- Nothing is as easy as they say
- Yoga practice as imagined
- Yoga practice as done
- Keep your menu you fresh and your practice will always be there for you
Nothing is as easy as they say
After several years of schlepping our youngest to daycare and our oldest to primary school, I finally felt the sweet relief of a simpler life — they were both at the same school. Now there was only one stop each morning and only one pick up in the afternoon. Parental heaven.
When I got to work the first day of this monumental shift in my life, I announced that my life was finally organized and manageable. But my boss was a few years ahead of me as a parent. She became wistful, and said, ‘Until the next thing happens.’
How right she was. One thing or another forever seemed shift in the universe of our little family, and adaptability became one of the most important virtues for me to cultivate as a parent.
Over the years, I have learned that adaptability is also one of the most important virtues to cultivate as a yoga practitioner. It is not in the Yoga Sutras, but it should be (maybe it is part of contentment, or santosha).
How often in my yoga practice have I settled on a daily routine and then had it up-ended when ‘the next thing happened?’ And it is stunning to observe how long it takes to recover from these changes. I can spend weeks and months trying to establish a new routine. If you counted all the weeks that my practice was ‘in flux’ they would far outnumber the weeks in which it was settled and predictable.
Yoga practice as imagined
One of the stories we often tell ourselves about a ‘good’ or ‘worthy’ yoga practice is that it needs to be consistent and sustained. We often imagine a quiet morning in a quiet space with an hour or so of practice time. A sunrise usually figures into the practice story as well.
But is this the world we actually live in? Not me. And I know a lot of yoga practitioners who do not live in that world either.
In fact, I often wonder if we have set princess-and-the-pea-type expectations of practice — that our practice ‘should be’ so regimented and delicate that even the tiniest disruption in our lives undermines it. And so we try to control everything to preserve this perfect hour.
Or we give up our practice in frustration. How many people have you met who said, ‘I used to love yoga until …’ they had a baby or they broke their foot or their mother became ill? All real life stuff.
While yoga may carry us through difficult times, it needs energy and planning from us to make it happen. Yoga does not happen automatically. We need to be able to make it to the well; we need to meet it halfway.
That is where adaptability comes in. Sustainability requires adaptability.
Yoga practice as done
How do we get to the well when either the world or our energy levels push back?
(1) We can acknowledge that a worthy practice is a ‘good enough’ practice. Perfection is for the next life or a different realm. Aristotle said that perfection is not a human trait. Let’s take down the temperature on our expectations.
(2) We can prepare for disruption by practicing adapting when we are not under pressure. This will make it more fluid when we are.
When small things threaten to disrupt our practice and the cost is low either way, we have a choice. We can double down and say, ‘I get my practice no matter what.’ Or we can say, ‘Hmm. I could get my full practice in. But what would it be like to make an adaptation today? Let me practice adapting.’
As we practice adapting, we feel more comfortable in the adaptive space and are able to see and feel the value of other modes of practice. This teaches us to not feel cheated when, later, we don’t have a choice to adapt. We may even feel grateful.
(3) We can create a menu of adaptations that work well for us. This menu will be highly personal. My job was so stressful for a period that my practice was 30 minutes with legs up the wall for six months. I don’t want to go back there, but at least I know that when I am over my max with stress and exhaustion, putting my legs up the wall for 30 minutes works for me. So legs up the wall is on my menu. I know that the day after my dad died, I took a long, lonely walk in the woods. And that walk started to put my heart back together. So a lonely walk in the woods is on my menu.
What can you put on your menu? If you are not sure, begin by asking yourself whether an activity you are considering generates energy or whether it drains it. You should feel better after you did it. If it generates energy, it is potentially a menu item. If it makes you feel as good as your yoga practice, it passes the test.
(4) We can keep our menus handy, and be thankful for them. There is no need to spend energy begrudging or hiding the fact that we live real lives in the real world (hey, that is why we need yoga in the first place).
I keep my menu written down in my practice space because, sometimes, I am just too dumbfounded by life to remember it on the fly. On a bad day, I just start at the top and work my way through the menu until I find an adaptation that fits my time, place and energy. No thinking, not when I am stressed. Just get a practice in of some shape or kind, and feel better. Think tomorrow.
(5) We can continue to test our menus, add items and take items off as our life stages shift. Pregnancy, aging, injury, illness, and job changes can demand significant and non-negotiable practice adaptations.
Keep your menu you fresh and your practice will always be there for you
Keeping our menu fresh also means acknowledging that some menu items will no longer feel generative for us as we progress through life. That means, when we are not stressed, we need to keep our eyes out for new things. Sometimes, those new things will come spontaneously when we need them. After my dad died, my body/mind just ordered me, ‘Go to the woods!’ Most of the time, we need to seek things out. Retreats and new teachers are great for this. When we find a new practice for our menu, it is a piece of gold to cherish for just the right time (which might be every day for six months).
Our ability to sustain a valuable practice does indeed require consistency. We need to show up every (or most) days. But we also need a plan to adapt when showing up is not possible or when we show up too vexed by life to engage how we imagine we want to.
Our yoga practice will always be bumpy because the world we live in is bumpy. But our continual willingness to adapt will assure it is sustained through thick and thin.