Yoga Every Damn Day, pt. 1
There is a very popular hashtag added to many social media posts about yoga. If you search #yogaeverydamnday on Instagram, some 20 million posts are available for your viewing. The vast majority of these are styled, beautiful pictures of folks showing off their headstands, handstands, arm balances, and other poses that not only require an incredible amount of strength and flexibility, but also a very particular body type. Like most things on social media, these photos are not an accurate representation of the reality of daily yoga practice.
Even (maybe even especially) if it never results in the ability to do the standing splits, daily practice is fundamental to harnessing the truly transformative power of yoga. If mastering fancy yoga poses is not the goal of practice, then what is? The answer is balance, and not just the kind that lets you stand on one leg.
In order to understand what balance looks and feels like, it helps to know what it means to be out of balance. In the Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali, one of the seminal texts on yoga philosophy, the symptoms of imbalance show up differently in different parts of our human system– body, breath, mind, and emotions. When we are not in a balanced state, our body might not work quite as well as we like; Pain, poor digestion, poor sleep, feeling antsy and fidgety are some of the ways our body tells us that we are out of balance. Do you ever notice that you hold your breath when you are stressed out, or that you breathe in a way that's really shallow and irregular? When we are out of balance it's also really hard to focus; the mind can be pulled in all directions, spinning forward, stuck on the past, or hopping from one task to another. Lack of balance can show up in our emotions as negative thinking and emotional suffering.
All of us have had these experiences, and likely would rather not continue to feel them on a regular basis. Luckily, yoga offers a clear path to move away from suffering and towards balance. The answer is to do something every day that actively creates within you the qualities opposite to the symptoms of imbalance. If your body is uncomfortable, do some movements that help alleviate pain or stiffness. When your breath is erratic or shallow, do some focused breathing that smooths out and lengthen the breath. To help your mind and emotions come back to balance, actively focus your attention on one thing, and spend time connecting to that which brings you joy or peace.
A daily yoga practice will cultivate balance within you through āsana that is done in a way that is steady and comfortable, prāṇāyāma to calm the breath and meditation to harness thoughts and soothe the emotions. Patterns of imbalance are often deeply ingrained within us. It can take a long time to counter them, but no practice is wasted. Every time we let our system experience the symptoms of balance, new patterns start to grow and strengthen. You can't take a picture of the internal results of practicing #yogaeverydamnday and that's ok. Your yoga practice is for you, and not for the world to see in a 1080 x 1080 pixel Instagram photo.