Do yoga every day for 108 days? Sure, that sounds brilliant! If research shows a long list of benefits to practicing yoga, then practicing daily is sure to compound the effects. Imagine feeling that post-yoga practice bliss everyday, all day. What could go wrong? How could I lose? Let’s do this!
And it is just like this that I jumped into my 108 days of yoga idea with both feet.
As it turns out, plenty can go wrong. Brilliant ideas can be thwarted. Injury, procrastination, doubt, negligence, laziness, craving comfort instead (because daily yoga is work), misunderstanding, frustration, and discouragement all thwart even the best laid plans.
So, did I hit the mat daily? You bet!
Noticing your obstacles and practicing anyway is the practice of yoga. But some of those obstacles are like enormous boulders blocking our path. So, how do we practice anyway?
First Things First
Perhaps you recognized that “my busy schedule” is not on the list of obstacles from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Yup. If “schedule” is your primary reason for not hitting the mat, I am just gonna call you out on that one right there. Schedule falls into the category of good excuses, but does not fall under the category of legitimate reason. Sorry folks!
Because there are a finite number of hours in our days, we must schedule our priorities first. And we must give ourselves permission to skip the things that don’t actually matter.
If scheduling is your top excuse for not hitting the mat regularly, please reread those last two sentences again.
It could be that when you evaluate your heartfelt priorities, daily yoga practice isn’t in the top three. That’s okay, but I would encourage you to own that then – guilt free.
If, however, a regular yoga practice is on your Top Three Priorities List, but it is always getting crowded out of your schedule, upon deeper reflection, you will likely find one (or more) of the nine predictable obstacles from the Yoga Sutras are actually the underlying culprit. This often shows up when we overindulge in life and leave ourselves with too little energy or time left to fit our practice into our schedule. We have to make time for what matters, which sometimes means giving up spending our time on things that don’t.
What does this look like in real life? Well, for me the list of priorities is: #1. my own yoga practice, #2. teaching my kiddos (because we are a homeschooling family), and #3. work (because I am an assistant studio manager + a mentor for a 500-hour teacher training program + a guest teacher for a 200-hour teacher training program + I teach 5 weekly classes at my local yoga studio). When I schedule in something from these three categories daily, other things have to move over. Important Things that wait until later (or until ‘never at all this week’) are: #1. time on-line (because Pinterest, FB, and e-mail inboxes – even website content/blogging – are like a gateway drug to time-wasting, mindless on-line wandering), and #2. accepting invitations to social gatherings, parties, homeschool group field trips, etc. (because if I am rushing to these just to fit them in, I end up having no fun once I arrive – so, I only accept the invites if I have time to really enjoy them, which puts social get togethers in the maybe-once-a-week realm for me).
Once you reevaluate your priorities and schedule your yoga practice as one of your top three must-do’s for the day, what do you get? All the lovely, blissful benefits of a regular yoga practice!… And one (or more) of the predictable obstacles, too. Dang!
I can certainly testify that while I have loved the daily benefits of having my regular yoga practice these first three weeks into my 108 day self-challenge, the obstacles showed up daily, too.
So, how do you crush your biggest obstacles?
#1. Tapas: Practice Anyway (a.k.a. Stick-to-it-iveness)
In week one, I started out with an injured shoulder and hip, and so I spent the week reacquainted with all the seated and lying poses in my repertoire. I saw the obstacle, and I practiced anyway. Not just any old practice of poses, but poses selected and sequenced in a style that actually helped speed up the healing process.
In week two, I was back to my old tricks… and then some. I was able to get back to working on standing splits into handstand into standing splits on the second side. And while it isn’t a sequence I include in the classes I teach at the studio – my home practice rarely looks like my drop-in classes, which makes sense since I am not teaching a bunch of Margos! – I did find my class plans begin to adopt more strengthening and core challenging work (because who doesn’t love a little chair pose to boat post to chair pose, right!?) being subtly inspired by my daily home practice. Funny how that happens!
Bonus in week two: I also had much more steady energy after 30-60 minutes of daily asana all week which made me more efficient with everything else on my to-do list.
In week three, my shoulder and hip were still going strong, but my energy and nervous system were dying to just crawl into bed. I hit an energetic wall – like a brick wall painted with the words mental laziness and procrastination. I could not have been more unmotivated to roll out of bed let alone unroll my mat. The wind was totally let out of my sails, but when I saw the obstacles, I practiced anyway. Admittedly, not the prettiest, longest practices of the month. I fell ungracefully out of handstand a few times and then bagged it entirely one morning. So, I chose the poses and timeframes I could rally enough to really put my heart into – which meant few days that week were just 15 minutes of heartfelt prone and supine. It was about quality over quantity: Little bits with real intention and attention are better than big mindless chunks of practice time (which are really just a waste of time).
Yoga is not so much about the mood you are in and the inspiration you feel when you step onto the mat. It is about the mood you are in and the inspiration you feel when you step off of the mat.
#2. Svadhyaya: Be Real with Yourself about YourSelf
Our practice is intended to provide a systematic way to do a little self-reflection. Svadhyaya is the necessary self-reflection/-study/-check we use to evaluate how well our yoga practice is serving us.
Is my asana practice balancing my asymmetries? Unsticking my stuck-ness? Strengthening my weaknesses? So that I can live in my body all day without aches, pains, or fatigue?
Is my pranayama practice balancing respiratory, cardiovascular, and overall physiological health? So that I have the energy to live with real vitality?
Is my meditation practice balancing my constant chitter-chattering mind with moments of steady focus? So that throughout the day, my mind can chitter-chatter efficiently when needed, and effortlessly rest when needed?
Planning and then evaluating my daily practices had nothing to do with aesthetics or hitting the crow to low plank transition without face planting – and a good thing, too, because I biffed my chin twice doing it. It had everything to do with whether I #1. showed up on the mat with intention and attention (even if for just 15 minutes) and #2. could answer a definite “yes” to the questions above. When those two things didn’t happen, I had to chalk that practice up to a flop.
Because yoga is not so much about whether your mind-body-spirit serve the yoga practice. It is all about having the yoga practice serve your mind-body-spirit.
#3. Ishvara Pranidhana: Make Your Practice About More Than Just Yourself
Funny thing about human nature: We tend to be better at keeping commitments to others than to ourselves. We tend to show up better for others, and find it too easy to blow ourselves off. Although hitting the mat regularly may be a brilliant idea – we know all the benefits that await us – it is too easy to put the family/the friends/the work schedule first, even at our own expense.
It’s not a new phenomenon either. This was a thing so many years ago that Patanjali even writes about it in the Yoga Sutras. His advice? Your practice must be about more than just yourself.
In various contexts, I have seen the Sanskrit term Ishvara translated as personal god, God, the divine, the universe, your Self, mother nature, higher power, supreme soul, lord, Brahman, Absolute Reality, Supreme Consciousness… there are, I expect, as many translations for this concept as their are people who meditate on the idea of it.
It is a very personal thing. It is not, however, I have found, a necessarily religious thing as yoga philosophy is not inherently theological or dogmatic – although it pairs nicely with most any theology, if that’s your cup of tea (or chalice of wine, perhaps). So, translate the idea for yourself however suites you and add a dash of Pranidhana to it (that’s the Sanskrit term for surrender). What you get is the yogic practice of Ishvara Pranidhana, which is a very helpful way to keep your eye on a bigger prize – creating perspective to make those big, scary obstacles look so much less intimidating.
Obstacles to our yoga practice begin as distractions. If we look beyond the distraction, and keep the focus on something bigger/greater/beyond/more on the other side of that distraction, it ceases to become a daunting obstacle. Not one of the nine obstacles listed by Patanjali are such giants that yoga cannot hop over it when we keep our focus on something bigger and better.
What does this look like in real life? Whenever I experience that post-savasana sensation of total groundedness and unshakable peace, I sense a little glimpse into my idea of Heaven. To someone with a history of chronic anxiety and insomnia, grounded and peaceful is like communing with the divine. Or at least, that is my rather poetic description of the experience. On a more practical note, what it looks like to passers-by is that I go about my day with a general air of calmness – a woman who spends all day with her children while juggling a long to-do list for work, but doesn’t holler, scream, and pull out her hair.
When I skip practice (when the obstacles win), calm, well, just doesn’t happen so much. My son, even at the age of five, years ago, recognized the difference enough for our morning conversions to go something like…
“Mom! Have you had your meditation and coffee yet?”
“Not yet, Buddy.”
“Yeah… So, I’ll just be in my bedroom then… playing quietly.”
I need to be grounded and peaceful to get through my daily to-do lists. My kiddos need a sane, calm mommy. The world needs the best side of me. It matters if I get my practice in!
What doesn’t matter is how fancy my yoga looks. Nor how many minutes I practice on any given day. It doesn’t even matter if I practice the particular poses, breath work, or meditation exactly as I might have expected to that day.
As it turns out, the more organic, intention-driven, and attentive my practice, the better. The less dogmatically adamant I am with myself about getting my practice in, the more likely I am to get out my mat. If I can resist the tendency to bully or ridicule myself for the low-energy, 15 minute supine practice days or the injured hip, must do only seated poses days… Well, those days could have been a wash, but instead they are exactly the days the remind me of the whole point of yoga…
After all, the whole system of yoga has never really been about doing yoga to get a better you. It is about doing yoga to help you realize that you are already pretty amazing – when you are not distracted by obstacles.