Sometimes I am a very lazy, very bad yogini. I don’t practice asana everyday. Sometimes, I only practice at home once or twice a week. Then I beat myself up for it because out there in the External World of the Internets, there appear to be those perfect, devoted, daily practising yogi/nis. S/He is there on many websites, in magazines. S/he flickers in our minds. S/he burns our eyes with her/his perfect practice.
… and thus I deal with the disappointment of not meeting my own expectations of what a yogini is.
For example, here are some of my Haunting Inner Voices:
Guilt.
- It’s good for you
- It’s your spiritual practice
- It will make you feel better and deal with great dollops of arising shit throughout the day in a calm and focussed manner
- If you don’t do this, then you are a failure, a fraud and a bad person
- If you don’t do this, the latent fat woman inside will burst out and you’ll be FAT.
Procrastination.
- But I want to go running
- I want to sleep in, just this once
- I just don’t feel like it
- I need to write my PhD
- I’m bored
- I have to get ready to go out bush
- I want to surf the net
- I just need to read one more chapter and the book’s finished.
Expectation.
- I will practice for an hour and a half everyday I will become super-yogini
- I will be nicer, and more focussed
- I will be a better human being
- Every one else out there in the online sadhana practices everyday for an hour and a half
- I will not be short, fat and frumpy if I do this.
———————
Anything in this sludgy and depressing mire that you can relate to?
Thought so. You’re just like me…
So let’s unpack the baggage.
I’m going to have a talk with the Haunting Inner Voices, examine my ideal yoga practice, then breaking this down further to get to my core understandings and motivations about yoga practice.
The Ideal:
I practice for an hour and a half everyday.
Why is this hour and a half practice ‘the ideal?’
- The market tells me so
- Most yoga centres promote classes that are an hour and a half
- My first experience with yoga was with hour and a half, and later, two hour, Iyengar classes.
- The mega-advanced-and-perfect yogi/nis on Yoga Peeps tell me that practice should be least an hour and a half
- The mega-advanced yogi/nis in Journal X all seem to practice for at least an hour and a half every day. (Ana Forrest, who I’ll admit, scares the be-Jesus out of me, practices for three hours).
- If I don’t practice for an hour and a half every day, Ana will teleport into my yoga room and crush me with her titanium-cast inner thighs!
What Do You ‘Practice’?
Asana. Especially headstands and other flashy poses on the front of Yoga Journal where some super-bendy chick sticks her big toe on the back of her head standing at Byron Bay in the rising sun.
This raises two questions for me:
How do I define yoga practice?
Why do I practice yoga? By this I mean: What’s the real, nitty-gritty reason I practice yoga?
My Definition of Yoga Practice:
- Asana, with pranayama, dharana and dhyana
- Yoga is a spiritual process, working from the outside in
- It’s the meditation that gives the real effects, not the asana
- Yoga is practiced all day, everyday
So, for me yoga is 4 elements comprising a spiritual process. There is no question that object of yoga is union (in a non-dual sense) with All That Is, and that eventually, it will be done continuously. This contradicts my ‘what‘ above, which is really about asana.
Asana, however, does remain ‘the big thing’ for me, influenced by the superficial understandings of yoga thrown in our faces each day: Yoga as an exercise practice, yoga as ‘designer spirituality and exercise’ wrapped up.
The contradiction creates a trigger, a darling I will murder later on.
Why Do I Practice?
- It makes me feel good (mentally and physically)
- It makes me belong to a special community (both physical and online)
- I am working with non-attachment
- I like what it does to my body
The sense of well-being that I derive from yoga is the main thing for me, followed by a sense of community. The ‘physical exercise’ component rates the lowest here.
Murdering My Darlings
So what can I do? I can’t live up to my own expectations, I have internal contradictions about what yoga is and I haven’t even started to tell you that I’m a mother, an anthropologist employed full-time, I have an exercise regime that I LOVE and I need me time everyday or I morph into a CRANKY BITCH. But not being able to live up to my own all-or-nothing-goals is making me miserable. I just want to practice yoga regularly and feel good.
Well, I’ve found some sage advice here from Jonathon Mead:
By killing your goals and exposing their underlying expectations -which often aren’t even your own- you free yourself. You make space, literally, for the ‘real’ stuff to happen. And you stop wasting time and energy on guilt and procrastination.
I Don’t Really Believe This Stuff: Goals Work!
Well, I agree. Setting goals works. If you’re trying to clean out your email inbox or renovate the house. When it comes to habits and behaviours, goals aren’t always useful in my experience.
Aligning with your own values and disowning what’s not yours is what works. To do that, you need to do the anthropology. Get right down into the underlying meanings and values you own and beat the fraudsters out with a stick.
That’s right. Get those frauds you’ve picked up from Yoga Journal and Madonna and god knows who else out of your inner cupboard. Shine the light on them and beat them out.
Not easy, I know. But I’m going to have a go. That’s right. I’m going to test this on myself.
What I am Going to do:
As I’m not giving any advice that doesn’t work, for next thirty days, I will conduct an experiment.
I will practice yoga every day –yoga that aligns with my core values and not those of the fraudsters. This will be any yoga practice as I’ve defined above, for no set length of time. It will be highly responsive to the present moment, the nowness of my life. This is, of course, very much about going against the grain of Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga, into the realms of Desikachar, Mark Whitwell, Satyananda etc.
At the end of this time, I’ll report back and let you know:
- Did it work?
- How I feel
- What I did, and
Whether murdering my darlings and killing the ideal of the home yoga practice has delivered any benefits. I suspect it will. And I also suspect I am about to redefine yoga to myself and transform my home practice forever more.
Any comments?
AnthroYogini 
If nothing else, you’ve, if unintentionally, sent some loving kindness my way with this post…by making me feel better about the fact that my yoga practice has been really falling apart in recent weeks….
I think the key is to find the balance of setting goals and not beating yourself up when you fail to meet them.
Then, that Jonathon Mead quote is interesting–when I first read it, I thought “hell, my natural rhythm is to just fuck around all day….” But, really it probably just seems that way because I’ve got so many conflicting expectations strangling me…would be awfully interesting to see what would happen if I could just cut ’em all loose….
Hmmm…this may end up as one of my own rambling blog posts…
Anyway, I’ll certainly be interested to hear how it all works out….
How exciting!
I can’t wait to hear what your results are.
For a long time, when I was in a lot of pain, my practice consisted largely of lying around. And breathing. Some chanting.
Now I am feeling stronger so my practice is stronger. But not always!
Godspeed, Youspeed, on this.
wow- this was timely! I was just feeling guilty about my minimal home practice these past few weeks. I agree that I feel like someone/something is telling me to aim for a standard of “home yoga practice”.
Thank you 🙂
@Dr Jay: Well, thank you Dr. I’m glad I helped out in some small way. I’m not sure that goals help habits & behavioural traits all that much. For me the ‘change one tiny thing’ method works, as does the listening to myself – and not my tearabout ego, either. Good luck, and as always, thanks for dropping by and taking the time to comment. I really appreciate comments so I just don’t think I’m talking to myself. (I do that, too. Have some great conversations).
@Nadine, hey how are you? And thank you for your encouragement. I’m on day 3 and it’s been a very interesting little journey so far -and some real dichotomies between what my ego says is yoga and what the inner, non-separate ‘I’ considers practice. Thanks for reading 🙂
@Ecoyogini – welcome, and thank you so very much for leaving a comment. Again, I am happy that I’ve said something that’s of service to others. The further I go, the more I am convinced that the yoga ‘practice’ we all accept is modelled more on fitness classes than yoga. But I guess it’s whatever floats your boat. Until the boat sinks, of course. 🙂
You know, one of the things my Guru always says is that it isn’t about ‘an hour and a half’ a day. Its the essence of what you’re doing and you should be able to fit practice in to whatever time you have. There’s the ‘ideal’, but since we’re not all dedicated yogis, but for the most part, householders with jobs and families etc, then we do what we can.
As long as we do it with intent and sincerity, this is what matters. So, he tells us – have a 5 minute practice, a 10 minute, a 20 minute, 1 hour and so on. Be able to condense your practice into the time and location you have. Don’t worry about it being perfect, ever, because it won’t be.
All that said… same here. My home practice isn’t perfect. In fact, its been downright MIA, in current times. And as much as that freaks me out in some ways, in others… well, I know now, that my homing beacon is set to return, always, to yoga. So, no matter how far away I might feel from where I want to be. I know where home is.
I think there’s possibly a whole bunch of yogis out there feeling a great deal of anxiety because they can’t do that daily practice, or the hour and a half a day etc. But when you think about it, giving yourself grief over such things is not honouring yourself, being loving or at one with what is.
There’s no magic spell, the only way to practice every day is to do what you’ve stated – find a way to practice daily. That’s all.
I’m not there right now, but the homing signal is switched on and its calling me…