Things that don’t look like yoga but are yoga
As long as I’ve understood that yoga is a practise (as the saying goes beautifully) to meet myself as I am I have practised it wherever and whenever. The time spent on the mat or being able to do specific asanas even as a yoga teacher hasn’t been something I’ve linked with ’being a yogi’ after I moved a bit forwards from my thoughts of yoga being a sweaty workout with a spiritual vibe. I’ve found it important and meaningful to integrate yoga as a part of my daily life understanding that I can’t ‘success’ in it all the time. There is no need to even use that word as yoga isn’t a competition.
The ’meeting myself’ can show up in so many ways - for example by not forcing myself into a pose that hurts but accepting my limits for today. Noticing my thoughts instead of being unaware and totally under control of them is a great practise to spend time with. Yoga is being with the thoughts, noticing them and noticing that there is that someone who is noticing. This way we are creating space between us and the thoughts. Learning to rest without feeling like it needs to be earned is a very fruitful practise in our modern lives that makes us easily feel like our accomplishments define us.
Yoga can manifest as challenging myself to do something that feels uncomfortable, on or off the mat or just sit with it. What I’m not familiar with is easy to avoid as the familiar is my nervous system’s safe place, even if it wouldn’t serve me. Familiar chaos might feel safer than an unfamiliar peace because at least it is known. Yoga is the awareness to notice this, too, and then proceed with an aligned action if needed. A great first step would be getting back into the body and taking a couple of deeper breaths.
Even as a yoga teacher I haven’t had a daily meditation routine at least the way we see meditation — sitting in crossed-legged pose in stillness. I haven’t had a physical routine either even though I do something good to my body every day. I have thought that yoga should be with me equally on or off the mat and especially in everyday moments with people I meet, myself included. It can’t be happening just on the mat.
Yoga has been an on-going practice for me. I can also forget everything I know in a second and go instead with my ego’s story. Thanks to years of practise I know how to get back. A conversation with presence is yoga and I feel that it’s many times so much harder than balancing in a yoga pose as the ego wants to be right and prove it. Yoga is simply being. The being is our deepest essence, as yoga suggests.
Yoga is being with whatever there is. This insight helps to correct the assumption I hear many times that practising yoga means to be calm. If you’re wondering that your yoga practise must be failing because thoughts and emotions keep on rising and serenity seems so far away, please know that it’s surely not. I want to remind or to shock you that even being a yoga teacher doesn’t mean to be calm all the time. The thing is to feel as we are humans, to shine the light of ours and expanding to our full potential. Luckily, many times being in the now does feel calm. Yoga practise might also manifest by not reacting to every opinion of others. This might look calm but it’s a practise happening on the inside.
What doesn’t look like typical yoga but is yoga is when we start to slow down and lower the walls that we’ve build over time, the walls that we’ve now discovered due to the awareness, due to yoga. The pausing can feel unfamiliar and because of that, uncomfortable, which makes it tempting to avoid. Staying with the unfamiliar is yoga. This is so much easier to say than to practise so let’s be compassionate towards ourselves and others. Yoga is about travelling to the center of our beings, through those layers that have been kindly trying to protect us over the years. Yoga suggests that safety is found within. I find it not just beautiful and comforting but also logical as everything around us is temporary yet we get so attached to it.
Yoga, the practise of now isn’t a quick fix we’d prefer but a lifelong practise full of tools to help with navigating through our unique paths. Yoga is getting connected with ourselves. Only that way we can truly connect with others, too.
