Keeping your yoga practice sustainable

Making your yoga practice sustainable means not only respecting your body and keeping your yoga practice balanced, but also how you live your daily life.  Here are five points to reflect on in relation to your yoga practice.

Respect for life
Yoga is “by its very nature inextricably associated with universal laws: respect for life, truth, and patience are all indispensable factors in the drawing of a quiet breath, in calmness of mind and firmness of will.” This is in the words of Yehudi Menuhin (violinist) in his introduction to B. K. S. Iyengar’s book on yoga, Light on Yoga.

A useful modern definition of yoga from author and yogi Mark Stephens is, “Hatha yoga is a practice of moving into energetic balance amid the constancy of change in our lives.”

Slow down
If how you are balancing your work and personal life isn’t compatible with your health and happiness, it won’t improve if you go harder and faster.

Slow down, prioritize areas you want to work on, and change unhelpful patterns in your life. Practicing yoga with patience and focus will help you gain insight into how you can do this.

Remember the breath is central. Connect to the stillness you feel naturally within yourself, focus on your heart space and find a soft and easy breath. Be aware of how you are breathing both in and out of yoga practice at times when you need to find balance.

To learn more in-depth about breathing in yoga class, purchase for EUR 9 the recording (5 recordings of around 30 min each) of the Pranayama workshop given by Natasha in the Sumer of 2022.

Make space for practice

Your main reason for not practicing regularly may be having no time. You have time, however, to shower in the morning and perform your regular routine of hygiene. Include yoga practice as part of this. You make the choice.

Decide that you will follow a regular practice that will suit your lifestyle and schedule and stick to it. Better to practice less but regularly than often for a short while and then suddenly stop for few weeks or months. Our Bridge card is perfect for those with busy and irregular schedules and or those who have other physical practices they balance with yoga practice.

Reopen to different perspectives

Reawaken your creative self. Leonardo de Vinci wrote that the average person “looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking.”

Remember that as well as being able to change our perspective, we can also be aware that others do not necessarily have the same perspective as we do. Or simply not be aware. How they react has more to say about them than us. Equally, how we react to things around us has everything to do with our own patterns and awareness.

Another way of looking at this is by reflecting on how we can’t change what we are watching now and what happened in the past, but we can change the place we act and react from. Yoga practice helps us create a spacious and quiet place in our consciousness from which to move from

Conscious consumption

Consumption is obviously what we actually eat. What we eat is what our body and nervous system are created from. What more reflection do we need on that.  But on another level, we can also look at where the stuff we consume, comes from, whether it is food or other stuff.

Be sure that you are happy with the production chain. Do you know what effect its production has on our planet in the long-term as well as the short-term? Does the production of what you consume respect the environment, human rights, and animal rights?

In recent times, we are becoming increasingly aware about our consumption and the impact it has on our environment and world.

Also, what we consume can be considered by the people we have around us in the sense of the transactional nature of the energies. If you constantly find yourself surrounded by people who drain your energy, think again. Do you need to set healthy boundaries? The call is yours again. You may simply need to take stock and with boundaries and a healthy lifestyle and routine, embrace yourself as an old friend or lost child who needs to return to the loving arms of yourself.