Tip of the Week: You Don't Need to Perform Each Pose Perfectly

No matter how flexible you are, or how deeply you are able to get into a pose, you are benefiting from every single pose you do. As a beginner, if you were able to perform each pose perfectly from the get-go, you wouldn’t be improving your body or focus at all. Do your best to embrace your inability to perfectly perform each pose and learn to see it as a positive thing, as it means you have so much more room for improvement and self-fulfillment. 
Beginners will often attempt to push their body far beyond what it is capable of, which usually means:

1. They risk injury.
2. The slowly stop enjoying the activity due to the mental and physical strain they are putting themselves under, leading them to unconsciously begin to make up excuses not to practice anymore.
3. Due to the extra strain, they stop breathing properly and make many mistakes during the pose, preventing them from ever improving in the future. 

Beginners sometimes feel the need to keep up with others in class (who are often more experienced than them), leading them to over-reach and force their body into things it is not capable of doing. Focus on yourself, the more you practice the more you will learn about your body and its limits. Start small, and work your way up over many months or years. Just make sure that every time you perform a pose it is somewhat (but not too much) challenging. This will force your body to adapt and improve. It’s a very similar concept to lifting weights at the gym – you don’t immediately start with what the professional bodybuilders lift, do you?