YYoga

A practice that supports your life

Being able to find the right class at the right time makes it easy to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. Whether you prefer an hour of power, a lengthy and luscious yin class, or both back-to-back every Friday night, the luxury of mapping your preferred practice around the rest of your life easily facilitates setting up a weekly yoga routine. And, while routines can be a very powerful way to support a consistent practice, routines can also turn into ruts.

If you don’t check in with yourself and reassess what you need from your practice on a daily basis, you may find that your yoga practice auto-pilot has steered you in an unsupportive direction.

To develop a more supportive practice, consider changing up your yoga routine in response to your energy level, stress levels, and even to the time of year. For women, your menstrual cycle may impact the type of practice that supports you – and being pregnant most definitely will.

Consider your emotions when choosing a class as well. The appropriate class for a day where you have been feeling sad might be different from a supportive class on a day when you have been feeling rushed or frustrated.

Deepen your practice by allowing your choice of class to become an integral part of your yoga.

Training for adversity

Classically, the practice of yoga is about finding more ease and joy in life. And, we find this ease and joy not because we eliminate suffering, but rather because we learn – and train – to find ease in the midst of suffering.

With the luxury of being able to choose the exact classes we want, we sometimes lose the opportunity to practice adversity on the mat. More often than not, we are able to practice exactly how we want to. If slowing down is challenging, we can choose to practice faster paced styles like Flow and Power. When we’re carrying a more depressed energy, we can settle into to Yin and Restorative classes.

But sometimes the practice we want to do is not the practice that will serve us most.

If you find slower paced classes agitating, chances are they are exactly what you need. If day after day you feel like practicing close to the floor, a strengthening and uplifting flow might be the source of the energy you seem to be missing.

Life doesn’t always allow us to move at our preferred pace. By committing to practice yoga at a pace that we initially resist, we develop the ability to move through resistance with more ease.

Namaste,

Sarah Jamieson
YYoga | Yoga Teacher