9 Tips for Your Home Practice

(waves crash) So when making a change in any one of our daily habits, it's really just simply a problem of physics. Whatever it is that we're doing or not doing is informing what we're gonna do or not do next. So the central key to starting a home yoga practice is starting. There's no magic bullet, there's no quick turnaround, there's no accelerated way to begin a home yoga practice other than to begin. And these next nine tips are things that we have found really helpful to starting.

So tip number one, accept your own resistance. Because while part of us wants to start a home yoga practice, there's also a large part of us that doesn't. Change never feels all that safe and it's not that easy. Do know that the part of you that is resisting will eventually become your ally with time and will be resistant to missing the home yoga practice. Two, know why you're starting a home yoga practice.

Aligning yourself with a deeper purpose will help the rest of you get organized. We don't do anything without a purpose, and the mind loves to plan. So by establishing, okay, your main motivation, and really make sure it's something that's a little larger than yourself, something that maybe even you don't totally understand, will help hold you on those days when you really don't want to. Three, small practices matter. Research has shown that multiple small practices throughout the day can have a greater effect of reducing stress and increasing our patience than one long practice.

So if you're finding that all you have time for is 10 minutes in the morning for a few sun salutations, maybe a handful of minutes in the afternoon to sit, and maybe a few moments at the end of the day to put your legs up the wall, do it. It's actually more effective. Four, put your practice on the calendar. Honor your practice time like you do any other appointment or scheduled meeting in the rest of your day. With some time, you'll find out if you have greater success making your practice in the morning or the afternoon or the evening, and you'll also discover where you feel the greatest rewards.

We're different at different times of the day, and our practice meets us differently at different times of the day. And you're just gonna find out what time, where you have the greatest success. Trust what you discover and then stick with it. Five, make a record. Research has shown that we're 50% more likely to accomplish something if we're writing about it.

So each morning or evening before your practice, take a moment to just make a small record of how you're feeling, what's going on in your life. And then as you practice, insights, ideas, thoughts are gonna come up. Write them down. And maybe even if you're motivated, write down what you practiced. And then additional, write down how you feel after your practice.

This kind of record-keeping will commit you to the idea that your practice is working and that you're doing it. We thrive with a sense of accomplishment. And unless we make a record of things, we forget. Six, interact with the teachers on our site. All of our teachers are so excited to meet you, to be with you, to find out how the practices are working.

Your feedback, your experience, your questions help us be better teachers, as it's through the translation of the teachings that we also understand them. So reach out, connect, we'd love to hear from you. Seven, include your friends. We just love the company of others. So if you're endeavoring to start a home yoga practice, you probably have a friend who is, too.

Include him or her, start together, share what you're finding out, dialogue about it. Even better if you have the space, invite your friends over to practice. I love practicing with my friends. It's just, you really start to see that the yoga practice is so personal, so individual, so unique and specific to each one of us that it removes the burden of imagining that there's some right way of doing it, something you're supposed to look like. And as soon as you remove the burden of it being something that you're supposed to accomplish, it frees us up to be able to be ourselves, which is really the whole point of yoga anyway.

Eight, post it. Now this advice might be only useful if you're of the more extroverted nature and/or like the tools of social media. But it can be fun to share a photo of yourself in your practice, insights that you discovered, the view from your practice mat, just to help create a community that's also supporting and encourage you, as well as maybe inspire others to dive in and sit down on the mat. And nine, and now this is maybe the most important one. Be gentle and kind with yourself.

As we endeavor to do anything, there are gonna be days where we miss the practice. Many days where we miss the practice. Multiple, long periods where you miss the practice. The most important thing here is to be kind and gentle and accepting. And those days that we miss the practice, those are the days where we actually find out if our practice is working.

Because on the days where we don't get to take that medicine of connection with self, of ease, of spaciousness, can we still show up and be present and available for our lives, our friends, our loved ones, and everything else that's happening? So glad you've joined us on this journey. Please, again, the step that really only matters here is start.