A personal yoga practice
There are two things that are important in learning yoga. One is finding a good teacher and spending as much time as you can learning from them. The other is spending time in personal practice.
Personal practice is not doing yoga to a video in your own home instead of going to a class. No, that is a class, only a much inferior one to being in person with a live teacher who can cue you and make suggestions based on what they see.
Personal practice is working in your own space, in your own body, exploring yoga in your own body/mind.
But many people struggle to establish a personal practice. There are many obstacles, what are yours? Do they match any of the following?
- I don't have any space
- my animals get in the way
- my kids get in the way
- I don't have time
- I don't know what to do
Finding a space
If the space is long enough for your mat with a bit of distance either end, and so that if you lay down and spread out your rams at shoulder height you do not collide with anything, you have enough space.
It is nice if you can establish a special space for your practice. But even if it is at the foot of your bed, that's OK.
If the weather is nice it is also nice to practice out of doors, on a deck or a patch of grass. In fact, even if you do have the luxury of establishing a dedicated practice space, it is important that your practice is not space dependent. You want to be able to practice wherever you are and whenever so you do not stop practicing just because you go on a holiday.
Enhancing the space
If you are lucky enough to be able to carve out a space to dedicate to your practice you can make it call to you by establishing a aesthetically pleasing space and adding an altar of some kind.
Even if you can't quite make it totally your own, when you practice it is often helpful to put on some music that is pleasant to practice to, something calm and flowing.
Interruptions and distractions
It is true, the home environment can be distracting. Here a bit of discipline is the key.
Distractions can come from gadgets, tasks, animals and humans.
So put aside the gadgets. All of your smart devices need to be on silent in another room. Make an old fashioned clack a part of your yoga equipment if you are scared of being late for work.
Tell other the humans you live with that this is important time for you that will make you a much nicer person to be around. Yes, this can be tricky if some of those humans are very young, but another strategy is to get them to practice along side you.
Shut the animals out of the room where you practice if they are too distracting, want to fully occupy your mat, chew your yoga block or lie on you in savasana.
In fact the hardest distraction to deal with is tasks, because that is in your head. What you are doing is prioritising your task list and in so doing devaluing your yoga practice. Don't. Put your yoga practice at the top of the list, second on the list is prioritising the task list, knowing that everything else will better fall into place once you've done your practice.
What do I do in my practice?
This is a big challenge for those who are new to establishing a home practice and this may be where dependency on videos develops. Here's a simple sequence to get you started, then see what unfolds.
- Roll out the mat and lie down. See what is here, how the body feels, how the mind is.
- When you are ready roll over and sit up. use a folded blanket or cushion to raise the buttocks high enough to sit with ease. The knees should be level or ideally lower than your hip sockets, and you should be sitting on your sit bones, those body protuberances on the bottom of the pelvis.
- In sitting do some of the seated warm ups you like best from class.
- All fours practice: this is when you do your cat pose and other all fours work.
- Downward facing dog - ease out the backs of your legs.
- Find your way into standing at the top of the mat. Begin to work through some sun salutes. Mix it up to include things like deep lunge, pigeon pose, different back bends, whatever arises today.
- You might include some bridge pose, twists or seated poses.
- Be sure to finish with a short period in savasana - don't short change yourself on this, leave something else out, not this.
After this physical sequence you might sit in meditation for awhile before packing up your practice space, letting the animals back in and saying hi to the humans.
(Author, Tina Shettigara)