Yoga is a great way to stay fit, healthy and fight stress. Depending on the type you practise, it can also make you incredibly stronger. However, for many, Yoga is that discipline that never seems to “click”. The first time I practised Yoga – more than 7 years ago – I wasn’t hooked, and although I knew it was good for me, I never really enjoyed it that much. Until a couple of years ago, when I found a great teacher, a fun class and my mind was blown. It’s not down to a single factor, but a few that could be stopping you from enjoying Yoga the way it’s meant to be:
1- Caring about what everyone else is doing: whether it’s your studio peeps, or your Instagram newsfeed, checking out what others are doing can be counter-productive. Yoga is about forgetting about everything around you, for a good reason: it helps you focus and release tension. Paying attention to who’s around you will very likely make you wonder about what you “should be doing”. I was terrible at looking around me, whether it was to gawp at the scary see-through leggings in front of me, or to see who could do what I couldn’t. It took some practice, but once I stopped caring about what happened around me, I began focusing on my breathing, my body and my mind, becoming better at Yoga.
2- Forcing your poses: we are all designed differently, with different levels of flexibility, strength, longer or shorter limbs. Certain asanas -poses- work great for some, but forcing yourself to bend backwards when your back is saying “no”, will only result in injury. If a pose doesn’t feel right, if your face is tensing or if you feel pain during and/or after practicing, there may be an asana – or two, to three – that needs to leave your practice, and that is OK. There are also no perfect ways of doing a pose – no matter who has told you otherwise, they are wrong – Your downward-facing dog may require you to keep your knees bent. That is also OK.
3- Forcing your evolution: during my first months practicing Yoga I became frustrated when I saw no improvement in my flexibility levels. Being impatient did me no good, I became frustrated, and sometimes left my class feeling like a useless broken doll. I lacked patience. I had to keep working, without expecting my body to change, even accepting some things may never happen for me, like the splits. Accepting that my body may not be designed to flex that way, gave me a sense of relief, and whenever I look like a broken doll – meaning I’m a sweaty mess on the mat – I laugh it off.
4- Not taking it seriously: I’m the first one to make fun of myself, when teaching and when practicing. However, a fantastic yoga teacher once asked me whether I didn’t take my practice seriously because I didn’t believe in myself. Being serious about Yoga is not about ceasing to smile. It means when I do it alone at home, I take the time to create the atmosphere, to light candles, to make it a real treat. In a studio, taking it seriously means believing your practice will be good for you. It means you will stick to it instead of thinking “oh, but I suck at it, so I might as well not go today”. Respect yourself enough to see your practice as something great, that you deserve 100%.
5 – Doing the wrong type of Yoga: there are so many ways of doing Yoga, with music, without, in a hot room, outdoors, with blocks, with movement, without… the list is endless. I plan to write about this further, but it may be that the kind of Yoga you tried was too focused on meditation, when what you required was something more active, or the other way around. Yoga practices can differ so much from one another, it really is worth checking out several studios in your town.
6 – Sticking to the wrong teacher: there are many good Yoga professionals, there are even more that are bad. More than the style of yoga, it really is up to liking your teacher. If you have fun with whoever is in charge of the practice, you will have fun during it. It’s a lot to do with chemistry, if you teacher doesn’t get you, then it’s time to move on.
And finally, it’s all about timing: sometimes it’s not your day, week, month, or even year, so if you are wondering why you are struggling so much, it may be that it’s not the right time in your life to practice with a certain regularity. Let go, give yourself time, space, and come back to Yoga whenever you want to.
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