It is YM’s duty to propagate Yoga and its benefits and anything that helps generate interest in this discipline, or helps people persevere when they find it hard makes us feel very grateful. So we are delighted that Jersey Life have again run one of my older pieces. Happy Monday Yogis 🙂 …
ARISTOTLE SAID ~ “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
This quote may help get you through many self defeating ideas about what you can and cannot do; especially in relation to what you have learned/ been taught in the first half of your life and what you have learned on your own through life experience. In that sense, it’s very empowering: you take up Yoga (at whatever age), practice regularly with the commitment it requires: you are Yogi.
New practitioners sometimes attend with a competitive streak setting themselves a measure, being too hard on themselves, seeking to ‘win the medal’. Well, there’s no medal to be had in Yoga but you can ‘win’ in a sense EVERY time if you stop focusing on results and attend more to the process. Don’t launch yourself into practice with a vengeance against your body. Don’t try to muscle your way into postures overriding any somatic feedback.
You must allow yourself time to get acquainted with the process of connecting body and mind. Yes the mind has a part to play. The mind keeps breath at the forefront, investigates and acknowledges your limit on the day, gives attention to the detail, chooses particularities about your movements, notes how you are feeling in the beautiful perfect moment. Each moment will be perfect if you do not force but just use 100% pure attention and effort.
This is the ‘skill’ involved in Yoga and you must trust the process to rejuvenate you and reveal the truth to you. The heart of cultivating a Yoga habit is making the commitment to keep turning up on your mat. Ultimately in yoga it is not where you are in the posture; it is HOW you are where you are in the posture.
OM OM OM Be Your Excellence
Patricia Thomas
Instructor at Yoga Matters