The many pieces of our yoga practice – and how they slowly come together

If you came to class week, you’ll have heard me talk about this at the start of class so I thought it might be useful to read about it too.

When you first start yoga, there can be a lot to think about. Where should my feet go? What am I doing with my hands? Am I breathing properly? And then the teacher starts talking about engaging your core, softening your shoulders, finding your gaze point, noticing your sensations and remembering to breathe… before you know it, you’re wondering how on earth you’re supposed to remember all of it!

But here’s the thing: you’re not supposed to.

There are so many different elements we can bring into our yoga practice, and I think one of the most useful things we can do (and what I often do in class) is focus on just one of them at a time. Over time, the pieces begin to come together. Things that once required lots of concentration start to happen without you consciously thinking about them. And slowly, almost without noticing, you begin to develop a practice that feels less like following instructions and more like something that belongs more to you.

Strength

Strength is one of the things I talk about a lot in my classes. Not because yoga needs to become a workout, but because strength gives us options. It helps us support ourselves, stabilise our joints and move with greater confidence.

When you’re new to yoga, holding a plank or balancing in Warrior III might require every ounce of concentration you have. Eventually, your body gets stronger and those things become less demanding. You’re no longer thinking “engage my legs, engage my core, don’t fall over” quite so loudly. The strength starts to become part of the background of your practice and that’s when you have space to invite something else in…

Softness

Because yoga isn’t all about strength – there’s also a wonderful softness to it too. Learning when to engage and when to let go is a skill in itself. We can be strong without being tense, we can create stability without gripping everything so tightly, we can find effort where we need it while allowing the rest of the body to soften.

Sometimes softness is physical — relaxing the jaw, un-clenching the hands or allowing the shoulders to move away from the ears. Sometimes it’s mental — letting go of the need to get the posture exactly right or comparing ourselves with the person next to us. Strength and softness aren’t opposites – a well-rounded practice needs both.

The breath

Then there’s the breath. When we first start practising, remembering to breathe can feel like another thing on the to-do list. Am I breathing? Was that an inhale or an exhale? Which bit am I supposed to do on the inhale again?

But gradually the breath begins to weave itself into the movement. You inhale and your body moves one way, you exhale and it moves another. Eventually, you don’t need to think about it quite so much, and then somewhere along the way the breath starts to lead the movement rather than simply accompanying it.

Closing the eyes

This was probably the biggest gear-shift for me in my yoga journey in helping me really start to internalise my practice. We experimented with it in class a couple of weeks ago which you can read about here. Without our eyes, we lose one of our main sources of information – we can’t check whether our posture looks like everyone else’s or watch what the person in front of us is doing. Instead, we have to rely more on what we can feel.

And that’s where yoga becomes much more personal. The practice stops being about what a posture looks like and becomes much more about what it feels like in your body.

Noticing sensations

This is something I think we can spend a lifetime exploring as it is constantly changing as our bodies change. What does this posture actually feel like? Where do I feel it? Is it stretching, effort, pressure, warmth, resistance? Is it a sensation I want to explore or one my body is telling me to move away from?

The more we practise noticing, the better we can become at distinguishing between all those different sensations, and we really get to know our bodies. And importantly, noticing doesn’t always mean changing something – sometimes the practice is simply to become curious.

The flow itself

And then there’s what I’ve been focusing on in my Slow Flow classes this week: sometimes, just flow and enjoy the movement. Indeed you might remember to think about strength, breath, alignment, sensations etc but there are also moments when we can let all of that fade into the background and simply move.

Feel the transition from one posture into another and allow yourself to become absorbed in the experience of moving. And if all those other individual ingredients you’ve been practising temporarily get put to one side for a class, who cares! They’ll still be there for you to practice another day 😃

And slowly, the pieces start to come together

You might spend a few weeks focusing on strength, then perhaps you start paying more attention to your breath and experiment with closing your eyes. You might become more interested in sensation, maybe you work on your balance or you start noticing where you’re holding unnecessary tension.

And perhaps one day — six months from now, a year, two years, or even longer — you realise that all those separate things have quietly started happening together. You haven’t deliberately put them together, they’ve simply become part of your practice.

There is no finished version of your yoga practice

One of the great things about yoga (although this might also be a challenging aspect for some!) is that there is no point at which you have perfected it.We’re not working towards some final version of ourselves where we can tick a box and say, “Right, that’s yoga mastered.”

Our practice keeps evolving because we keep evolving. Our bodies change over time, our strength changes, our flexibility changes. our energy changes, our lives change and what we need from our practice changes too.

There may be postures that were once a big part of your practice that gradually disappear because they no longer feel useful (I no longer have any desire whatsoever to do a headstand whereas I used to do them in every practice). Perhaps your body doesn’t enjoy them anymore or your priorities have changed or you simply no longer feel drawn to them.

And then other postures find their way in. Maybe you become stronger and discover something you couldn’t previously do or find a posture that gives you something your body needs. Maybe you suddenly fall in love with a posture you used to avoid (Humble Warrior for me!)

Our portfolio of postures will continually evolve.

Making it your own

So maybe the next time you come to class, you choose your own focus, regardless of what the theme of the class is: Strength, softness, breath, balance, stillness, sensation, curiosity, letting go… or whatever else you fancy trying!

Explore what resonates and what doesn’t, learn from it, adapt it and revisit it in a few weeks. And somewhere along the way, without necessarily noticing it happening, the practice stops being something we’re trying to get right and becomes something we’ve made our own.

See you in the cabin!

Michelle x