Sometimes life feels like a race without a finish line. When this is the case, developing consistency in your practice can be a balm for your body-mind and spirit.
I’ve always been Type A. A consistent yoga practice eased me out of chronic pain, but it also gave me deep reprieve from my self-generated pressure to perform, achieve, and go go go. I didn’t sacrifice life-performance by alleviating the pressure – practice simply led to a new way of living (on the good days at least 🙂 ).
What does a regular or consistent practice mean and how can Modo help?
The Modo foundational sequence is designed to be safely practiced every day (no pressure!). How? To briefly explain… there’s not a lot of weight bearing on the small joints, and every joint and major muscle group is given the chance to move. Plus, the repetition in this sequence creates ease and variation for long term joint and muscle health. The Modo foundational sequence can be practiced at age 20 or 75 – and anywhere in between. After years of practice, the Modo 60 or 75 feels like a home base for the body, a meditative reset. So, it’s nice to return to this foundation between Flow, Yin, Restorative, or other classes.
Consistency is self defined and has to be right for your life and your schedule. Repetition is part of the design of the Modo Yoga practice, but to support modern day life, most Modo teachers suggest 3-4 times a week in the studio, and some form of daily practice on the other days – even if that’s simply 15 minutes of mindful walking, breathwork, or meditation.
Yoga is a science of lifelong practice. What you give to your practice – time, strength, focus, stillness – your practice will give back to you in return, ten fold. This journal entry aims to act as inspiration for you to invest time in yourself through exploring the why behind curating a regular practice.
Lessons from Practicing Daily
I learned about the power of daily practice from my teacher Baba Hari Das (1). From age 17 to 25 I would study with him once a year at a 4 day retreat for his Ontario students. He would assign a breathwork sequence and invite us to do it every day of the forthcoming year. The next year he would say (on a chalkboard, because he practiced mauna – or silence – for most of his life): “if you’ve done the practice every day, practice Breathwork in this tent; and, if not stay here with the beginners.” For Babaji, if you didn’t have a daily practice, you were always beginning. For years I would keep it up for 3-6 months, but it wasn’t until 4 years into these retreats that I finally committed to myself and said, “that’s it – I’m DOING it!” Now, 23 years later, it’s been every day since.
As a working mom of 2, my daily practice has shifted A LOT through the years, but the consistency remains. My life changed when every day literally meant every day – rain or shine, good sleep or bad, out late seeing or performing music, at a party or not, up late with a baby, good mood or bad. My life changed for the better with daily practice, in too many ways to enumerate here. But I’ll try to share what I’ve noticed from my own life and from teaching in Community these past 20 years.
Resilience
I think the greatest benefit to practicing regularly is inner resilience. We aren’t defeated when we’re knocked down into the muddy dirt of life. We’re defeated when, after the fall, we don’t get back up again. Getting up requires resilience. With consistent practice, inner resilience is built not through having a better downward dog than our mat-neighbor, or by doing a handstand, but it is constructed by returning to ourselves on the mat consistently, with dedication to our self care, and an openness to evolve and listen inwardly.
How about Weight Loss?
Yes I know, this can be a less inspiring subject. So, let’s wrap this question in love and a whole lot of awareness. You’re beautiful and your body is perfect. I’m including this because people ask about weight loss all the time, and that’s ok. The short answer is yes – consistent practice supports consistent and enduring weight loss.
But let’s talk about it. Even with the last decade bringing more awareness to body positivity, we’re still bombarded with images of the “right body.” Part of a consistent long term yoga practice is an experience of what is known in Yoga Philosophy texts as ‘vidya’ or awareness of deep truth. In other words, when our practice deepens beyond just getting sweaty and working out, we know intuitively that having someone tell us what our body should look like is, well, total BS. That being said, many people come to the studios with a goal of losing weight, and that’s ok too. There are lots of healthy reasons to want to lose weight, and no one in the studios will judge that goal.
A regular practice promotes weight loss as a mind-body practice, and not through calorie counting your food or counting the calories you burn. When practiced with consistency and fully (read: must include AT LEAST a FULL 5 minute savasana at the end of class), a consistent practice brings you to deep inner awareness. This often leads to natural lifestyle changes that include less emotional eating, healthy food choices that feel better for you, drinking more water, less alcohol, having deeper more restorative sleeps, and most notably and impactful less stress. Deep physiological shifts can occur with stress reduction and nervous system regulation, like changes in metabolism, better bowel movements, and an improved gut microbiome. With consistent practice comes consistent change in feeling healthy in your own skin.
Know Thyself
And speaking of listening inwardly, a consistent practice that is followed for years also leads us to increased interoception. Where perception is an understanding of where our physical body is in space, interoception is the awareness of our bodies’ inner workings. Interoception has been shown to decrease stress (2) increase mindfulness (3) and lead to a deeper sense of knowing ourselves. When we practice interoception we become acquainted with who we are without inherited scripts or expectations, we remember what we truly hold as core values, what feels good and what doesn’t, and direct our life accordingly. We feel with more precision what is serving us and, in contrast, which parts of ourselves are remnants of a past chrysalis ready to be sloughed off to expose our whole selves to the sun.
When moving through trauma, daily practice was my lifeline. A small daily return that whispered, “you are here, all will be ok.”
When we practice regularly we remember that we can’t lead others well if we aren’t at the helm of leading ourselves.
A regular practice for you may mean once or twice a week at your home studio, and 5 minutes of meditation a day. The last thing I’d want is to precipitate any self judgment around here! You are perfect and whole – without adding anything or taking anything away. Just sayin’.
Hope to see you soon in a sweaty room one day!
With love, Jess
(1) Here is a list of my teacher, Baba Hari Das’, many wonderful books. My favourites are Silence Speaks and Yoga Primer.
(2) “Interoception and stress” by A. Schulz and C. Vögele (2015).
(3) “Mindfulness, interoception, and the body: A contemporary perspective” by J. Gibson (2019).
Jess Robertson is Modo Yoga’s Co Founder, Senior Advisor, and Community Documentarian. She is also a writer, musician, yoga teacher and Co Founder of the New Leaf Foundation. She lives in Montreal, Canada with her 2 kids.