How Often I Practice Yoga

As a yoga teacher, the question I get asked the most is, "How often do you do yoga?"

I've always answered honestly, though over the years I have been practicing my answer has ranged from almost every day to once a week and back again. There have been numerous extended periods of time where the only movement I do is yoga daily. Other times, when I'm training for a race or following a strength-training regimen, I do yoga only on my rest days. Most recently, I'm showing up on my mat as a student two to three times per week.

I used to feel like a fraud when I was teaching and my answer was anything but a majority of the days of the week. I'd give an honest answer of "not that often," all the while afraid of losing credibility. Like my students would somehow find me out and take away my yogi card. I'd get frustrated with myself for not doing more yoga.

Recently, though, I've had a massive transformation in my thought process. As a result, I've become frustrated with the question itself. "How often do you do yoga?" [note the emphasis on the masculine, Western prioritization of doing over being] has come to mean "How often do you stretch on a mat in positions called by yogic names?"

In the West, we think of these poses, or asanas, as yoga itself. You can blame whatever you want as the culprit for perpetuating this idea--ignorance, cultural appropriation, the embodiment of what we've been taught--but assigning blame isn't going to change the problem at the root. Only by truly living yoga will we right this wrong.

Because yoga is so much more than poses.

It's also more than "matching breath [prana] with movement," something I tell my students all the time.

It's even more than meditation or mindfulness.

Though all these things are a part of yoga, they're only that: a part. As Reverend Vidya Vonne says in the introduction to The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, "The physical Yoga, or Hatha yoga, was primarily designed to facilitate the real practice of Yoga--namely, the understanding and complete mastery over the mind. So the actual meaning of Yoga is the science of the mind" [emphasis mine].

So, if "the real practice of yoga" is "understanding and complete mastery over the mind," how often do I practice yoga?

Every. Single. Day.

Every day I sit down and write three pages of longhand steam of consciousness. Over the course of ~30 minutes, I practice telling the truth to myself about myself and my experience, so I can then go out and live as my authentic self in this world. This alignment with truthfulness is known as satya, and it's one of the five yamas, or principles for how to conduct oneself in regard to others and the world. The yamas, in turn, are one of the eight limbs of traditional yoga.

I also practice another of the eight limbs daily: niyamas, or five standards for which we should hold ourselves accountable internally. I consciously choose my thoughts to be as pure and positive (saucha) as I can manage, and I practice being content in the present moment (santosha). By choosing to believe that my trials, pain, and hardship can be used for my ultimate growth (tapsya), I deepen my practice even more. My relentless desire to know myself more fully (svadhyaya) and take radical responsibility for my life while simultaneously surrendering to a Force Greater than Myself (ishvarapranidhana) allows me to have one foot firmly in this world and the other...well, metaphorically at least, in the spiritual realm.

The yamas and niyamas are the first two limbs of yoga, and they're all about how we live our lives. It's not until the third limb, asanas, that we enter into the physical poses--or what the West has come to associate as yoga.

It's like we skipped the first two steps entirely.

Not only is this a disservice to the historical, cultural, and spiritual roots of yoga, it's a disservice to ourselves.

You can go and stretch any way you want and call it whatever you like, but if you're not taking the lessons with you off the mat and into your life, you're not really practicing yoga. You might be doing yoga poses, but you aren't living yoga. Yoga is meant to help "in every aspect of our lives, from the White House to the outhouse" (Sri Swami Satchidananda's commentary on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali).

I'm here to practice yoga, in every area of my life, every single day, to the best of my ability. Practice, not perfect. To first and foremost always be a student of yoga, continually discovering what more it has to teach me.

And I'm here to lead others to do the same. To guide yoga as it was intended to be taught: "the journey of the self, through the self, to the self" (the Bhagavad Gita).

Wanna work with me on taking yoga off the mat and into your life? Use my contact form to reach out. Let's practice, together.