Getting Back into Yoga After a Break
A few years ago, I wrote a caption for my Instagram on how many times I practiced yoga. It was back when I was following my Tumblr/Pinterest lo-fi chill aesthetic, so if you’re curious, you can try to find it buried underneath an enigmatic photo of a cloud or a forest leaf. More recently, I filmed a short vlog where I riffed on the theme.
You see… this question comes up whether you are a student or a teacher. From the perspective of the teacher who is following the studio model of teaching classes in community spaces, they are rushing to and from places so that they find they don’t have as much time as they’d like to practice for themselves.
And as a student who has practiced yoga off and on, this question of “how many times should I practice yoga?” and “how do I get back into my yoga practice?”comes up.
In this blog post, I am going to share some ways for you to return to your yoga practice with ease.
Two things I’d like to acknowledge:
These tips are shared for students getting back into regular asana classes.
Not all of these tips may apply for yogic practitioners facilitating yogic practices.
Yoga Sutra 1.14 states स तु दीर्घकाल नैरन्तर्य सत्कारा असेवितो दृढभूमि
Practice becomes firmly grounded when well attended to for a long time, without break and in all earnestness - Translation from Swami Satchidananda.
I am of the opinion that you must have a daily and uninterrupted practice of yoga, if you are a yoga teacher. While making room for the economic reality that most yoga teachers in the west are also householder yogis like their students, there must be a commitment to regular practice. You must practice what you teach.
To the yogic practitioner that wants to have a sustainable yoga practice, please do not think too much of Yoga Sutra 1.14 at this point in your journey. Why? It can be restrictive to start off with this idea. And just like the yoga teacher who is now dashing off all over town with limited time to practice, you have your reasons for stopping the practice. As well as for beginning again. Whatever the case may be, please do not allow intrusive thoughts of shame or guilt to disturb your peace. If they do arise, take time to reflect.
Here are some gentle ways to reframe how to get back into your yoga practice so that you can create a sustainable habit.
1. Work with the body you have, not the body you used to have
A student observation I sometimes hear is, “I’m not flexible the way I used to be.”
Often said in a self-deprecating manner that speaks to some ego work. Sometimes, I want to have an hour-long conversation about why flexibility is not the goal. Mobility would be much more attractive and useful, if we were looking at the physical benefits of yoga. But I digress.
It’s very common to be surprised about what your body can do when you get back into your yoga practice. It can be a cause of embarrassment or frustration. But before you beat yourself for feeling that on top of everything else, know that it is very normal. Our bodies change. It’s not a realistic belief to expect our body not to change as a part of the aging process. And remember that we have different life experiences, lifestyles, as well as gifts and traumas that we inherit from our ancestors that all shape how our bodies move.
When you get back into practice, you may feel discouraged at how your body has changed. I would invite you to reflect upon how your body is worthy of your respect, care, and trust. We are not made like products off a factory line, we will have different quirks, and this is what makes yoga such a personally empowering practice. We each can find movements into, during, and out of a yoga asana that expresses our soul.
2. Discipline is not about punishment but balance
Coming from a hot yoga and vinyasa background, as well as dabbling in Ashtanga yoga, I have borne witness to how anti-fat bias, performative flexibility, and hustle culture ethos come into play when a teacher holds space and how that, in turn, shapes a student’s understanding of a yoga experience.
There are too many memes that normalize power yoga teachers laughing as they devise their next sequence to kill their students. But this is the fitness culture that asana gets co-opted by, and it’s not very trauma-informed or accessible for most folks.
As someone who is flexible, I’m not immune to feeling attacked by teachers who’d challenge me in class. Just for the sake of it. It seemed the goal was to push me to work so hard that I’d either pass out at the end of class or fall out of the pose. I understand that some people do not mind being yelled at when they are exercising but then this is the problem. Yoga wasn’t created as exercise. Yoga wasn’t created so that we could keep up with unrealistic beauty standards of the day.
For someone who is new and can’t do these poses, it can be disheartening to be left behind. And oftentimes, teachers may say that coming more and more is the solution to being like everyone else… Which isn’t how bodies work.
When you come back to your yoga practice, it can be easy to have these ideas assimilated into your brain and it can be confusing to sift them out from your own beliefs. We have a distorted idea of yoga where the practice is an experience that must hurt to be effective.
Discipline is not about pain. Er, at least, in this context. Discipline is a beautiful concept related to devotion and praxis. It is the ultimate discernment of understanding your energy, and from there, making the right decisions for balanced living. And the truth is, you can be challenged without being broken. One of my hatha teachers used to say, keep things interesting, not dramatic.
When we get back to yoga, we may make ambitious plans. We plan to go 3-4x a week.
You can commit and prioritize without making your yoga practice rigid. Say, you skip a day so the next day you go even harder. You feel completely exhausted for the rest of the day. Was this a yogic experience?
Not in my books.
Benjamin Lorr’s book, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga, was one of the first books I read that made me feel seen as a hot yoga student. In one powerful passage, he writes:
“One hundred percent is an illusion. Why do you think so many people in the Bikram world have a beautiful practice for a few years and then slip away? One hundred or even ninety percent is impossible to maintain. You will become exhausted. Mentally if not physically. Terrified of practicing the yoga you love because it is draining you not replenishing you… but even if you could practice at that intensity - it would be undesirable. you can’t make adjustments at your edge. For regular practice, seventy-five to eighty-five percent is fine - you will never tire out and in the long run you will grow much stronger.”
There will need to be a regularity to your practice for there to be continuity and sometimes, it may not be the most exciting thing to do. At the same time, we can acknowledge holding ourselves to perfectionist standards set by ableist teachers is a way to failure, disappointment, and disenchantment with the practice itself.
Come to your yoga mat. You decide your speed. Stay the whole class in child’s pose.
Too often we think commitment and discipline as sacrificial states of being, but they are truly ways for us to balance, to stay the course, to be steady in devotion.
Yes, it will not always feel good but this is the intuition piece. Through this practice, you build your awareness of your body, interoception, and you begin to understand how to moderate to keep your practice sustainable.
Discipline and balance go together.
Reflecting back on Lorr’s quote, in the hot yoga studios I’d go to practice in, there was a lack of connection. The teacher focused on pushing, and the students, therefore, believed that’s all there was to the practice. Even in your spiritual practice, in your fitness practice, there can be burn out when we buy in to the idea that more is better and productivity is of more value than rest.
I will end this section by saying punitive discipline doesn’t make you stronger. When I went nearly every other day to practice hot yoga, I wasn’t getting deeper into my yoga practice. Yes, even in my physical practice because the hot yoga studio is all about reciting a script created in the 1970s.
Which leads me to my next section…
3. Move from practice to praxis
In my IG caption, I shared that your yoga practice doesn’t have to be 60 minutes at a studio. It doesn’t have to be defined by sweat or by the body.
I practice but it doesn’t mean I am doing a power flow for 90 minutes every day. I may choose to practice hatha, or practice yoga nidra, and not do any vigorous movement. I may not do any movement and study the Yoga Sutras. I may listen to the Yoga Sutras being recited.
When people say they live their yoga, I interpret it, not as a toxic New Age statement, but that they are following the yamas and niyamas. These are the ethical codes to treat others and yourself that are listed in Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga as stated in the Yoga Sutras.
Yoga is meant to be taken off the mat.
Do not limit yourself to an idea of the practice that is on the mat. What you learn on the mat about your power, intuition, adaptability, calmness, you take off the mat so that you have the tools to calm, restore you in difficult situations.
This is what happens when practice becomes praxis, meaning that you are realizing the yogic concepts in your life.
A person who can contort themselves into a yoga pose is not more spiritual, kinder, wiser than you. All that this tells us is that they can contort themselves into a yoga pose. It tells us nothing about whether they study or live their yoga.
When you change your idea of what practice means, even taking a few minutes away from your computer and technology, sitting in silent meditation - that is yoga. Understanding that you can practice asana anywhere, even while you’re waiting for your flight to take off (yes that’s me doing down dog at the terminal!), it accrues. It matters.
And if you do have a goal of how many times you practice, set a small goal. Therefore, you can celebrate and reward yourself when you achieve that goal! This reward can be something that connects you back to your yoga practice.
If you want to practice 3-4x a week, consider if these sessions can be 10 minutes, 20 minutes as opposed to all of them being 60 minute sessions.
4. Experiment to see what works for where you are at in your journey
When I started, hot yoga was all I knew. And when I first started to encounter different styles of yoga, I became irrationally territorial. They didn’t do it like this. I don’t know what to expect.
It wasn’t because I liked the things that happened but that was all I was familiar to.
Beginning anew, you may not be sure what you like. That’s ok to say that too. So try things out.
Practice by yourself. Go with a friend. Try in-person. Online. Group or private class. Try an online video. Experiment with different times and different styles of yoga. See what resonates with you. Notice if you have mixed feelings, that could be a sign that something is of interest but you need to keep digging.
Start to record your observations so that you can begin the process of articulating, even just for yourself, what felt exciting, memorable, inspiring, challenging, scary. These are all signs for you to listen to. For beginners or students that have been in and out of their practice, they may not have the ready vocabulary to say, “Slow down your sun salutations,” or “I prefer mid-tempo music halfway through class” - all feedback I’ve received from passionate studio students ;)
It’s ok for you to prefer a certain teacher, a certain style of class. You are allowed to request your teacher to make changes so that the environment is most beneficial and supportive to our collective journey. This is what a student-centred space means to me.
Missing a class is not a sign of a setback
You may find yourself stopping. In fact, it’s quite easy to take a break and watch that break extend itself over the next few months, perhaps years.
For whatever reason. Do not beat yourself up. And hopefully, you won’t because you have reframed your relationship to discipline and to practice.
When you find yourself taking a pause, this is a time to reflect on why you chose to stop.
This practice is meant to nourish you and to restore you.
If the practice of yoga is taking away that energy, that suggests to me several things. First, it could be an indication that you are slipping back into colonized yoga. I have talked about how yoga is commodified by the fitness industry and this colonization strips yoga from its true worth, which is of the journey inwards. I’ve lost the thread. The meaning of yoga because if it was just about the physical practice, it would not have the impact it has had for millennia.
I’ve found that when I don’t want to practice on the mat, it’s because I have overexerted the physical limb of yoga. When I find myself unable to relax into a 30 minute practice and I know that I have had some great asana practices during the week, I check in with myself to see if I can practice breathework, meditation or even a restorative yoga practice instead. To call myself back within.
Secondly, it could also be that your life is changing. This isn’t a bad thing. Perhaps a weekly practice or mini practices will be more conducive. Again, stretch your idea of your yoga practice.
Try to reflect without interrogating yourself. If you find yourself blaming yourself, pull back to determine what beliefs about the world that you have that are impacting your thoughts about your yoga practice. If you were busy at work, it is not reasonable to blame yourself for matters out of your control. What is in your control is how you react. Rather than put yourself down or blame others, see how you can adjust your thoughts towards a solution. Perhaps a shorter practice during a work break. Perhaps practicing before or after work. Perhaps simply giving yourself the honesty that right now things are heavy. I personally find that those are the times I go to my practice the most but everyone is so different. We are all capable in our own loving ways.
If yoga is a practice that works for your health and well-being, if yoga is a spiritual practice for you, if yoga has a deep meaning for you - if you actually get something out of this practice that even you can’t describe but you feel it in your bones…
Ultimately, I wish for you to reflect upon what sustainability looks like for you.
If we have the right environment, and we have the will, we can focus on our growth and evolution.
Written By: Irene Lo