A Regular Practice

I am struggling with making yoga a daily part of my life. But I have improved. When I moved to Turkey I was forced to do yoga on my own since I could not initially find any classes to go to here (there are some studios but I have not explored them)... This led to many weeks of me attempting or at least thinking of doing yoga everyday. And I did practice on my own - about once a week but I felt very out of touch and stiff - my move from Victoria to Ankara occurred over about 6 weeks so there was a long break. And I had never really seriously tried to start my own home practice.

I was proud of myself though for trying to do yoga on my own but it was hard to focus or even to know what to do.... then in November I started practicing weekly with Annie. This really inspired me to want to practice everyday and in the beginning of January I did manage to keep up a nearly daily practice for two weeks. But then I caught a bad cold and there seemed to be loads of stress all around. I continued to keep up with the weekly practice with Annie though. Over the last three weeks I have had an intention to do yoga at least three times on my own per week. With my weekly practice, that brings me to four sessions a week. And that seems more doable to me than aiming for a daily practice right off the bat.

Mind you, practicing on my own is messy, to say the least. I often just launch into my practice and do not center myself at first nor do I always end with corpse pose and some meditation. But for me, right now, that is ok. One of the things that Annie and I talk about often is how personal yoga is. So while I used to feel guilty for not doing yoga the "right" way, I am now starting to think of yoga as something that I must do "my" way to benefit from it and to learn at a pace that is best for me. It is silly to think that you can teach a person to play a violin concerto just after you have shown them musical notes and some fingerings. Similarly, while I have been attending yoga classes intermittenly and sometimes quite regularly for the past six years, I feel that I am still learning about awareness and breath especially in the context of my own home practice. Not that I am unwilling to push myself but in the past, I think I have been too ambitious in my practice goals and that ultimately leads to me not practicing. So like one would practice scales and etudes, I practice poses that I know fairly well and challenge myself to do more sun salutations (if I do 3, I feel really good but last week Annie and I did 5 in a row so this week I will try to do 5 in a row during one of my practices) or practice poses on my head - a fear of which I will talk about in another post.

There are some sites that offer tips for starting a regular practice like this but I have found this to be much more complex than meets the eye. Its all well and good to set up a time to practice but that always seems to fall by the wayside for me as I have a fairly flexible work schedule that leads to a fairly unstructured work day. And, most evenings I am tired and most mornings I am rushed. So what to do? Mainly, I just do it. And right now, there is no set time for me, if it feels right and I can, then I do yoga. Even if that means there is activity around me. Because in a one bedroom apartment with another person, finding my own time and space to practice is quite difficult. So, I just do it. Like I said, it isn't always pretty and most times my practice is about 25 mins long but I feel good about that right now and see the messiness and chaos of my practice as a part of the evolution of my own practice.