Making the Most Out of Your At Home Yoga Practice

Nothing is as it was. You're doing everything online including seeing your friends and family. The moment you leave the house to run a simple but necessary errand, nothing is normal and you are acutely aware that the world is different. 

Even your yoga class is online and you're forced to practice at home in an environment that may feel anything but peaceful right now. You know your practice is an important way to help you through this moment in history, but how can you possibly make it work at home?! Here are a three ideas that might help you make the most of your next online yoga practice.

Carve Out Sacred Space - You may share your home with many other beings including animals, kids, significant others, roommates, digital assistants and more and this can certainly make finding a space for your practice difficult. If at all possible, talk to the people you live with and negotiate a space that you can use. Remind them that they will get a better version of you if they allow you this time and space for yourself.

Ideally, this space would allow for your yoga mat and props to be out all the time, so you just have to jump on and get going. In a perfect world, you might even be able to close a door between you and all those distractions, but I know the world is less than ideal right now. Even having a space where you have to move a few items and ask the other beings to vacate is better than nothing.

If you can, you might enhance this space with some sacred objects. It might be as simple as a single flower in a vase or a small plant. You might go as far as having a statue of a deity and some incense or a candle and an uplifting photo. Bringing even a small amount of beauty to your space will only help you feel more “at home” (at studio?) in your environment.

Clear the Distractions (and the Energy) - Now that you have a space to do your practice you’ll want to clear it of distractions before you settle on to your mat. This is probably the thing that will make you feel like you’re back at the studio the most. We usually ask you to turn your phone to silent and leave it in the lobby. How can you create that same thing in your home? Can you leave it in another room? Can you unplug the Alexa? Turn off the TV? Silence the notifications on your tablet that you’re using to stream your class? Consider what types of things might take your attention away from your practice and do what you can to turn them off or leave them in another room.

You may also consider doing an energetic clearing of the space. A lot of us are feeling the heaviness of the situation we’re all experiencing right now on deep mental and emotional levels. Clearing our space and clearing our own energy can be very healing at this moment and set us up for a great practice. It’s something I do regularly at the studio before and after people come in for class and whenever I can at home. You might burn some sage or incense, sweep the floor, do a little light cleaning or decluttering, or chant some mantras. To learn more about Space Clearing, you can check out my Ebook on our Digital Downloads page.

Finally, and most importantly…

Release the Idea of Perfection - Your practice at home, even with a livestream with us, is not going to be the same as a class at the studio because it is not the same as a class at the studio. Maybe that’s obvious, but sometimes it helps to state the obvious! The cat is going to walk on you. The TV is going to be blaring in the other room because someone else is watching it. The phone is going to ring even though you thought you turned it off. The dog is going to lick your face endlessly because you’re rolling around on the floor and gee that looks like fun!

It is ok. Really.

The fact that you are getting on your mat and doing something?! Let that be enough. Because it is enough.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. Do what you can. Keep gently telling the dog or the kitty or the kid or the husband no, not right now. I’m doing my yoga. They’ll figure it out.

Keep coming back to your breath. Keep doing what you can.

Because this might be one of the big lessons for all of us right now. What is enough? This moment.

Just let it be.

If You Enjoyed This Post You May Also Like…

What happened when I did 40 days of Lovingkindness Meditation for The Difficult Person

A dear friend came to me on January 1st and said, “I want to do a 40 day lovingkindness practice. Will you do it with me?” You’d think that would be something I’d jump at, but you’d be wrong. I knew I should, but I can best describe my ethos going into the first practice as “kicking and screaming”. Almost literally. And yet somehow I just completed 40 days of the practice!

The most interesting part to me was the part where I offered the phrases to The Difficult Person. I’ll let you know who that was in a moment.

If you aren’t familiar with this practice it’s a pretty interesting one. Similar to mantra, some phrases are repeated in this practice but they are offered to a progressive series of beings, starting with oneself. I usually go with the following phrases:

May I be happy.

May I be healthy.

May I be safe.

May I be free from fear and worry.

May I live with ease.

(Replacing “I” for “you” when offering to another person.)

For my 40 day practice, I decided to eliminate the 4th phrase and to only offer to the following beings: myself, someone I love, The Difficult Person and all beings everywhere. I was only doing 9 minutes per practice so I needed to condense things. 

On my first day of practice, with my friend sitting next to me, I was fascinated at how much things changed as I offered these phrases to the different people, especially The Difficult Person. (Side note - some traditions even call this person “the enemy”. I don’t necessarily subscribe to that notion, but it’s nice to know even monks understand that relationships with others are not always easy!) When I got to The Difficult Person, I felt my whole body tighten up as if to say “I don’t WANT to offer happiness to this person!! Look at what they’ve done!!” I especially noticed my lips tighten as if trying to form the snarl that I felt inside.

This sensation persisted for the next several days. But I quickly found myself thinking, “If this person was truly happy, healthy and safe, maybe they wouldn’t be so awful! Maybe we need everyone to do this practice for them!”

With those thoughts, my body began to soften. I still wasn’t entirely happy about doing the offering and I certainly didn’t notice the same heart connection I did as my practice progressed with the person I chose as the person I loved, but there was an ease coming in.

Then The Difficult Person did something, yet again, that I didn’t agree with and that endangered hundreds if not millions of people and animals. 

The physical sensation of tightness in my body returned, apparently reflecting the tightening in my mind and heart. 

But it was different. Noticeably so. It was maybe 50% as tight as it was when I began the practice. 

Not long after this I found this passage about the Difficult Person in Sharon Salzberg’s book Lovingkindness:

“In the same way that cultivating lovingkindness toward a benefactor is easy, feeling kindness toward an adversary can be just as difficult. In order to begin to develop Metta toward a person with whom we have problems, we must first separate our vision of the person from the actions they commit that may upset or harm us. All beings are deserving of care, well-being, of the gift of lovingkindness. In developing Metta, we put aside the unpleasant traits of such a being and try instead to get in touch with the part of them that deserves to be loved.”

As I’ve been talking about in classes recently, the great ones from all the world’s great traditions tell us that we are Love, we came from Love and we will return to Love. All of us. That can be hard to fathom when we find ourselves face to face with the actions of a person that we’ve labeled as anything but Love. That’s true whether they are living in our home or we see them on television on a regular basis. But as Sharon says above, instead of separating them from us, we have to be willing to separate the actions from the truth inside and recognize that we are the same. And in some situations, that’s no easy task.

As I finished my 40 days of practice I started to notice outside of my practice that my reactions to The Difficult Person had softened when I heard about him or what he had done on Facebook or TV. I still don’t agree with him, I still wouldn’t have lunch with him, and I still wouldn’t vote for him, but I think I’ve begun, just the tiniest bit, to separate the actions from the being inside. 

I know this isn’t going to change anything for The Difficult Person, but it has changed something for me. They say anger is like holding a hot coal and expecting the other person to feel pain. I’ve managed to give myself the gift of a little less anger through this 40 day practice. That seems like a pretty powerful gift to me.

Oh. And if you haven’t already figured it out, My Difficult Person is the current president of the United States.

If You Enjoyed This Post You May Also Like…

Scenes from the 2020 Inspire and Restore Retreat!

We had another amazing retreat in Vermont this past week and I wanted to share some of it with you today! I’m always amazed at how our small group comes together for these retreats. Some of the faces are familiar, some of them are new, but we all feel like we’ve known each other forever by the end. It’s really wonderful!

We had the barn to ourselves for the full time this year so we got to do our first practice in the space we think of as “ours”.

We spent most of the time we were there with these beautiful misty views and light snowfall.

Each year we make a collective altar that everyone contributes some small object or two to creating. It holds our intentions and reminds us of what we’ve come to do throughout our time together. It’s always beautiful and so very special. The stories behind each object are often quite moving.

The morning practice this year was very “workshop” like, focusing on moving pelvis and spine together for safe and healthy twisting and finding our personal alignment in standing postures. We always work hard but have fun too!

We always have a little gift for all our participants and this year my Mom and I created a special little handmade book for everyone that had info on our schedule, mantras and space for journaling. All the decorations on the front and back were made by my Mom on a tight schedule, which I very much appreciated and so did everyone else!

Restorative yoga with Heather in the evenings is always such a welcome end to the day! Her loving touch and soothing voice is absolutely a favorite with everyone. We hope to have her to the studio sometime soon so more of you can experience what she has to offer.

Before we know it, it’s time for one last practice and then we all head home. But we do our best to remember that the connections we’ve made do not go away when we go back to our daily lives.

We are already looking forward to next year!

Save the dates! January 24-27, 2021!

If You Enjoyed This Post You May Also Like…

3 Keys to a More Stable High Lunge

“Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!” was a clever marketing catch phrase from my childhood (oh Lordy am I dating myself now!) and something I’ve been known to say to encourage my students with a smile and a laugh when they’re having a hard time in balancing postures. One posture that this comes up in is high lunge. It’s a common posture in a vinyasa practice and can present some real challenges depending on where you find it in a sequence and how fast it flies by. But I’m here to help! Here are 3 strategies that might make this posture more stable (and even enjoyable!) for you.

1. Set yourself up for success by aligning your feet well. Foundation is always the first thing to consider in any yoga posture, and how you align your feet in this pose will either set you up for success or failure when you try to lift your torso.

Traditionally, if you’re standing in tadasana or mountain pose, you may have been taught to have your big toes touching and your heels slightly separated. While that may work for some bodies, including the traditionally slight statured Indian male, if you’re an American woman such as me, you may find this not only unstable but restrictive in your outer hips. Instead, take your feet farther apart. I usually say sit bones distance, which can be measured by taking your two fists between the arches of your feet. With that little bit of extra space, you’ll have created a broader foundation for whatever you build on top.

Now with that broader foundation, as you bend forward and step one foot back to prepare for high lunge, see that the foot that goes back stays in that same line. There’s a natural tendency for it to drift into the center of the mat a bit, so resist that tendency and keep the foot wide to the side. This way, when you come up into your high lunge you’ll have that broader base to support you and maintain stability.

2. Draw the torso up through center rather than forward and up. This is subtle, but this is an energy management strategy. If you try to reach your arms forward as you lift the torso your energy and your focus will move OUT rather that in and up. Think of it this way, if you wanted to shoot and arrow up into the sky you wouldn’t aim it forward first and then expect it to turn upward somehow. The same is true for the energy of lift that you’ll need to bring up your torso.

Instead, as you exhale (because breath is always a good part of any strategy in a yoga posture), draw your arms up through center as you lift your torso. You might imagine that as you start to lift you’re going to take your hands up from the ground bending your elbows to touch your outer hips first, then draw them along the sides of your torso and up to the sky. Your torso will naturally follow this movement and you’ll contain your energy output to move in the direction you want to move, rather than a direction that isn’t necessary.

3. Engage the muscles surrounding your outer hips. This is an area we don’t think about very much in daily life, but the group of muscles that surround your outer hips are so important to creating stability in any standing posture.

As you move into the pose, feel as if these outer hip muscles are squeezing in towards the center of your body and maintain that feeling as you hold the posture. It’s as if someone came behind you and placed their hands on your outer hips and gave them a hug. You can even use your own hands to create this feeling and notice if the muscles here are doing the work you’re asking of them.

Having a hard time connecting to these muscles? We’re working on strengthening and engaging this area in my classes all this month. Come in for a class or sign up for Digital Membership to learn how to engage and strengthen this important area of your body more readily!

If You Enjoyed This Post You May Also Like…

Creating Lasting Change

It’s that time of year again! The time where you may be looking around at your life or health or surroundings and thinking it’s time to make some changes. But did you know that a whopping 80% of New Year’s Resolutions fail?? If you’re finding your resolve flagging already in these first few days of the New Year, here are some big ideas to help you create lasting change and a FREE PDF to help you map your way forward!

Identify The Problem

This may seem obvious but it really isn’t in some ways depending on what it is you wish to change. If you spend a small amount of time really identifying what it is that you’re trying to solve, that clarity will make what comes next that much easier.

The Biggest of the Big Ideas - Start Small and Break It Down!

You may have heard this advice in the past, but there’s a lot of truth to it in my experience. Too often, when we see that big changes need to be made and we’re at the point of being sick and tired of whatever it is and totally fed up we may go a bit off the deep end and try to do something huge. Not that I’ve ever done that. ;-)

And then we end up failing and have an even bigger mess to deal with later. Or we just give up entirely. And then we really get nowhere.

So as you look at whatever the problem is, let’s take health for an example, you may see this huge problem and want to attack it from all angles at once. Let’s say your diet is terrible, you don’t exercise, and you work too much. If you try to change all of those things at once, it just isn’t going to work and you’re probably going to be back on the couch eating potato chips night after night (mmm…. potato chips… /ahem).

What’s one thing you can do to start in the right direction? Maybe it’s exercise. What if you started by parking farther away from the places you need to go, whether that’s the office, the grocery store or something else. By doing so, you would be moving your body more because you would have to walk farther to get where you need to be. That one small change might just start to make you strong enough to then start taking regular daily walks. Maybe they start out as 5 minutes around the office on your lunch break. They might get longer from there. You may find yourself suddenly outside for an hour before you know it! Maybe that leads to the next small change, and then the next…

Make a Plan

In order to make change you have to have a plan. That may seem time consuming but, “If you fail to plan you plan to fail” isn’t a thing we’ve heard a million times for no reason. Any successful endeavor starts with a plan, whether that’s a big project at your job, a home improvement or changing some aspect of your life. This is where old fashioned paper and pen(cil) can really come in handy. There’s just something about writing it all down and mapping it out in front of you.

Set a Timeline

This isn’t want you think. Instead of saying I have to do such and such by this date, set a date where you’re going to begin your first small change. Nothing can change if you don’t simply START. By writing down a date or putting it on your calendar you make a commitment to yourself to simply begin. Give that some time, then move on to the next and the next…

Finally and Most Importantly - Take Time to Reflect and Take In the Good!

After some time, maybe a month, maybe several, take the time to reflect on the changes you’ve implemented. They might not all be winners, but have they moved you in the right direction. Be honest, but also remember the negativity bias of your brain and take in the good! Take the time to celebrate what DID work for you and what HAS changed. As those small accomplishments add up you’ll be more motivated to keep going. And that’s where the real magic lies.

To help you with this process I’ve thrown together a simple little PDF that might help you map out your plan on paper. You can find that here. I hope it helps you! Let me know if it does!

If You Enjoyed This Post You May Also Like…