4 Easy Ways to Stay Motivated In Your Yoga Practice This Fall
As we get ready to brace the winter with warm sweaters, cozy socks and a nice cup of tea, it sure gets more difficult getting out of bed!
Lucky for you, now is the perfect season for change! Challenge yourself and find a daily practice that fosters your growth and keeps you warm and away from the flu all winter!
Here are four easy ways to stay motivated in your yoga practice this fall:
1) Discipline Yourself
You’ve heard it before. It works!
Discipline has led many of our ancestors to awaken greater conscious and change within themselves and their generation. A disciplined practice is necessary, as it creates space to observe your practice from a non-judgemental perspective.
Since you show up around the same time to your mat every day, or every week, your body remembers to show up, and starts forming a conscious pattern to do so during that time.
Your muscle memory adapts to this flow and starts firing during that time of the day, enabling growth via consistent practice.
The quickest way to manifest change starts with discipline!
2) Repetition Is Your Best Friend
Repetition could be interpreted as the number of times you practice during a week, or simply how many times you observed yourself do a forward fold in your days practice.
Again, repetition allows space to observe change. A fantastic scientific tool of observation, with consistency, your marvelous brain can tell differences in your physical, emotional and wisdom bodies within your disciplined regime.
Time for observation could vary from individual to individual, depending on their preferred pace of learning.
3) Self Study and Self Love
Study: The idea of consistently staying curious, whether that means studying your asanas during your daily practice, or gaining factual knowledge from different sources of information such as books, videos or conversations with your favorite mentors, about anything that sparks your interest.
In addition, mentioned in the well known ancient 8 Limbed Path of Yoga (Next Week’s Topic), are the four Niyamas, or simple ethical guidelines on how to live a sustainable and peaceful life, whilst observing your actions and behavior towards other human beings and living creatures.
The fourth Niyama, called Svadhyaya, means self study or inner exploration! As a universal guideline to live peacefully, one must continue to study and observe.
It is important to stay curious about the world we live in, even outside of our asana practice.
Love: Love love love!! I couldn’t say it enough! Love yourself! Everything good in the world starts with love and compassion. Only when you have compassion for yourself, can you build emotional capacity to heal yourself and your loved ones.
4) The Real Yoga
Lastly we should never forget the purpose of yoga and why it all began. A true Yogi must exemplify a consistent, disciplined and healthy mental and spiritual lifestyle in addition to their daily asana practice.
By practicing self love and the 8 paths of yoga, we can start to meditate on emotions such as compassion, gratitude and forgiveness, that we can learn to incorporate into our daily interactions with the world and the way we treat ourselves.
Join us next week where we will explore and uncover the guidelines mentioned in the 8 Limbed Path of yoga, as listed below.
- Yamas
- Niyamas
- Asana
- Pranayama
- Pratyahara
- Dharana
- Dhyana
- Samadhi
Hope you enjoyed these quick and easy tips to stay encouraged during your yoga practice this Fall!
Stay motivated, and see you next week!
Peace & Love,
Hum Yoga
Hum Yoga 