This week I want you to focus on leaning into your yoga practice.
By developing the practice of leaning into your yoga practice you get to familiarize yourself with your body and with your physical edge. You will also learn to trust your body, which is part of knowing your soul, true self and inner self.
Whether your yoga practice is spiritual or purely health and exercise related, you can gain mountains of benefits from yoga as a daily practice.
Start by sitting your ass down on that mat! This can be a hard habit to build if you haven’t carved out the time for your yoga practice, especially with everyone holding being “busy” in high regard. But there is a way to move forward. Try rolling out your mat next to your bed so that every morning you have to walk across your yoga mat.
If you can’t get yourself out of bed, just literally roll out of bed onto the floor and sit cross legged in silence for a few minutes while your brain focuses on your breathing and the sounds around you. What can you hear? Then slowly ease into your first yoga position.
Now that you’re on the mat, get it OUT of your head that you need to follow a full yoga routine every single time. When I started practicing yoga regularly, I began by getting acquainted with the poses.
Could I do this pose?
How in the heck do I get into this pose?
Then I learned the sequence and disregarded holding each position for a certain amount of time. My focus was doing the pose correctly and memorizing the sequence, it didn’t matter how long I held each pose.
My number one goal was to be able to do yoga outside in nature without headphones, which means I had to memorize the sequence I wanted to do. I am at a point in my yoga practice where I have sequences memorized and now I am focusing on breath and holding the position.
In my personal experience I have found that it was MUCH easier to get myself TO the mat if I took the time to roll it out the night before. The difficult part for me was getting to the mat at the end of the day when my will power was depleted, so I moved it to the beginning.
If you’re still have trouble finding time to lean into your yoga practice, try the bathroom trigger method. Every time you go to the bathroom hold a yoga pose or move through a quick sun salutation as you exit the bathroom. Don’t worry about how long it is, just get your body moving and stretching.
This is going to remind your brain and your body why you started your yoga practice in the first place. And hopefully plant the seed for your next yoga session on the mat.
Things to Remember:
1. There’s no such thing as being bad at yoga.
2. Meditation is yoga!
3. Stretching counts too!
By developing the practice of leaning into my yoga practice and letting my body guide me, I have found that I feel more energy and loose & flowy in my body. I also feel strong depending on the type of yoga practice. By stopping the excuses and scheduling my yoga time I feel more balanced in my life and more calm in my mind. The practice of leaning into my yoga practice has given my mind a new type of stability when I am not actually in my yoga practice, but in the rest of my day working and engaging with others.
