Ideas for Your Personal Practice
Yoga classes provide inspiration, feedback, and community, but a personal home practice is the best place to explore yoga deeply. The following articles provide suggestions for a personal practice that will help you bring your yoga practice home.
Choose an area of your body that you usually don't think about, and make it the focus of your yoga practice.
Cultivate Self-Acceptance in Your Yoga Practice
What yoga can teach us - if we are open to the idea - is that everything we want to be, and everything we want to feel, is already a possibility within us.
Enjoy the Process, Not the Progress, of Your Yoga Practice
Ambition in your yoga practice can be just one more way to postpone happiness.
3 Parables about Building a Personal Practice
These stories from the 100 Parable Sutra can help you find balance in your personal practice, and the courage to begin.
This New Year's Day, invite change into your life by cultivating awareness, focus, and patience.
Give Yourself (and Others) the Gift of Actual Yoga Practice
This holiday season, hold back on the urge to splurge on yoga accessories, and invest your money in actual learning and practice experiences.
Blend Asana with Meditation for a Centering Practice
Students often ask me what my personal practice is like. This month, I describe a typical practice, straight from my sticky mat.
A Restorative Practice for an Open Mind
Combine the Buddhist tradition of a dharma talk (receiving the wisdom of a teacher) with restorative yoga to help open the body and mind. The intention of this practice is to cultivate a relaxed, receptive physical and mental state to prepare you for deep listening and learning.
During times of stress, our bodies and minds can fall into a familiar pattern: The first part of the day is spent worrying, procrastinating, denying our own stress and the difficulties we face. By sunset, the challenges have only become more stressful, and we spend what should be a calming part of the day rushing, blaming, panicking, or otherwise exploding. Use this yoga practice to counterbalance the tendency to fall into this emotionally draining pattern.
Close your eyes to open your other senses. This practice develops your ability to observe from within. Feel each pose more exquisitely, and refine your actions in each pose with your new-found sensitivity.
Whether you have a mild injury or are
recovering from an illness,
write yourself an individualized yoga prescription. Use your injury or
illness as the foundation for increased mindfulness and compassion in your
practice. Take the everyday aches and pains as reminders to treat your
body with respect, to be consistent with your practice, and to keep the
creativity of your practice alive.
Exhaust
Yourself
This practice offers a way to explore the
relationship between psychological patience and muscular endurance. It also
can sensitize you to the role of effort, ambition, and competition in your
practice. And, when you’re done with the practice, feel free to pull out
that bolster and turn down the lights. I promise not to wake you up from a
well-deserved savasana.
The S T R E T C H E D O U T Practice
If a little yoga is good, it stands to reason that a lot of yoga is even better. However, if you've ever attended an all-day yoga workshop or a yoga conference, you know that asana all day does not always feel as blissful as you anticipated. How do you get the benefit of all-day yoga without pushing beyond what your body and schedule can accommodate happily? Try stretching out your regular practice throughout the day.
Teaching yoga is the clearest mirror onto your yoga practice, for one simple reason: teachers tend to teach their most current lesson. Find a friend, family member, or co-worker, and offer to teach them a yoga pose or two. Then observe what you choose to teach and how you present it.
Forget Resolutions - Set a New Year's Day Intention
Yoga isn't about becoming something or someone different than you already are - it's a process of consciously choosing which aspects of yourself you want to express. This practice won't make you smarter or kinder or funnier or happier, but it will give you a chance to observe the conditions that allow you to express your intelligence, your kindness, your playfulness, or your joy.