage more effectively with our bodies. 
 
Placing the breath in the body in different ways, e.g. upper chest, or lower belly breathing, slowing the exhale, perhaps creating the ujjayi sound to accompany the physical challenge, there are lots of choices to create wonderful physical, energetic and psychological effects. 
 
Placing the attention to more subtle aspects and becoming more focused. Allowing our patterns to surface, and perhaps uncovering blind spots in our mental patterns that can come to the fore. Noticing emotional connections and levels of awareness that are beyond the everyday that allow a subtle yet powerful  transformation of mental and physical patterns. You might not even notice it happening, but a year on you can look back and notice, wow, that is different. 
 
These layers and depths to our yoga continue to unfold as we become more grounded and established in what we are doing. And we invite the delight of postures and breath into us from top to toe. 
 
This of course requires regularity of practice to develop this.