377 days of Yoga

5 things I’ve learnt from Yoga every day for a year 

At the end of January 2016 I wrote a blog post about having done 30 days of consecutive yoga. I’d challenged myself at the start of the year to commit to the full month of yoga and by the end of it I was bursting with passion and love for the practice and for myself. As I wrote my blog post an idea began to form. What if I just kept going? What if I carried on doing it every day and saw how long I could last.  Maybe I could do two months of yoga… probably not… but I could just see. You never know… maybe I’d end up doing more…Maybe I could do it every day for a year…. Hahaha of course not…that’s ridiculous… obviously… but maybe…. No I’ll just start off small and just see how far I get a whole year is to much of a commitment. But the idea was planted and by three months I knew I wasn’t going to stop til the year ended. Then I’d stop for sure… unless...

And that’s where I find myself now- 377 days in a row and still going strong. I feel like I’ve learnt an awful from this experience and thought I’d share some of the things that have happened over the past 12 and a bit months.

1. Yoga got me pregnant

Don’t get me wrong I’m not suggesting that it was yoga ALONE that got me pregnant- Don’t be thinking I’m completely and utterly unworldly- there was definitely more to it than just yoga-  but all the unprotected sex aside, I feel sure that yoga had a part to play. My husband and I had been trying for a year by the time I got pregnant and I had started to do the yoga at about the 6 months point. We had a time at the end of December when we thought I might be pregnant and despite the fact that we had been doing all we could to make it happen, when we thought it had happened, we were terrified. For me the fear came down to the fact that I knew my body wasn’t ready for that challenge. I knew I didn’t have the energy or the stamina to put myself through such changes. I believe my body knew that too and therefore it wouldn’t allow it to happen. As I came to yoga, I grew stronger and healthier and more in tune with my body and I began to feel that not only would I cope with pregnancy but I would thrive and it was yoga that gave me that confidence. By the time I got pregnant I was feeling the fittest I had felt since before puberty. I felt spritely, full of energy and powerful. I think this is what allowed my body to conceive and what has kept me so well throughout my pregnancy. Now in my third trimester it makes me so happy to know that my little boy has experienced the benefits yoga has had on me every single day since his conception. I haven’t had a pain free or stress free pregnancy by any means but I think I have yoga to thank for everything that has been great about it and I can not imagine how much more difficult these 8 months would have been in a yoga free world. 

2. The best way to commit to any exercise is to stimulate your mind.

This is one of the most exciting revelations I have had this year. This concept has been something I’ve known for a while but I feel doing yoga every day has really helped me to fully embrace it. Is this familiar: You find something you really enjoy and it feels easy- maybe you join a new gym and you can’t wait to get there at the end of the day- suddenly it feels luxurious to exercise and you can’t imagine why you ever put it off before. Then one day you put it off. It’s slipped from exciting treat, into the realms of mundane, time consuming chore. You might drag yourself there for a while and think “See, I enjoy it when I’m here” but then you stop enjoying it when you’re there. The love has died and soon you find yourself paying out your gym membership month by month and never turning up!  I have fallen into this pattern so many times! Here’s what I think has happened- at the beginning your mind and your body are completely in tune. Your body is being worked out which it loves and your mind is being stimulated- you’re engaging all parts of yourself- its making you happy. Then you get bored. Your mind disconnects but your body still feels good, so you can kid yourself that its still doing the trick. Ultimately though, it’s your mind that makes the decisions every day and you find yourself making excuses not to go and the guilt sets in which might make you go a few more times but basically makes you put it to the bottom of the to do pile and your poor body gets neglected once again.

That is why I have found yoga such a revelation because every day it engages all aspects of yourself. It engages your mind and your body in equal measures. It sees no difference. Not only is my time on the yoga mat when I feel most physically in tune with myself but it is when I feel most in tune with my thoughts and feelings. The phrase “at one with yourself” has become hackneyed but it really resonates. The amazing thing is that through a regular yoga practice you can apply this feeling of being connected to all parts of the self to any kind of exercise you want. I have got a lot better at running and swimming this year because I go into all fitness regimes in what I would call a yogic way- an attentive and dedicated way. To truly commit to fitness it can’t just be about putting on your earphones, pushing through and thinking of the end goal, it has to be about finding the enjoyment of the whole journey.  

3.  There is no substitute for home practice.

With only a few exceptions throughout the year, all my yoga has been home practice (or hotel room or digs practice or wherever I happen to be). Its not that I don’t see the benefit of attending a studio- in the past I’ve done this a lot but they aren’t the be all and end all of yoga practice.  Group classes are amazing for many reasons; not falling into bad habits, for an instructors eye and there one on one advice, for sharing an experience with like minded people and for keeping things fresh and you motivated. What group classes are not good for is the inner monologue. Mine generally goes something like this: “Haha, I’m way more flexible than that girl. But look at that girl over there- she’s way more flexible than me. And stronger! Oh God, I really need to rest from this pose  but I can’t let that girl win - I’ll push through- owiiiieeeee- I hate this, I hate this, I hate this!!!! Oh the instructors coming over this way. Don’t correct me, please don’t correct me… He’s correcting me. He thinks I’m shit. He’s right, I am shit! This is shit. Shit shit shit shit shit. SHIT”. It goes without saying that none of this is ideal. Its completely the opposite of what is supposed to happen. All my attention is thrown outward at comparing myself with others and my own body feels nothing but annoying reminder of how far I have to go rather than the acknowledgement of where I am in that moment. Its hard to get away from these thoughts and to truly benefit from all the wonderful things the class has to offer.  The more I have done my home practice, however, the more I have learnt to focus and develop an almost trance like inwardness, so when I do attend public classes that inner monologue is so much quieter and more generous to myself and others in the room. If I had more money I would definitely attend more public classes but I think the balance should always be towards more home practice. Home practice not only allows you to cultivate the connection to your inner world, it gives you the freedom to choose what suits the mood you are in. this neatly leads me on to my next point.

4. There is always time for yoga

Jet lag helped me find time to yoga at 6 am in a park in Hong Kong. 

There is not always time for a 90 minute flow, high octane flow class! If that’s what you have been imagining me doing these past 377 days , I’m sorry to disillusion you but you’ve been imagining someone far fitter, with a lot more time on their hands than I. My practices vary from 10 minutes to 60 minutes. I may have done a couple of 90 minute classes in the year but certainly not with any regularity. This is how I made it an achievable goal. You’re just asking youself to check in with what you need once a day. You can manage 10 minutes when you’re utterly exhausted and you just want to go to sleep-In fact, if you pick the right kind of practice, you’ll go to sleep so much quicker than you would have done otherwise. What’s to stop you just doing 10 minutes every day then? Nothing. You could do that if you wanted but here is why it is why cultivating the inner connection is so important. The key I have learned through yoga is to be able to ask yourself “what do I need today” and to be able to answer knowledgably and honestly. 19 days out of 20 I need more than 10 minutes to feel the benefit. And that 20^th day its just perfect;  lovely little 10 minute stretch to remind myself I’m not just a floating head but basically nothing that’s going to impact my day. But most of the time I want more- not because of the guilty feeling that often makes us exercise but because I’m able to listen to my body and work out what it needs. I’ll take a moment to connect with myself head to toe and I usually come up with something like this:  “Well I feel quite lethargic so I need a nice bit of a flow to get my heart rate up, I’ve been on the computer all day, so I need some chest openers to balance me out and  and I really need to create some space in my hips too. Course, I’m not going to feel right unless I get a good few minutes to stretch out and relax at the end so I’m looking at least half an hours practice.” When you approach it from this angle, every single day is different. Even If it’s the same practice you’ve done before. With this amount of freedom and tailoring it to your immediate needs I find I make the time for it I need. Sometimes that means coming to the mat first thing when I wake up or at two o’clock in the morning- there are no rules but those which life and your body dictates.

5. Not every day is easy but you always feel better after yoga.

In the last 377 days there have been times when I really didn’t enjoy my practice. I know that seems to go against everything else I’ve said but some days it seems to make everything worse. I first noticed this phenomenon years ago when I went to a group class. I just got angrier and angrier and angrier as the class went on. It was totally irrational. Sometimes the practice is somehow out of sync with what you need and it can create the exact opposite effect you were hoping for. Even on these days I have walked off the mat at the end of the session with a huge sense of pride and satisfaction. Even if it is the satisfaction of having battled and slayed a ferocious beast and come away the worse for wear. More often than not the exact opposite is true. Just yesterday I had the experience of being in my room just after my practice and catching myself thinking what a wonderful mood I was in. Only when I thought about it did I remember that a few hours before I had been thinking how hopeless, miserable and frustrated I was feeling. Without actively focusing on it Yoga had completely turned my day around. I hadn’t chosen a practice that was desgined to do that, it had just happened

without my noticing. Sometimes yoga really does feel like a little bit of real life magic.

For now I can’t imagine ever giving up what I’ve gained through yoga every day. It would feel really presumptuous to say I’m going to do it every day for the rest of my life but then again it has become almost as much an essential part of my day as eating. Basically I am just looking forward to whatever the future holds for me and Yoga.

If you would like to take up a home practice and wondering where to start I can not recommend yoga with Adriene enough. It was her 30 day system that started me off last year and I still do her classes at least once a week. They are free and available on youtube.  

https://www.youtube.com/user/yogawithadriene

 There are also loads of other wonderful yoga teachers sharing their brilliance on youtube for free so definitely start off there.

Over the past year I have mostly used Yoga Glo, which is a database of thousands and thousands of video classes led by some incredible practitioners. From Post golf work outs, runners yoga, fertility classes, pregnancy classes- I’ve never come across something I’ve wanted but couldn’t find on there and It costs about the same as one yoga class per month. https://www.yogaglo.com