365 Days of Yoga - Lessons Learned

I just wrapped up my 365 day commitment to yoga; initially my goal was to show up on my mat in a yoga class each day for a year. Why on Earth would a yoga teacher need to do a 365 day yoga challenge?

One thing that I didn't factor in when I quit my big girl job to become a yoga teacher was how my personal practice would be affected. I had envisioned hours upon hours of both practicing on my mat and teaching daily. Well when I was teaching 25 hours of yoga classes each week, seven days a week,  shockingly, I really had neither the desire nor the energy for a physical practice.

I burnt out pretty quickly; I began doubting my decision to become a yoga teacher after just a year of teaching full-time. Which is when and why I decided to re-commit to my mat for one year and try to reignite my passion and love for this thing called yoga.

Here are the biggest lessons I've learned from this challenge:

1. HOLISTIC. Yoga transcends the physical. While my physical practice may have languished, I slowly realized my other seven yogic limbs had grown and deepened. Yoga is an eight-limbed path, where the physical asanas comprise just 12.5% of the entire yogic practice. I had been focusing so heavily on the physical practice that I hadn't realized how yoga had cracked me open in so many other ways! I was delving more deeply and trying to practice the yamas (morality); niyamas (personal conduct); conscious breathing and meditating; withdrawing from the external senses and cultivating inner awareness; seeking a greater union with the Divine. 

Yoga is not about unrolling your mat and twisting into a pretzel. That's the tool that we use to cultivate heightened awareness OFF of our mats. The lessons that we learn from the physical practice are to be integrated off of the mat. I had been doing this but not even thinking to call it yoga! It was missing the forest for the trees.

2. BALANCE. Yoga is about seeking balance. It's about walking the middle path. Avoiding extremes. It doesn't get more extreme than forcing yourself upon your yoga mat each day for a year! Well, I already knew how to be INTENSE. I already knew how to PUSH myself to my limits, how to GRIND it out. 

What I learned this past year was how to PULL BACK when I needed to without feeling like a failure. I learned to be KIND and FORGIVING of myself and my limitations. I learned to ACCEPT exactly where I happened to be in each moment. And I realized that I was good enough regardless of whether or not I unrolled my mat in a yoga class or not.

3. INTRINSIC VALUE. I really learned to accept my intrinsic value as a human being, a manifestation of God's perfection and love. For my entire life, I'd measured myself based on achievements, successes and my physical appearance. My value was linked to so many external factors as a way to validate my existence, which resulted in feelings of both inferiority and superiority in comparison to others. (Mostly superiority!!!)

This past year, I have found myself truly beginning to tune out the external noise - other people's opinions and expectations and, more importantly, my flawed perception of other people's opinions and expectations. For the first time, I allowed myself to sink into child's pose during a vinyasa class. Formerly, I would power my way through, even when I probably could have used the rest. For the first 100 or so days of this challenge, there were many times that I would crawl to my mat and sleep for the better part of an hour! There was a time that would have filled me with a sense of shame, embarrassment and a harsh judgement of myself. It is quite liberating to follow your intuition rather than your ego!

4. SUBSTANCE. I moved away from optics and moved toward substance. The visual image of a beautiful yoga pose is certainly pleasing to the eye, but the culmination of a certain pose is really the smaller view. The big picture stuff in yoga is finding equanimity, precision, focused breath work and contentment in a pose. It's having balanced awareness of all of the sensations in a pose, especially the more subtle ones.

It's having the confidence in myself that I am moving in the right direction in my life and in my practice without focus on how it appears to others or what it "looks like." I'm no longer comparing myself and my practice to others. I'm competing with myself to be the best that I can be; not in the hopes of impressing or winning over others but with the intention to honor God with devotion, gratitude and service to others.

5. COMMITMENT. I've realized that I am totally and completely committed to my practice, because I have finally totally and completely committed to MY LIFE. I've spent my entire life afraid to truly commit, always feeling that there was something bigger and better out there for me. And there always was. But the problem with living with the philosophy of constant striving for  something "better" or different or more exciting is that it is never enough. You get caught in a cycle of misery - yearning for something better, receiving a false and fleeting feeling of contentment when you get it and then the cycle starts again. And repeats. Again and again and again. Until your happiness is no longer in your control - it's owned by all of the advertising and marketing people trying to sell you something!

The truth is that all that I have been seeking and looking and yearning for from external sources could never provide true happiness and satisfaction. That is my job. And it's an inside job. My commitment is to trust in a higher purpose and surrender to life as it unfolds. That doesn't mean to give up or to cease efforts to improve; it means to move forward with RIGHT EFFORT and NON-ATTACHMENT. Never giving up and always letting go.

Yoga is a path toward self-realization. My practice has transformed as I have transformed. My expectation to sustain the same intensity of my physical practice does a disservice to the deepening of the other seven limbs of yoga. My 365 day commitment to my mat was successful because the World Is My Yoga Mat. My practice is not limited to being in a hot, sweaty room for an hour each day.

So grateful for the past 365 days. Annica! Annica! Annica! Be happy! BE HAPPY! be happy!