Why practice yoga? There is a multitude of different answers to this question. As with any longterm relationship, over time, our practice evolves; it ebbs and flows. Sometimes our practice feels fresh and vital; other times it may feel as if we’ve hit a plateau. At times we may drop the practice for a while, and at others we may look forward to stepping onto the mat or sitting on our meditation cushion. It can be helpful to remember why we decided to prioritize yoga practice in the first place. Reflecting on our initial motivation to practice can help us maintain not only consistency, but also inspiration.

3 Tips for Developing Motivation to Practice

When I look at my motivation to practice, I’ve found that it’s really simple. I practice because after 37 years of meditation and 43 years of yoga, I recognize the immeasurable value they bring to my life. I don’t practice because some awful harm would befall me if I don’t. It’s not simply something I’ve added to my daily to-do list. It’s not a should. I trust the practice. I have faith in the practice. And it’s not blind faith, but a faith that’s been verified through decades of experience.

How do we develop motivation to practice? Whether our core practice is yoga or meditation, we often need to be reminded why we’re doing it. Here are some tips for staying on the path:

• Think of your practice as part of your morning ritual, a way to maintain the health of your body/mind. We don’t think twice about eating a decent breakfast, brushing our teeth, showering, etc. Yoga and meditation practices are they ways we bring equilibrium to our bodies and minds.
• When you set aside the time to practice, give it your full attention. You’ve got plenty of time to go over your to-do list, or to reflect on that difficult conversation you had with someone yesterday. You’ve got time to formulate your reply to that person—later. Use your practice time to invest your full awareness into what you feel in your body and mind, here and now. Your practice time is precious. It deserves your attention and care.
• Reflect on the value of your practice in your daily life. According to the yoga sutras, the benefit of asana practice is the cultivation of equanimity in the face of the ups and downs of our lives. This can apply to minute daily annoyances, or it can apply to major challenges and losses. The benefits can be subtle or obvious. What benefits have you experienced? Reflecting on this can remind you why you practice and can help you stay motivated.

Trust Your Yoga and Meditation Practices

Reflecting on the value of practice in your life can be tricky. While there are benefits you can feel right away when you practice yoga and meditation, some of the deeper benefits are subtle. This is where reflecting on the millennia-long history of these practices can be helpful. Yoga and meditation have survived for thousands of years. They’ve survived because millions of people have reaped their benefits. So even if you’re just starting out, and the benefits you experience are on the subtler side, trust the process. Approach your practice with an open, curious mind. Reflect on why you love your practice. Then grab your meditation cushion or your yoga mat, open your mind and see where your practice takes you today.

Decades ago the film, Annie Hall, embellished a famous quote about the art of teaching. In the film the quote went like this: “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.” (The film’s embellishment is the second sentence.) The quote’s intention was to diss teachers, especially gym teachers I guess. For yoga teachers, it seems to be the opposite. The bendiest among us often choose to teach. We can perform all the fancy poses, after all. But is that always a good thing?

My dad was a gymnast, and I inherited his hypermobile body. So when I started practicing yoga with June Bains, an Indra Devi-trained teacher, I took to it right away. All the poses we practiced depended on flexibility, and in short order, I found myself able to perform everything the teacher offered—to extremes.

When June announced that she would be offering a teacher training, I immediately thought, this is for me. I loved how the practice made me feel. I could do the poses “better” than anyone in the room, I thought. This would be the perfect calling for me.

A few months later, before the training started, I moved to Salt Lake City. June’s training was out of the question. The teachers I found in Salt Lake City—there were only a handful at a time—taught Iyengar yoga. It was a whole new world.

All Standing Poses, All the Time

In every single class we did standing poses. I hated them. My loose-knit body was very unstable, and the loosey-goosey practice I’d been doing probably didn’t help. My body trembled under the barrage of alignment instructions, and from my overabundance of flexibility and lack of strength.

I can’t begin to recount the number of times I heard, “Lift your kneecaps!,” an instruction I was incapable of fulfilling. I’d been unconsciously hyperextending my knees for years and my quads were completely asleep. My quads slid down toward my knees 24/7. Engaging them seemed impossible. In every workshop, teachers called out my hyperextended knees as an example of what not to do.

I’m honestly not sure why I continued. The practice was such a challenge to my ego. But I really liked my teachers, Cita and David Riley, a physical therapist and doctor. Their knowledge was so vast, and I was learning a ton from them.

They brought many senior Iyengar yoga teachers to town: Ramanand Patel, Mary Dunn, Felicity Green, Judith Hanson Lasater, Pujari Keays. These workshops rarely attracted more than 30 people—a number that was considered to be huge at the time. In retrospect, it was an amazing time to be practicing.

Back to Square One

Mary Dunn taught me how to wake up my quads. She took me to the wall. She showed me that I needed to practice with the ball of my foot of my front leg a few inches up the wall and my heel on the floor, at about a 45-degree angle. When I pressed the ball of my foot into the wall, my quads would actually move upward a fraction of an inch. She suggested I practice standing poses this way for at least six months to build strength and intelligence in my quads. It took a year of practicing this way before my quads would engage with my foot flat on the floor.

During that year, my standing poses slowly became more stable. Other things started to fall into place in my standing practice. I found that when I stopped collapsing into my knee joints, my arches began to lift too. I was born with flat feet, and I was amazed to see tiny arches forming. My calves also engaged, pushing my shins forward, which stabilized my knees.

As my legs began supporting me, my breath eased. I could expand in the standing poses instead of fighting just to hold myself up. I no longer found myself grumbling silently as Cita and David talked us through endless standing sequences. When Pujari Keays came to town with his special brand of intensity, I actually began to love standing poses and began to note a newfound stability in the rest of my life too.

The Power of Woodshedding for Yoga Teachers

When I first started teaching, I sequenced classes the way Cita and David had because it was what I knew. I taught lots of standing poses. And I found without fail that the instructions I gave to help students find stability were more thorough and helpful than any I gave for the poses that had been easy for me. Despite my troubled past with standing poses, I came to teaching with a far better understanding of them than the poses I’d found effortless.

Decades of observing my students’ struggles with the poses I found easy have taught me what to look for and how to teach these poses too. But my deepest, most thorough instruction is in standing poses. Having started at square one, I understand my students’ struggles and how to help them through those struggles.

How Challenges Help Yoga Teachers

So maybe the “Those who can’t do, teach” quote isn’t a diss after all. Maybe it’s those who had to learn the rudiments that make the best teachers. If yoga was about performing fancy poses and posting our prowess on Instagram and Facebook, perhaps the quote would have some merit. But it’s not.

The vast majority of yoga practitioners will never perform extreme backbends or slide their ankles behind their heads. Most people are just not built that way. Teachers who are “born on third base and think they hit a triple,” as the saying goes, have a lot of work to do to understand where most of their students are coming from.

Asana practice is about finding steadiness and ease in the pose you are practicing at this moment. A teacher who understands in her gut, from her own experience, that the journey is the practice will likely be able to teach the majority of students with empathy and understanding.

Decades ago the film, Annie Hall, embellished a famous quote about the art of teaching. In the film the quote went like this: “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.” (The film’s embellishment is the second sentence.) The quote’s intention was to diss teachers, especially gym teachers I guess. For yoga teachers, it seems to be the opposite. The bendiest among us often choose to teach. We can perform all the fancy poses, after all. But is that always a good thing?

My dad was a gymnast, and I inherited his hypermobile body. So when I started practicing yoga with June Bains, an Indra Devi-trained teacher, I took to it right away. All the poses we practiced depended on flexibility, and in short order, I found myself able to perform everything the teacher offered—to extremes.

When June announced that she would be offering a teacher training, I immediately thought, this is for me. I loved how the practice made me feel. I could do the poses “better” than anyone in the room, I thought. This would be the perfect calling for me.

A few months later, before the training started, I moved to Salt Lake City. June’s training was out of the question. The teachers I found in Salt Lake City—there were only a handful at a time—taught Iyengar yoga. It was a whole new world.

All Standing Poses, All the Time

In every single class we did standing poses. I hated them. My loose-knit body was very unstable, and the loosey-goosey practice I’d been doing probably didn’t help. My body trembled under the barrage of alignment instructions, and from my overabundance of flexibility and lack of strength.

I can’t begin to recount the number of times I heard, “Lift your kneecaps!,” an instruction I was incapable of fulfilling. I’d been unconsciously hyperextending my knees for years and my quads were completely asleep. My quads slid down toward my knees 24/7. Engaging them seemed impossible. In every workshop, teachers called out my hyperextended knees as an example of what not to do.

I’m honestly not sure why I continued. The practice was such a challenge to my ego. But I really liked my teachers, Cita and David Riley, a physical therapist and doctor. Their knowledge was so vast, and I was learning a ton from them.

They brought many senior Iyengar yoga teachers to town: Ramanand Patel, Mary Dunn, Felicity Green, Judith Hanson Lasater, Pujari Keays. These workshops rarely attracted more than 30 people—a number that was considered to be huge at the time. In retrospect, it was an amazing time to be practicing.

Back to Square One

Mary Dunn taught me how to wake up my quads. She took me to the wall. She showed me that I needed to practice with the ball of my foot of my front leg a few inches up the wall and my heel on the floor, at about a 45-degree angle. When I pressed the ball of my foot into the wall, my quads would actually move upward a fraction of an inch. She suggested I practice standing poses this way for at least six months to build strength and intelligence in my quads. It took a year of practicing this way before my quads would engage with my foot flat on the floor.

During that year, my standing poses slowly became more stable. Other things started to fall into place in my standing practice. I found that when I stopped collapsing into my knee joints, my arches began to lift too. I was born with flat feet, and I was amazed to see tiny arches forming. My calves also engaged, pushing my shins forward, which stabilized my knees.

As my legs began supporting me, my breath eased. I could expand in the standing poses instead of fighting just to hold myself up. I no longer found myself grumbling silently as Cita and David talked us through endless standing sequences. When Pujari Keays came to town with his special brand of intensity, I actually began to love standing poses and began to note a newfound stability in the rest of my life too.

The Power of Woodshedding for Yoga Teachers

When I first started teaching, I sequenced classes the way Cita and David had because it was what I knew. I taught lots of standing poses. And I found without fail that the instructions I gave to help students find stability were more thorough and helpful than any I gave for the poses that had been easy for me. Despite my troubled past with standing poses, I came to teaching with a far better understanding of them than the poses I’d found effortless.

Decades of observing my students’ struggles with the poses I found easy have taught me what to look for and how to teach these poses too. But my deepest, most thorough instruction is in standing poses. Having started at square one, I understand my students’ struggles and how to help them through those struggles.

How Challenges Help Yoga Teachers

So maybe the “Those who can’t do, teach” quote isn’t a diss after all. Maybe it’s those who had to learn the rudiments that make the best teachers. If yoga was about performing fancy poses and posting our prowess on Instagram and Facebook, perhaps the quote would have some merit. But it’s not.

The vast majority of yoga practitioners will never perform extreme backbends or slide their ankles behind their heads. Most people are just not built that way. Teachers who are “born on third base and think they hit a triple,” as the saying goes, have a lot of work to do to understand where most of their students are coming from.

Asana practice is about finding steadiness and ease in the pose you are practicing at this moment. A teacher who understands in her gut, from her own experience, that the journey is the practice will likely be able to teach the majority of students with empathy and understanding.

If you practice yoga, you’ve probably heard the entreaty, “Listen to your body.” It’s good, sound advice. When you embark on any physical practice, it’s important to know and respect your body’s limits. Tuning in and listening to your body and what it’s trying to communicate to you each time you practice is essential not only to your body’s health, but to the growth of your practice. How else can you really know the effects of an asana?

As teachers, we can’t truly know what another person is feeling in his/her body. So encouraging students to develop their own body awareness is crucial. Although listening to your body, and encouraging your students to do so, is very important, sometimes it is not enough to keep your body safe.

3 Reasons Why Listening to Your Body Might Not Be Enough

Body Awareness Is Not a Given

Some of us come to practice with fairly refined body awareness, while others come to practice barely able to understand what they’re feeling even when it’s not at all subtle. This disparity might be the result of some people having already engaged in lots of physical activity while others have not. A person who has suffered physical or emotional trauma could be either hyper-aware of physical sensation, or might have developed a mechanism to shut down extreme sensation. Whatever the reason, it’s safe to assume that every student who comes to your yoga classes is not experiencing the same level of body awareness. So not every student will be able to trust his/her listening skills, at least at first. This is where an experienced teacher who knows how to assess alignment integrity is so important. And alignment integrity doesn’t look the same for every person—humans are not cookie cutters.

Ligament Pain May Not Show Up in the Moment

Even if your body awareness is very refined, there are times when you might be hurting yourself inadvertently. A pose may feel fine in the moment, but in some cases, the pain response could be delayed. For example, you may not feel overstretched ligaments until the next day. Once ligaments are overstretched, they don’t return to their original length. Over time, consistently over stretching ligaments can destabilize your joints. Refraining from pushing to your absolute edge is smart, healthy practice, for your ligaments as well as your cartilage (up next!).

Joint Damage is Often Hidden—Until it Isn’t

A stickier, more long-term issue is the possibility of joint damage, especially in the hip joints. Our acetabula (the sockets of the hip joints) are lined with a cartilaginous surface called the “labrum.” In addition, cartilage covers the heads of our femur bones. The cartilage on both surfaces allows the ball and socket to articulate smoothly and freely. Cartilage has no enervation, so we can’t feel the ball and socket articulating with each other. When we make a habit of pushing or collapsing into our joints—this especially applies to the bendier folks—the cartilage can tear or wear down over time. We don’t feel cartilage damage until the cartilage is gone, and then it’s often too late. Fortunately, hip replacement surgery has improved by leaps and bounds. But a better idea would be to avoid over stretching our joints in the first place.

How Can Yoga Teachers Help?

As teachers, we should encourage students to listen to their bodies, and help them understand that pain and discomfort are signals to back off, not to keep going. But we also need to train ourselves to know what collapsing into a joint looks like. Some of the poses that people commonly collapse or push into their hip joints include extreme hip openers—think Kapotasana (Pigeon), Hanumanasana (splits), Anjaneyasana (lunges) and Yoga Nidrasana (ankle behind the head). (Do you really need to put your ankle behind your head to enjoy a grace-filled life?)

Backbends can be a problem as well because there’s a tendency to push into your hip joints to get that extra few millimeters of height. And that ubiquitous instruction about keeping your pelvis squared in standing poses? Please don’t do it. Let the hip of your back leg rotate inward so that you maintain continuity between the legs and pelvis. This goes for twists as well.

Listening to your body is essential. You can avoid a lot of present and future suffering by simply paying attention. But also, do remember that just because everything feels fine in the moment, it may not be in the long run. Know what normal range of motion is for your joints. And remember: Nowhere in yoga’s texts does it say that pushing past your limits is good practice. Remember shtira (stability) and sukkha (ease) from Sutra 2.46? (Translated: The physical body should be steady and comfortable.) If you’re going to put energy into anything in your practice, aim for a balance between these two qualities. And find yourself an experienced teacher who knows what that means.

This post explains one of the 4 Foundations of Mindfulness. Normally, I might have chosen to write this after the first foundation (mindfulness of the body). But mindfulness of change has been at the forefront of my mind recently, so I’m offering this now, while it’s most alive for me.

Labor Day marked the first dusting of snow in the Wasatch Mountains here in Utah. I’ve lived in Salt Lake City since the early ’80s. I don’t remember a time when the mountains saw snow anywhere near this early. Just a week before, I was hiking in these same mountains enjoying the profusion of wildflowers. In a few weeks, the aspens will begin to turn golden. Transition is not only a part of life; it is the nature of life itself. Practicing mindfulness of change can help us learn how to navigate this truth.

Many years ago, a longtime student asked Suzuki Roshi (author of the seminal book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind) to sum up Zen practice in a single sentence. His answer was, “Everything changes.” But change does not happen simply in the transitions from season to season.

We can easily see the truth of change if we reflect on our lives. I recently saw the Barbie film. It was a fun romp to watch, but it also reminded me of how important my Barbies (and my trolls) were in my early life. Where are they now? I barely batted an eye when my mother told me she’d given them away. In college, an active social life (read: partying) was super important to me. Sometimes I wonder who that person was who inhabited this body during that time. It’s not that I regret those years; it’s just that it’s so far from where my priorities lie these days.

Mindfulness of Change at the Micro Level

We can all reflect on the many phases in our lives to help us understand the truth of change at a macro level. But practicing mindfulness of change can give us an intimate view of the process of change that is happening literally all the time. When we look closely, we can see that everything is changing constantly. There is not a single moment that passes that is the same as the previous one, or the next one.

Tuning into the flow of change can help us understand one of the late Vietnamese Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh’s, most profound teachings: “Birth and death are only notions. They are not real. The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going; there is no same; there is no different; there is no permanent self; there is no annihilation. We only think there is.”

I won’t pretend to be able to explain this teaching. It’s something I’ve been trying to understand for many years—the continuity of life within the flow of change. But understanding this concept, I believe, is key to living our lives with equanimity amidst the inevitable changes we will go through in our lives. Practicing mindfulness of change can help us navigate transitions—pleasant and unpleasant—we all experience.

How to Practice

1. Sit in a comfortable position. You can sit on a Meditation Cushion, or if sitting on the floor is not comfortable, feel free to sit in a chair.
2. Settle back in your body. Close your eyes gently and allow them to relax back into their sockets.
3. Now open your sense of hearing. Be aware of the sounds arising in your environment, and perhaps, within your body. Relax back and allow sound to come to you. There’s no need to reach out for it; it’s coming to you anyway. Be aware of how the sounds arise, change and pass away. Continue this practice for a few minutes.
4. Now become aware of bodily sensations—sensations of contact with what you’re sitting on, sensations of temperature, sensations of pulsing or vibration, sensations of breathing. Feel your body as a whole, tuning into the flow of sensations—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. When thoughts arise, are there physical sensations that accompany them?
5. Become aware of how these sensations are changing moment to moment. So rather than simply labeling the sensations you’re feeling, relax into the flow of change from one moment to the next.
6. Thoughts will come. That’s okay. When you notice that you’re lost in a thought, redirect your awareness back to the flow of sensation. What do you feel when you let go of the thought?

Let Go of the Past, the Future and the Present

Several years ago while I was on retreat, author/mindfulness teacher Joseph Goldstein offered a practice I found to be a profound doorway to the awareness of mindfulness of change. In mindfulness practice, we’re often reminded that there really is only this moment. Past is past; future has not yet happened. Neither exist in reality. Past and future exist only as thoughts in this moment.

So we’re invited to let go of the past and the future. But Joseph took it a bit further and suggested that we explore letting go of the present as well. So while you’re practicing meditation, set an intention to let go of each moment as it arises.

Feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to hear about your experience.

When I first began practicing mindfulness in earnest in the 1980s, relatively few people had heard of it. Over the past 10 years or so though, awareness of mindfulness has grown. As of today, Googling “mindfulness” yields a staggering 1,020,000,000 results. These days, people practice mindfulness in places as disparate as yoga studios, meditation centers and corporate retreats. While the practice appears to be simple, it’s not easy. As anyone who’s ever attempted to practice knows, our minds are like a wild monkey, constantly leaping from one thought or sensation to the next. That’s why this ancient technology for awakening spells out 4 foundations of mindfulness, to help us get a handle on our unwieldy minds.

What Is Mindfulness?

If you ask pretty much anyone what mindfulness is, most would say that it’s “being in the moment.” This is true. We must be in the moment to be mindful. But there’s more to it than simply being in the moment. Mindfulness also includes knowing what’s actually happening in the moment. We can be in the moment but not really be aware of what we’re experiencing.

For example, back in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, I was a fan of the Grateful Dead. I went to Dead shows whenever I could. It was sooooo much fun. When I was dancing to the Dead, I was totally absorbed in the moment, but I can’t say I was all that aware of what I was experiencing. So while I was in the moment, I wasn’t actually being mindful.

Mindfulness requires knowing what is happening in our experience. Knowing is key to developing wisdom. Mindfulness also requires that we are aware of our responses to what is happening. Are we clinging to pleasant sensations, hoping they won’t go away? Are we responding with aversion to unpleasant experiences? Awareness of our responses to present experience allows us to make choices about how we deal with the vicissitudes of our lives. This ultimately leads to the development of equanimity.

What Are the 4 Foundations of Mindfulness?

Whenever I teach a mindfulness class, one or more students invariably lament the fact that their minds seem even more jumbled and confused when they sit down to meditate. The key word here is “seem.” Our minds are no more out of control when we practice meditation than they are in the rest of our lives. What’s different is that we’re actually observing the normal state of our minds for the first time. That can be both daunting and humbling.

This is where the technology of the 4 foundations of mindfulness can be so helpful. The 4 foundations give us a framework with which to understand what is happening in each moment. The foundations help us connect with the quality of knowing. In this post, I’ll introduce the foundations. In subsequent posts I’ll delve into each foundation, and give you some ideas for how to practice with them.

The 4 Foundations of Mindfulness

1. Mindfulness of the Body: This is really the foundation of the other three foundations. That’s because everything we can be aware of arises as a sensation in the body. This practice includes awareness of whatever is coming in through our senses.
2. MIndfulness of Feeling Tone: In mindfulness practice, feeling tone is not the same as feelings or emotions. Mindfulness of feeling tone is awareness of whether what we are experiencing is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. This provides a crucial link to understanding our responses to experience.
3. Mindfulness of Mental States and Emotions: Our mental states and emotions color our perception of experience. So it is important to understand when they are present. Knowing what filters may be distorting our perception helps us see more clearly into our experience.
4. Mindfulness of Dhammas: This foundation is quite vast. Joseph Goldstein’s book, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, spends a whole lot of chapters explaining the many different aspects of this foundation. It includes mindfulness of the flow of experiences, as well as unpacking universal truths of our life experience.

A Work in Progress

After 35 years of practice, I’ve come to understand mindfulness as a work in progress. It’s a practice, not a performance. I’ve found it to be helpful to approach practice with a beginner’s mind. So as I describe the 4 foundations of mindfulness in this and future posts, I’ll remind myself, and you, the reader, that what I write reflects only my present understanding, which is likely incomplete. Still, I offer this exploration into the 4 foundations of mindfulness as a jumping-off point, a way to explore mindfulness and perhaps, to give you some tools to make sense of the practice. Happy exploring!

In the age of social media, yoga pose photos can inspire and/or intimidate. Instagram is chock full of picture-perfect fancy yoga poses. Looking at yoga pose photos is one way to set intentions in your practice. It can be helpful to observe how others practice. But photos have one major limitation: they’re static depictions of living, breathing forms. But yoga is not a static practice. Asana is a verb.

What Does It Mean to Pose?

Part of the reason we often misinterpret asana as a static form could be a matter of semantics. Most of us use the word “pose” to describe asana. The Oxford Dictionary’s first definition of the noun form of “pose” is this: “a particular way of standing or sitting, usually adopted for effect or in order to be photographed, painted, or drawn.” This sounds an awful lot like what we do when we pose for a prospective audience on social media.

The verb definitions are equally problematic. According to Merriam Webster, the first two are: “1. : to assume a posture or attitude usually for artistic purposes. 2. : to affect an attitude or character usually to deceive or impress. posed as a doctor to gain access to the ward.” Yikes!

This is why I’ve tried—with limited success—to change my habit of using the word “pose.” Old habits die hard, but I do feel that the word “asana” is finding its way into my yoga instruction more often than it used to. The reason I feel this is important is that most people don’t come to yoga practice with a preconceived idea of what asana means. The word is more malleable, making it easier for students to interpret it in more flexible ways. Asana is a living, breathing process. So it’s important not to confine it to a static definition.

If Asana Is a Verb, How Do You Approach Practice?

Here are some ways to explore the process of asana:

1. The first step in recognizing asana’s evolving nature is to let go of our concepts of what each pose “should” look or feel like. That means developing our “beginner’s mind.”
2. Once you open to allowing your asana to unfold naturally, instead of trying to make it fit a particular preconceived mold, you can begin exploring.
3. Each asana begins with our initial intention to practice it. So, set an intention to be present with the entire process, beginning with whatever sensations arise when you decide to practice a particular asana. Are you anticipating what you might feel, based on past experience? Is there trepidation or anxiety around the pose? If it’s a pose you enjoy, are you in a hurry to move into it?
4. Then be present with the sensations that accompany setting up your body in order to make the shape of the asana. Do you start the process from a particular standing, sitting or lying down position? What sensations are present as you prepare?
5. Be present with the process of moving into the asana. Move slowly, so that you can feel the changing sensations as your body shifts toward the asana.
6. Once your body has found the shape of the asana, breathe and relax. Stay connected to the unfolding process. Where do you feel stretching or stabilizing sensations? How are those sensations moving and changing?
7. Stay inside your body, letting the breath guide you. Each part of the breath—inhalation and exhalation—will suggest to your body to either retract from or deepen into your asana. Relax into these suggestions, allowing your body to oscillate, gently and subtly, into and out of the pose. Be present with the process. This is probably the easiest way to understand how asana is a verb.
8. What sensations accompany the impulse to come out of an asana? Stay connected to the process of moving out of your asana. Then pause for a moment in a neutral position to feel the effects.

A Few More Suggestions

• It can be helpful to practice a particular pose more than once. If you stay present as you practice, as in the above instructions, you may feel completely different sensations the second time around. That can help unstick us from our preconceived ideas about the asana.
• Have fun with it. The best way to keep your practice fresh is to approach it with curiosity. Each time you practice, say, Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog Pose), you’re coming to it with a different body/mind. No matter how many times you’ve put your body in the shape of the asana, it truly is different each time. Staying present with the process can keep your practice fresh.

In 1988, I attended my first silent Insight Meditation retreat. I noticed one thing right off—how incredibly out-of-control my mind is. But as my mind began to quiet a little, I started to notice something more subversive: that my mind judged everything. If I stayed focused for an entire breath, I’d label it “good” meditation. If I caught my mind spinning out in thoughts, I’d label that “bad” meditation. Soon, I saw myself judging my judgments. This judging was not what I’d call wise discrimination. It was simply a completely subjective lens through which I saw the world.

This insight sent me into a period of being completely anti-judgment. I thought that any less-than-glowing evaluation of another person’s actions was judging, and therefore, unyogic. Each person has his/her own dharma, I thought. We’re all following our own truth. Who am I to judge?

In a lot of ways, this made life easier. I could “follow my bliss” and if someone else happened to take it wrong, well, they were just being judgmental. My truth just happened to clash with theirs. If they had a judgment about it, that was their problem. Another name for this is “spiritual bypassing.”

The Problem with Anti-Judgment

I made some poor choices during that period. Living in a “cult of positivity,” averse to what I thought was unyogic judgment, I caused considerable hurt to a person who was very dear to me. This was just one of a series of unwise choices I made during that time. Pursuing what I thought was non-judgmental “yogic” bliss—everything’s yoga, so anything goes, right?—I ended up making a chaotic mess of my life. This culminated in a year of immense suffering as I reckoned with the choices I’d made, during which I committed to rebuilding my life in a much more conscious way.

Wise Discrimination—Not the Same as Judging

It was then that I began to understand that not all evaluations can be classified as damaging judgments. Wise discrimination (viveka) is actually an essential part of the yogic path. If the purpose of yoga is “the settling of the mind into silence” (from Sutra 1.2), wise discrimination is crucial to that end. Our minds cannot settle into silence when we’re continually making unwise choices. Tossing all evaluations out the window in the pursuit of being judgment free is antithetical to the settling of the mind.

All too often, I’ve seen yoga culture confuse wise discrimination with “unyogic” judgment. Every few years it seems, a revered yoga or meditation teacher falls off his/her pedestal. More often than not, it’s because of unacceptable sexual behavior toward students. About a decade ago, I was in the thick of the yoga blogging world when one such toppling occurred.

Predictably, many yogis rushed to the defense of their beloved teacher. Anyone who questioned hurtful behavior was labeled as simply being judgmental and therefore, unyogic. It felt as if “judging” was considered to be a much bigger crime than the exploitive behaviors that triggered the discussions.

It’s true that judging can be damaging. It’s also true that judging, the automatic labeling of something as “good” or “bad,” is often the result of a shallow understanding of a situation. But there is a difference between judgment and discernment. Discernment is the faculty that asks us to consider the yamas, the foundation of the system of yoga, when we are faced with a perplexing choice. Discernment asks us to consider the potential consequences of our behavior.

Wise Discrimination: The Crown Jewel of Yoga Practice

Vivekachudamani—meaning “Crest Jewel of Discrimination”—is a 580-verse poem that describes the quality of viveka, wise discrimination or discernment. The text describes the development of viveka as the central task on the yogic journey. The poem calls discrimination the “crown jewel” of the qualities we need to develop in order to reach enlightenment. Definitions abound, but the most common one says viveka is the ability to discriminate between what is permanent and what is impermanent, what is real and what is unreal, the causes of happiness and the causes of suffering.

The Yoga Sutras list the five causes of suffering: ignorance of our real nature, egoism, attachment, aversion and fear of death. Sutra 2.4 states that ignorance of our real nature is the source of the other four causes. Sutra 2.5 goes on to define ignorance as “the failure to discriminate between the permanent and the impermanent, the pure and the impure, bliss and suffering, the Self and the non-Self.” Also, Sutra 2.25 states: “When ignorance is destroyed, the Self is liberated from its identification with the world. This liberation is Enlightenment.”

So according to Patanjali, discrimination is the antidote to ignorance, the root cause of all our suffering. The uprooting of ignorance leads to freedom. Our freedom is not limited by our loyalty to conscious, ethical behavior; it is dependent on it.

Viveka: The Key to Happiness

Discernment allows us to see beyond the unconscious, relentless pursuit of temporary bliss, which keeps us on the hamster wheel of samsara. Viveka is dependent on mindfulness, our ability to discern in each moment’s experience whether our choices will lead to happiness or to suffering. Viveka allows us to look deeply into each situation and make choices according to the truth of the moment. While judgment looks at a situation and labels it good or bad based on our beliefs, viveka evaluates whether our or another person’s actions lead to lasting happiness or to suffering. Big difference.

Viveka is not name calling. It is not snark. Viveka is not petty judgment. Viveka is, in fact, essential to discovering lasting happiness, the happiness that is not dependent on our external circumstances or those things that will necessarily change—which is everything in our experience.

I don’t doubt that the teachings of yoga’s ousted teachers were beneficial to many, many students. But I also know that their private actions caused a lot of chaos and suffering in their communities. To dismiss these teachers’ critics as judgmental and “unyogic” is to diminish the suffering their misbehavior can cause. This, of course, extends to the rest of our world as well. Calling out harmful behaviors and actions is not simply being judgmental. It’s the beginning of effecting change for the better.

Yoga has tremendous power to heal not only our personal lives, but also the world around us. When we begin to experience our interconnectedness with everything and everyone around us, we become much more conscious of the power of our actions. We are more likely to act in ways that heal our world, rather than in ways that simply prop us up as individuals. It is viveka that teaches us the difference.

One of the most challenging aspects of yoga practice seems to be learning how to rise above our cultural ideas about the body. It is also one of its greatest rewards. We all grow up with ideas about what the human body should look like. In U.S. culture, that usually means thin and lean, and in yoga practice, über bendy. Often we strive to measure up to the images of “advanced” yoga practitioners, and when we don’t, we suffer—and so do our bodies. Instead, I’d like to propose practicing body gratitude.

I’ve said this in many different ways in many different posts. But it seems to bear repeating, probably daily. We all come into the world with different genetics, different talents and different challenges. Our physical structures are wildly diverse. The very idea of an “ideal” body disrespects this reality. Comparing ourselves to someone with completely different genetics is pointless. Comparing ourselves to someone who’s been cultivating habits that are foreign to us is equally pointless. Ultimately, our bodies are not simply vehicles to be looked at and judged. They’re so much more.

What Are These Bodies For Anyway?

Our bodies are our vehicles for interacting with the world around us. Our senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch—allow us to experience our environment, the Earth and its inhabitants. It doesn’t matter what our bodies look like. It doesn’t even matter if one or more of our senses are not in proper working order. We use the senses we have to interact with our environment. On that basis alone, we should practice some body gratitude.

Do our bodies have quirks? Are they sometimes uncomfortable to live in? Of course. But we can be grateful for the pleasures we find in everyday living. Simple acknowledgment of the ways in which our bodies serve us can be powerful. Here are a few things I’ve discovered over the years.

2 Ways to Practice Body Gratitude

Practicing body gratitude involves a shift in perspective. First, we have to stop thinking of these bodies as objects to be “perfected.” I recently wrote about the importance of partnering with the body in yoga practice. This can go a long way toward helping us shift our understanding. But here are a few more points that might be helpful.

• Cultivate awareness: This is probably the most important practice for developing body gratitude. In order to stop objectifying the body, we must relate to the body internally. Practicing mindfulness of the body helps us to ground us in the experience of living inside the body, rather than looking at it from the outside. I’ll explain mindfulness of the body in the next section.
• Practice body gratitude: The late Vietnamese Zen master and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, led a body gratitude meditation that I love. It’s quite simple. I’ll explain more below.

Mindfulness of the Body

1. Begin by sitting in a comfortable position, on a meditation cushion or in a chair.
2. For most people, it’s best to close your eyes for meditation. This helps focus your awareness internally.
3. Now notice if there are any sounds in your environment. If there are, open your sense of hearing, allowing the sounds to come and go. Notice if you feel the vibration of ambient sound elsewhere in your body.
4. After a few minutes, begin to feel the points of contact between your body and what you’re sitting on. Feel the sensations of pressure in your legs and glutes, your hands and feet. Simply tune into what you’re feeling. There’s no need to interpret what you feel. Just feel it.
5. Feel the movement of your breath in your body. You need not breathe any particular way. Just feel your breath as it is, and how it is moving your body.
6. Expand your awareness to take in the entire body. Notice feelings of temperature—are certain areas warm and others cool? Notice feelings of pressure or tension, pulsing or vibration.
7. Thoughts will come. That is the nature of the mind. When you notice that your mind is elsewhere, simply redirect your awareness to body sensations.
8. Stay here for as long as you like—5 minutes or more.

A Body Gratitude Meditation

You can practice this meditation in a seated position or lying down in Savasana (Relaxation Pose). You could also practice it while walking in nature. My instructions will be for a sitting position, but you can adapt them to other positions.

1. Take a minute or two to tune into the internal experience of your body, as in the meditation above.
2. Now tune into your eyes, feeling them resting in their sockets. Reflect on all that your eyes do for you every day. Your sense of sight allows you to negotiate the world, and to move through the world with ease. They allow you to take in beauty. Then, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “Smile to your eyes.” Feel a sense of gratitude for all they do for you.
3. Then tune into your ears, nose, mouth, throat; your heart, lungs, stomach, liver, intestines, etc.; your arms, legs, hands and feet. In each case reflect on the part each structure plays in keeping you alive and allowing you to interact with your world. Smile to each part of the body, expressing gratitude for its gifts.
4. Continue until you feel done. Then reflect on whatever feelings arise.

Shifting Intention

Both these meditations will help you make the shift from seeing the body as an imperfect object that needs to be made whole, to experiencing your body as a living, breathing entity that you can inhabit with gratitude. You can practice them separately or in sequence.

Feel free to play with them in other formats. For example, if you’re walking in nature, be mindful of the act of seeing, and remember to appreciate your eyes. Remember to appreciate your legs that are allowing you to experience nature. Listen and appreciate hearing, and the feel of the sun or breeze on your skin. You can even tune into the internal sensations of your daily tasks such as washing dishes or brushing your teeth.

Shifting intention from the objectification of the body to the internal experience is key to living a more peaceful and grateful life. The gift of yoga is that it gives us techniques we can use to transform the way we experience ourselves, and therefore, the world around us. Enjoy the inward journey.

What motivates you to practice yoga and/or meditation? Why go to the trouble to attend a class or two each week? We’re all busy, and yet, most of us who practice yoga and meditation find time to practice. That practice doesn’t have to take hours out of our day. We can benefit from as little as five minutes of a mindful practice. When we realize this—the benefits of devoting some time to practice each day—we develop an inner fire. That fire, called tapas in Sanskrit, keeps us going to the mat.

Tapas is the third of the niyamas, the second of the Eight Limbs of Yoga. While there’s no direct translation of the word to English, its meaning includes a combination of inner fire, enthusiasm, discipline, simplicity and commitment. Tapas is what inspires us to practice. And it’s a self-fulfilling energy.

Tapas is a Self-Fulfilling Practice

Many of us rebel against the idea of discipline. The word is fraught, often conjuring visions of a rough taskmaster whipping us into shape. But the word “discipline” actually comes from the Latin root word meaning “to learn.” Learning is what we do when we commit to a practice. We learn not only about whatever it is that we’re practicing, but we also learn about how to balance our approach to practice.

Tapas not only inspires us to practice yoga or meditation, but it also helps us define the path we want to take. When our path comes into focus, we can begin to let go of the habits and practices that don’t support our vision. So tapas is a discipline of balancing our lives so that we invest our resources wisely. Then we’re able to funnel our energies into those things that support the direction we’d like to take.

In my book, Mindful Yoga, Mindful Life, I wrote about the self-fulfilling practice of tapas:

“I’ve found tapas to be a meld of discipline, simplicity, mindfulness and enthusiasm. With discipline, we steadily feed our aspirations. As our practice grows, extraneous, unsupportive distractions fall away. Our lives become simpler. Simplicity brings our lives into sharper focus, which allows us to invest our consciousness more mindfully to our tasks. Mindfulness generates insight, energy and enthusiasm, which renew our resolve to practice.”

How to Balance Your Effort

My meditation teacher, Pujari Keays, talks a lot about balancing effort. He implores his students to be “not too tight, not too loose.” Another meditation teacher I’ve worked with quite a lot, Joseph Goldstein, puts it this way: “Be relaxed, but not casual.”

The tricky part of exploring tapas is learning how to balance our effort. When we take discipline too seriously, we can tend to become the taskmaster that invites rebellion. When we allow ourselves too much leeway, we can fall into a habit of skipping practice altogether.

Six years ago, I committed to practicing mindfulness for an hour a day. For the most part, I meet that commitment. But there are days when it’s not feasible to spend an hour on the cushion. On those days, I practice as long as I can, usually at least 30 minutes. I can do this without feeling guilty because I remember the bigger picture, that for the most part, I honor my 60-minute commitment. Because I’ve been practicing for so many years, since 1988, my inner taskmaster is not in charge of my practice anymore. I practice because I’ve seen the benefits, both in the moment and over time. The value of mindfulness is never in question. That trust in the practice develops over our years of engaging in tapas.

Sometimes, we do need to invoke the inner taskmaster. There are days when you may not feel like practicing. But often, if you just step onto your mat or cushion anyway, you’ll remember why you’ve chosen the practice in the first place.

How to Inspire Tapas

It’s helpful to reflect on the reasons we practice. In what ways has your yoga or meditation practice enhanced your life? Remembering the good can be a component of tapas practice. It reminds us of why we’ve chosen to practice in the first place.

The most powerful way to inspire tapas, though, is to practice. Here are some suggestions that might help you keep your commitment to practice:

• Commit to practicing each day, no matter what. Determine the amount of time you can commit to, whether it’s five minutes a day or an hour or more. Practicing for five minutes a day will help you develop a practice habit much more easily than practicing for an hour once a week. Of course, if you commit to five minutes a day, you can always practice longer if time permits.
• Determine a time for your practice. I’m not a morning person, but I’ve committed to an early morning practice simply because it’s too easy to be distracted later in the day. Make that time you set aside sacrosanct.
• Make it easy. Have your props available and easy to set up. If setting up your practice space is excessively inconvenient, you’ll be less likely to do it. You need not have a dedicated yoga room. Most of us don’t have space for that. I keep my meditation cushion set up in a little corner of my den. My yoga mat, bolsters, blankets and blocks are in a closet in the next room so that they’re easily accessible.

Like all the Eight Limbs of Yoga, tapas is a lifelong practice. The way we apply tapas to our practice will evolve over time. Sometimes the strategies we used in years past will no longer apply. Mindfulness is key. Pay attention to the process—your attitudes toward practice and what kind of effort is appropriate at a given time. And enjoy your journey.