How to Start Living Your Yoga

It’s the end of the week and while you managed to make it to two yoga classes, you haven’t unrolled your yoga mat once. Family, work, and household commitments make finding a 90-minute slot during the day next to impossible. Short of getting up at 5am, or re-prioritizing your life to ditch other commitments, there are other ways to regularly practice yoga. After all, home practice is where the deeper rewards of yoga blossom.

Start by realizing that you don’t have to wait for a 90-minute window to unroll your mat. Take 20 minutes in the morning, or 30 minutes after dinner. Use whatever space you have in your day for a practice. Allow your internal teacher to guide you through the appropriate postures for you in that time space – without any attachment to fulfilling a particular sequence of postures you may not have time for. Stepping into daily time gaps with your yoga mat cements your commitment to home practice, and often you’ll find that time begins to expand. You naturally wake up 30 minutes earlier, or you realize you don’t have to watch the news every night.

The second way to integrate yoga into your daily life is to practice whenever the opportunity arises. Let yoga spill off your mat and permeate everything you do.

Doing the dishes? Connect with your breath, ground the four corners of your feet, engage your quadriceps, align your pelvis and open your heart.

Having a shower? Practice back bends and forwards bends with breath and mindfulness as you shampoo your hair and shave your legs.

Working at your desk? Take five minutes to breathe mindfully and work through a short shoulder opening sequence.

In this way, yoga becomes not just something contained within the confines of your yoga mat, but something that infuses the way that you move about your day.

Now you are not just practicing yoga, but living yoga.

Author: Kara-Leah Grant, once a Queenstown-based yoga teacher, now teaches in Wellington where she’s discovered the joy of Prana Flow Yoga. Read more of her articles on yoga and the art of living at Prana Flow NZ.