WHY PRACTICE YOGA?

When you think about yoga you may start with a few preconceptions. For example that yoga has to be a spiritual practice or that it is only for young bendy people.

Fortunately this is not what yoga is about.

Yoga is essentially about you, which means there are as many ways of doing yoga as there are people doing it.

People do yoga on their own at home. They do it at home following a video or a live class online. They go to classes with a handful or hundreds of others. Sometimes a yoga class is given a name to describe roughly what the style of yoga is, e g Vinyasa flow, Yin etc. There are classes where people sit still, where they do slow stretches which they hold for a long time, or where they are essentially doing gymnastics. Some people set up a brand of yoga and sell it all over the world.

For me yoga is a practice that engages every part of what I am. It involves a physical practice to work the body in conjunction with the way I breathe. It engages my mind in applying myself to the way I breathe and move. And maybe most difficult of all it requires me to find physical and mental stillness so the chatter of my mind doesn’t drown out everything else.

It really doesn’t matter if you can do a handstand or not. I think it is good to work hard to do as much as you can, but the benefit really comes from the effort you make in all parts of your practice rather than the performance.