Why Practicing Yoga Is Essential For A Joyful Life

Yoga is a practice of awareness. When we get on our mat, the first step in our practice is to become aware of our physical body. Our teacher invites us to observe our breath, notice the thoughts racing through our head, feel where our body is touching the floor.

Then, we move into a greater sense of awareness with intentional action. We deepen our breath to create the yogic breathing, called Ujjayi. We focus our gaze, or drishti, to one spot ahead of us or on our body. We move specific parts of our body into defined places creating yoga poses, or asanas.

As we continue to practice, our mind wanders, as that’s a natural part of being a human being, but our teacher asks us to come back to our mat, back to the sensations of our physical body. He asks us to notice the sweat between our shoulder blades or the heat building in our thighs as we hold the pose. When our muscles quiver and we want to quit, our teacher encourages us to stay with the challenge one breath at a time. We move into a hip stretch that reminds us just how tight our hips are and our teacher suggests we stay with the uncomfortable-ness, instead of distracting ourselves or running away. We get tired, scared, excited, or annoyed about a pose and our teacher asks us to solely observe these feelings, instead of labeling them right or wrong, and to keep practicing, breath by breath, pose by pose.

When these things happen on our mats, there is no judgment, just awareness. When we begin to create stories about the person practicing next to us or our brain wanders to what we should have for dinner tonight, there is no judgment, just an awareness around this. We begin to notice when we are not fully present. We begin to shift into awareness. And the more we do this on our mat, the more we do this in our daily life.

With awareness, there can be change. With awareness we can understand how our mind is wired: the kind of stories we continually tell ourselves, the excuses we use, the actions we take to cover up uncomfortable feelings, the thoughts that hold us back from owning our strength. With awareness we begin to understand that there is a better way. And with awareness we can then choose a different action in the present moment. We can create a new intention of how we want to live our lives.

If all of this sounds like mumble jumble to you because you’ve never taken a yoga class before or haven’t found the right one, don’t worry! I’ll soon be publishing a post on how to find the best yoga class for your unique needs. (Sign up for my newsletter so you don’t miss it!)

So yes, my friends, I believe you must practice yoga in order to live a life of joy. Beyond awareness, there are thousands of other benefits of the practice – we’ll get to some of them later! But for now, get curious about yoga, start being aware of your awareness, and rock on.

Namaste.

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