Need some inspiration to get on your yoga mat?

If you’re finding it tough to motivate yourself to get up early and do your practice, you’re not alone.  I have certainly been challenged, especially in the early days, to get on my mat and practice.  Part of this process for me has been learning to embrace a more curious attitude to what is really going on for me.  Bringing more awareness into why I’m wanting to avoid my practice has really helped me to dissolve resistance both on and off the mat.  I’ll write more on this in my future posts but I wanted to share one way I get inspired from the inside to get on my mat.   

And it’s super simple…

Read (and re-read) Donna Farhi’s, ‘Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living’ book.   

This book is absolutely divine and I’m so in love with the way Donna Farhi writes.   I have re-read this book so many times – it is well worn and has pencil (and pen…) underlines everywhere in the text (yes, I am one of those people who write in their books – but I don’t dog-ear).  Reading this book was like having a steady friend close to me who didn’t want to change me, she just wanted to keep me company and share some of her wisdom. 

Donna writes with grace, humility and humour.  Bringing Yoga to Life, was one of the first books I ever read about yoga and it blew my mind and heart apart.  This book was like the teacher I didn’t have at the time and it motivated me from the inside to gently and quietly, wake up, get up and start moving and breathing on my mat.

If you haven’t read this book – you must.

Donna breaks the book into three magical parts, 1) Coming Home, 2) On the Means and 3) Roadblocks and Distractions.

Reading the first part, Coming Home, was exactly that for me. It was like a massive exhale when I had been holding my breath for such a long time.   It was reassuring to read about this thing called yoga, this practice of moving about on my mat, this thing that I felt such an incredible and almost unreasonable pull towards as my answer to my own healing.  Finding Ashtanga yoga was like coming home to myself and I found myself glued to the pages where Donna wrote of her own early days of practice where she describes the experience as feeling a sense of calm ordinarily unavailable to her and a deep inner goodness within her body which she found undeniably reassuring.  I too was looking for that feeling of okay-ness within myself so this alone was (and still is) super motivating for me.. 

‘ While I was under the spell of my yoga practice, I felt neither fear nor pain. Without knowing it consciously, I started to make daily contact with this inner entity that spoke a wordless language I could understand. I began to feel supported by this inner friend, whose company could be conjured miraculously through making my breath calm and regular and through slowly stretching and holding myself still’.

Part two, in this book also first exposed me to the idea that freedom could be achieved through discipline. I had always rebelled against the concept of discipline. I associated it with boarding school, polishing shoes, being made to do things against my will and so on. But, Donna writes that it is through a deep commitment and discipline that we are able to connect to more freedom than we ever thought possible. Donna notes that when we make commitment to a new game plan of disciplined practice we can be assured the executive ego will balk and take some steps back.  One of the parts I have underlined in the book is this beautiful quote below where Donna touches on some of the ways our mind cleverly creates all the reasons why not to practice yoga.

‘It is too cold, too hot, too late, too early, too noisy or heaven forbid too quiet. Or we are too stiff, too hungry, too tired, too nervous, too busy, too bored, too distracted, or too upset to practice. When we hear our executive ego whispering these endless excuses and evasions, we can make note of the excuse and then do our practice anyway. This is how we begin to rein in the mind. As we learn to rein in the mind and rein in our actions, we gain control over our lives once again’.

In part three, Donna discusses the many ‘Roadblocks and Distractions’ that keep us off our mat. Donna tackles some challenging and confronting topics in this section with regards to how we come up against ourselves with such honestly, kindness and compassionate - it’s wonderfully contagious.

Donna writes about the incredible deep internal shift that can happen through this practice of moving and breathing on our mats. 

‘When we open up, we not only start to see all the wonderful things about ourselves and the world (that were also there all along), we may start to see the Technicolor detail on all our dirty little lies and untruths…we discover that having a spiritual practice is not, ‘as easy and enjoyable as sipping a cool beer on a hot day’, but more like sitting in a closet with a lunatic who is shouting through a megaphone’. 

Through these moments, where we become more sensitive to all that is around us, when we start to see what is really in front of us and within us, we can be supported by our practice.  There is so much more to this book then I have been able to touch on but I wanted to give you a little taster and encourage you to have a read and find your motivation from the inside!

I can’t wait to support you in your practice soon.

Reach out if you have any questions or comments.

Love B