5 Ways to Stick With a Home Yoga Practice
Bagheera claiming her edge of the yoga mat during home practice.
Like taking your vitamins or that recommended cup of green tea, some things in life bring their benefits better when they are a part of our daily routines. While yoga can always be beneficial, maintaining a home practice can become a defining factor in your own sense of well-being.
With the pressures of modernity pushing us like never before to achieve, produce, and consume, stopping the world just long enough to get some mindful movement in on your mat has become a radical action of self-love.
Although it sounds easy, committing to a home practice is not without its challenges. A common one is merely the matter of all the other things there are to do and take care of in the day. However, I have found that keeping up a home yoga practice actually helps me taking care of all the other responsibilities I have going on in life. It may sound backwards, but spending 10-20 minutes on the mat every morning helps me tackle whatever lies ahead in the day with more equanimity and ease. It reminds me of Buddha’s famous quote, “Meditate for one hour a day. If you don’t have time for that, meditate for two hours a day.”
The good news is you don’t need to practice yoga for one or two hours a day for the benefits of your practice to begin permeating other areas of your life.
Here I have compiled my top five tips for overcoming the many challenges that often keep us from keeping up with our home practice. There’s nothing to lose by giving them a try, but there is so much to gain by finding a daily rhythm that includes time for your own self-care and wellness through a home yoga practice.
Put your yoga mat right next to your bed.
If you aim to start your days off with your home practice, roll out of bed and straight onto your yoga mat. If you prefer practicing in the evening, climb straight into bed off your yoga mat. Lay your mat out directly beside you bed to starting and/or end your day with a little stretch.
Whether you are rolling out of a mattress on the floor straight onto your yoga mat, or climbing down a treehouse latter to your mat at the base of the steps, placing your yoga mat where you will inevitably step onto it first thing in the morning helps reinforce a daily morning practice at home. Often we feel tired and groggy in the mornings and, even if you love doing yoga, the “work” of going to get your mat, deciding where you are going to practice, rolling the mat out & getting in the mindset can all be blocks to engaging your practice.
The simple preemptive act of placing your mat as near as possible to where you will step first thing out of bed makes coming into contact with your practice more inevitable, and easier to say yes to. Some mornings, upon waking, the list of all we need to get done and tend to throughout the day ahead already starts begging for our attention. This is another common block to keeping up a morning yoga practice.
Setting yourself up to step on your mat before busy thoughts of the day begin claiming your mental landscape can help you stick with a morning yoga practice that will get increasingly easier to keep up with each day.
Queue up music for your practice.
Sometimes the open-endedness of not knowing how long you are going to practice can be a deterrent to getting on the mat. Even in a public yoga class, you go in having an idea of how long the class will last (typically 60 or 75 minutes). For whatever reason, being able to anticipate the length of time that will be spent doing something sometimes helps us actually achieve that thing (think Pomodoro productivity method).
Of course, your yoga may be full of flows that can take you on a trip of their own and you may practice best without a timeline. But for many of us, deciding on an amount of time to practice, especially when trying to build a daily practice, can help us stick with it.
For someone wanting to begin a daily yoga practice or who has been maintaining one but needs some help, 10, 15, or 20 minutes are great goals for timing your practice session. Queuing up a few of your favorite songs lately, or some binaural beats to last the amount of time you want to practice will help guide through the set amount of time you’ve chosen without second guessing yourself.
You won’t need to worry about what time it is, if you’ve been practicing too long, or not long enough, if you’ll be late, if you should have hit snooze, etc. Decide for how long you will practice and provide yourself a nice soundtrack of your choice that will guide you through that time.
Invest in a yoga mat you love.
As simple as it sounds, finding a yoga mat your love can help you stick with a home yoga practice. When you love the color, texture, weight, feel, and even smell (depending on the material) of your mat, you want to get on it and move.
Think of your yoga mat as a space & place maker. Within its bounds is where your physical yoga practice happens. One of the advantages of yoga is that is doesn’t really require equipment to practice, like many sports and exercise activities often do. Props like a foam roller, cork block, or yoga straps can help for certain things, but can usually be replaced with things found around the home in the absence of props specifically made for yoga.
But the mat is essential. Its’ delineation helps provide a visual and spatial parameter within which the physical postures or asanas of the yoga take form.
The yoga mat helps define the space where your practice is taking place from the rest of the world around. When we practice on a mat we love, we simply feel more drawn to engage the practice we are trying to make a part of daily life.
Observe how you feel after practicing.
In the days you have been with your practice, make an effort to be mindful of how you feel in your life and your body after having practiced. Recognizing the difference, if it’s a positive one, helps you want to keep that practice in your daily routine.
The easiest differences to spot might be physical ones. You may notice your shoulders aren’t crawling up your neck or that your posture is a bit more upright after having spent your 15 minutes on the mat in the morning.
But as you advance in your daily practice, a part of which could include these observations, you may also begin to notice differences in your mindset and emotional state. It may be that those 15 minutes of yoga straight out of bed begin to make you less reactive to stressful or unanticipated situations. Maybe through that bit of stretching and conscious breathing, you released something that has been holding you back emotionally and feel more free to respond intentionally to situations that happen in the day, rather than react to them out of habit.
Whatever differences you notice, take note. You don’t have to actually write them down, although that may be even better, but just make a mental note of when you notice some slight change that may be from having engaged your yoga practice.
As these observations of positive differences and good feelings accumulate, and your brain, through your conscious observation practice, begins to recognize that the yoga has had a hand in shaping these differences, the mental recognition will solidify that this home practice is bringing some good magic into your daily life.
Make the practice yours.
Use the time on the mat as a chance to be in communication with your body, mindset, and energy. A home yoga practice is your own. It is an opportunity to move in the ways that feel best to you in your yoga and an opening to tend to parts of your body or mind that you may know deep down could serve from a particular stretch or release.
Overall this will make maintaining a home practice and building a habit not feel like a chore but a more of a cultivation of a lifestyle investment in your own wellness. Over time, you will find that the home practice does not only benefit you, but its influence on you may benefit the lives of those in nearest proximity to your own.
If you are a total novice practitioner, maybe you do not yet know many yoga postures. Your home practice can be the time to re-engage and play with the few postures you may have learned in a yoga class recently or on YouTube. I have a library of free yoga videos to help you get started here.
The home practice is a chance to begin making your yoga totally yours. There is not teacher there to guide you along, or other people practicing around to compare yourself to. It is just yourself and your mat. At the beginning this may seem like even more of a challenge than taking part in a group practice in a public yoga class, but if you stick with it, it may emerge as a precious space you carve out within your daily life, nearing something like sacred.
Bonus Tip: Bounce Back
A sixth bonus tip I will offer is to not dwell too much or be disheartened when you may miss a day or go a little while without practicing. Just step onto your mat again, straight out of bed without thinking twice and keep deciding to commit to carving out this small precious space for yourself each day amidst this ever maddening world.
If we let it get the best of us, we will spend more time being disappointed in ourselves for missing a day here and there than we actually will practicing. It is very important to bounce back. To just keep going and try again. It is important to train ourselves to identify more with the days we maintain that practice at home, than with the handful of times that something in life, or deep in ourselves, just gets in the way.
