Your Yoga:
Practicing on your own
If practicing yoga at home is a new habit for you, or if you are accustomed to a different style of yoga, you might have questions that get in the way of fully committing to a daily practice. I hope to encourage within you a deep trust of your own body and intuition so that you can become your own teacher and host the practice that is most beneficial for you, right here, right now.
And speaking of “right”… as you practice on your own, you might wonder:
Am I doing it “right”?
So much of the purpose and benefit of yoga lies in re-establishing a deep connection to and trust in your own body. Western culture suffers from systematic disembodiment, denial of the body, and a view of the body as a mechanical nuisance that needs to be fixed. On top of that harmful world view that so many of us are entrenched in, we all hold varying degrees of trauma that causes miscommunication between our mind and body. So to do this practice “right” is to slowly, breath by breath, re-establish that intimacy with your own cells, muscles, bones, skin, and every part of your beautiful self, allowing for awareness and expression of all that comes up for you in the process.
Having said that, there are some basic principles of alignment, breath and awareness that we should have an understanding of in order to practice in a safe and effective way.
Generally, our joints should stack on top of each other. In Cat-Cow and Plank Pose, for example, our shoulders, elbows and wrists should be in direct alignment. In High Lunge, Goddess Pose and Dynamic Bridge, our knees should be more or less directly above our ankles. This helps provide maximal leverage to the body, distribute the work throughout the whole body so as to not tax any certain muscle group, and keeps our joints safe.
To honor and encourage the alignment of the spine, we hold the awareness that the spine is one long energetic line from the tailbone to the crown of the head. This means that in Plank Pose, we don’t drop the head down towards the floor or slouch between the shoulders, but fill the whole body with our energetic awareness and reach in opposite directions with the head and the heels, visualizing an uninterrupted flow of energy along the spine. It means that when we do a Seated Twist, the hips, heart and head are all in one vertical line.
To care for our own limits, we should back off a posture any time our breath becomes choppy or belabored. The full expression of the breath is essential to a safe and effective practice.
Measuring the breath with our movement is a powerful way to vertically integrate the brain, which helps improve emotional regulation, mindfulness and nervous-system well-being. If you reach your breath capacity mid-posture, it is best to do an extra breath cycle, or move more quickly to keep the breath and movement in harmony.
When we do dynamic postures, we generally inhale to expand and exhale to contract, though there are a few postures that use the opposite pattern, like the Seated Hip Rotations and Dynamic Leg Extensions from Week One.
Don’t entertain self-critical thoughts. If you start thinking that you should be more flexible, more strong, or more of anything, you can re-direct the thoughts towards an uplifting affirmation. One that has been really helpful for me over the years is “This is my body. My body is sacred.”
Remember to pause in between postures to notice sensations in your body, integrate the wisdom of each pose, and allow the body to return to a resting state. This practice of tuning in to your inner landscape is absolutely life-changing.
How many rounds of each posture should I do?
During the lifelong process of re-connection with our physical selves, we might wonder if we can trust our bodies to send us the right messages, and if we can honor the requests our body makes of us. We might think that we need a teacher to tell us how many times we should repeat a movement or how long to hold it, and of course that is useful in the beginning. But over time, we fine-tune our awareness to let the body decide when we have reached the sweet spot of maximal benefit of each pose. This is a practice of trusting our intuition, listening to signals of pleasure, peace, strain, pain and fatigue in the body, and responding accordingly.
The general rule of thumb is to do somewhere between 3 and 5 repetitions on each side for the deeper dynamic postures, and up to 9 repetitions on each side for warm-up postures. For static postures, hold for anywhere between 3-9 deep breaths, always coming out of the pose if you experience discomfort.
Do I have to do an equal number on both sides?
When beginning to cultivate a yoga practice, it is wise to aim for doing roughly an equal number of repetitions on each side. However, we all have some degree of asymmetry in the structures of the body, and often hold more tension on one side than the other. As we fine-tune our practice, it can be supportive to balance the body with our postures. If, for example, you hold chronic tension in your right hip flexor muscles, you can absolutely do one or two more repetitions of the Dynamic High Lunge on the right side.
What if I don’t feel like practicing today?
The last thing we want is for our yoga practice, which is supposed to help us feel more alive, healthy and happy, to become yet another pressure or stressor. So by all means, if you have another practice that revitalizes you, it can replace your yoga practice a few days a week. And if you need to catch up on sleep, you need to catch up on sleep.
However, I can not emphasize enough the power of an unwavering commitment to a daily practice. Have you struggled, at any point in your life, with the feeling that you were not cared for in childhood the ways that you needed, or that life seemed to hurt or disappoint you in heartbreaking ways? This leaves us feeling like we are not quite whole, and people do all sorts of destructive things to try and avoid feeling this void.
Showing up for ourselves by starting every day with a self-care practice is a way of uncovering and discovering our inherent wholeness, of providing the unwavering self-love and support that may have been lacking from others.
When we are establishing self-care as a habit, it is best to practice EVERY DAY for at least a whole lunar cycle. Once the practice is well-ingrained in our morning routine, we can indulge in a little inconsistency.
Speaking of morning routines, here is a page dedicated to establishing a healthy routine around your practice, based in the wisdom of Ayurveda, India’s ancient science of life.
