To Totally Transform Your Yoga Practice
Your yoga mat. A sacred space to reconnect with yourself and exorcise the trials and tribulations of the day. But even with the best intentions, your yoga practice can rapidly become a source of unprecedented anguish.
As a yoga educator, I’ve guided many practitioners along their yoga journeys. Irrefutably, everyone’s practice is idiosyncratic to them, but one common denominator is for certain – everybody has slumps.
Counterproductive to your practice and counterintuitive to yoga – a system all about unity and connection – slumps get under your skin and in your head, altering how you view your practice. I’ve witnessed many people try to “tackle” their practice pitfalls with harder, more intense sessions – a like-for-like cure, I guess. Or elide their practices altogether – it’s easy to abandon your cause if the light inside you dims.
What we really need to do is employ critical thinking and a little self-assessment, creating subtle mind-set shifts that will help us pull ourselves out of the depths of despair and back to practicing passionately and productively. These five tips will support you to take a step back off your mat and gently reshape how you practice, so you can return to your practice more empowered and aligned than before.
1. You’re Trying To Condense Too Much Into Your Practice.
We all have favourites. And it’s natural that you’ll gravitate towards certain yoga postures more than others and want to incorporate them into each asana session. But it’s also reasonable to want to seek out new postures and master them…and also exercise them in each asana practice. Inevitably, this puts you in a pickle and you end up racing through your go-to postures, neglecting the true value you get from them, reframing your practice into something counterproductive. In an attempt to cram in everything you love, you most likely become stressed – the opposite of what you want from your practice.
To avoid this happening, I’d recommend keeping a mental repertoire of the postures and sequences that give you joy but alter your approach them within your practice. Rather than making a mental list of what postures you want to practice, consider what you actually need from your practice in that moment. Start each session by taking inventory of these needs – physical, emotional, and spiritual – emphasising introspection and the self-service that yoga gifts us with. whatever you need, your internal library of favourites will have a few postures that meet your needs. Approach with concision and build your practice around a handful of postures that serve you and I can guarantee your practice will instantly start to feel more fluid, natural, and pleasurable.
2. You Practice Every Day.
Yoga extends farther than what we do on our mats – something I breakdown in my Beyond the Mat series. While we shouldn’t solely focus on asana practice, it’s indubitably an important part of our approach to it in the west. Personally, I believe asana is an extension of the mechanisms of our minds and a graceful medium between our inner-worlds and the ever-expanding outer universe. Through moving the body with intention and purpose, we release what we don’t need in order to grasp what we do need. Subsumed in a sacred ritual, we escape ourselves to reconnect with ourselves. But we don’t have to do this every day.
Controversial, but practical. Our ancestral yogic sages didn’t live as we do today. They had different objectives and problems to the modern yogi (and that includes us educators). So, even though the philosophical path is now resurging within the yoga paradigm, it doesn’t need to be a prescriptive code for living in the twenty-first century. The beauty of yoga is that it invites us to look within and adjudicate what we need and decipher our own values.
An impetus for change, yoga incites self-assessment and ultimately commands us to make conscientious decisions for ourselves. And if that means you can’t commit to an arduous daily asana practice, so be it. That is your prerogative and is by no means an indication that you aren’t progressing or aren’t approaching yoga in the right way. You know what’s right for you and honouring your instincts is the most yogic action you can take.
3. Accept That You Can’t Do Everything & What You Can Do Might Look Different.
When we engage in something as aesthetically engaging as yoga, it’s natural to conflate the most complex contortions and graceful flows with success. While it’s fun to have aspirations and advancements to work towards, you might not ever be able to do certain asana.
Even yoga teachers and educators have postures they just can’t do. What you can achieve is purely dependent on your anatomy – and there’s no escaping that. Your range of motion will develop when you’re a child. From the moment you’re born, your bones form in a spiral shape, uncoiling as you grow. They remain malleable throughout your childhood and teenage years. The physical activities you pursue during these years determine your skeleton’s lifelong range of motion. Trying to push past the limitations of your bones and surrounding tissues will only result in devastating injury.
So, safely explore the depths of different asanas with the guidance of an experienced teacher and the support of props. If something doesn’t feel right and you’re sure you can’t go any further, stop. It’s perfectly normal and absolutely ok to retreat, take a break, and recover your practice with postures that feel comfortable and nurturing to your physical body.
For the asanas you do master and delve deeper into, they might look a bit different to what you see in books, online, or even in class with other students. Again, we’re all shaped differently, and your asana respectfully follow the ingrained patterns of your unique anatomy. As you start to become more aware of the shapes of your own body, you may start to notice commonalities with others. For example, not everyone will have a perfectly linear leg in standing split. In fact, most of us will have a slight bend as life doesn’t often require us to have long extension through the knee joint. Remember, you’re human and need to take care of your physical body in your asana practice – not punish it.
4. Length Isn’t Everything – & Meditation Doesn’t Have To Be Separate
Sadly, I can recount endless preaches from the depths of the internet about length of practice and how we should practice as much as we can. While this sentiment may be intended as salutary, it’s quite misguided, unrealistic, and diverts away from the true integrity of a physical asana practice.
Asana isn’t the full sum of yoga. It was established as a modality to prepare the body for long periods of meditation – traditionally taken in stillness. To subsume oneself within such stillness, we need to get out the twitches and jerks, excise the chatter of the mind, so we can arrive at a point where we can concentrate and focus on nothing in particular – and find everything we’ve been searching for.
Our lifestyles – an endless juggling act of family, work, and stress – don’t necessarily permit for assiduous, lengthy practices, let alone several hours of seated meditation. And in respects of our bodies, hour upon hour of yoga isn’t necessarily safe. We’re all anatomically unique and prone to a range of different issues – like overstretching and hypermobility, of which – if not consciously managed – may have deleterious effects down the line.
Practice at a pace and for a length that’s right for you – not in line with someone else’s interpretations of a very subjective process. And don’t consider meditation as separate to your asana practice – it’s easy to entrance oneself while moving mindfully. Unconscious absorption in flow state and being one with your body – without interruptions from the external world and the monkey chatter of the mind – is one of the most joyful and inspiring experiences you can go through.
5. You’re Trying To Emulate How Others Practice
Primal movement, intuitive flows, weird and wonderful new postures – watching other people practice can be a mesmeric marvel, and a critically confounding curse.
At some point on our yoga journeys, we’ve all found ourselves engulfed by a cloud of comparison when watching videos of fellow yogis online. Robbing us of joy, our egos force us to focus on what they can do that we can’t – and we unfairly assign negative feelings to our own practices. But just because a certain method of flowing is right for others, doesn’t mean it’s right for us. Particularly when it comes to approaches like Intuitive Flow.
As other practitioners seamlessly transition between postures, we can be left in profound wonder of how exactly they memorise these transitions and postures, comparing them to our own attempts to move between a limited library of asanas that never seem to evolve. The good news is that this intuition may very well be more choreographed [and limited] than it appears.
When we draw on intuition, we’ll immediately accommodate a need to make ourselves happy – an inherent, dopamine-genic process. Our intuition doesn’t guide us into uncomfortable situations, so we’ll gravitate towards the postures that give us pleasure – and they will always be the ones we commit to memory and fall back on.
Even when we use intuition, we’ll repeatedly draw on these postures – maybe in different combinations and with a few transitional tweaks, but we’ll unconsciously practice particular sequences. So, they become effortless and “intuitive” in the traditional sense, but we’ve likely been rehearsing them for a long time. That’s the beauty of intuition, you usually don’t realise you’re doing it.
Real People, Real Lives
It’s easy to get into bad habits in your asana practice. We’re real people, living real lives with real problems that imprint on our souls. More often than not, we carry that baggage on to our mats. From over committing to letting the greater purpose slip away, the yogic halo slips for even the most intentional of us.
These issues usually arise because we’ve lost connection with ourselves and the pressure of the outside world seeps in. The good news is, getting yourself back on track is easy. Simply take a step back, reassess your values and what being on your mat means to you. Quickly, you’ll find ways to re-join your yogic path with greater authenticity and deeper meaning, bringing unbridled joy back into your asana practice.
Main – Photo by Lucas Pezeta
