What is a Home Practice?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful to play around on your mat and come up with sequences or ideas for your classes. I recommend all teachers do this. But this is not a home practice, it’s class planning.

A home practice is for us to journey inward into the center of our being. To slow down our breath, take a seat in our body, and explore our consciousness.

We don’t get to do that if we’re simultaneously building a playlist and writing cues in our journal.

It’s helpful to do a practice that a teacher passes down because then it’s not personal, it’s more universal. If we design our own home practice, we’re at the mercy of our minds and our preferences, aversions, and what “feels good.”

But the goal of our practice isn’t only to feel good, it’s to gain insight and awareness into the truth of our being. A balanced practice will have parts that feel good, and parts that feel challenging. This makes it more of a universal metaphor for life, and helps illuminate something new rather than just more of the same.

We could do our favorite pose every day, and we’d probably enjoy it!

Or we could do our favorite pose AND our least favorite pose, and really go somewhere new.

Until one day, our least favorite pose is no longer our least favorite pose because by doing the pose, we gain fluency. and that’s the power of practice - with yoga or with anything else.

You can even seduce yourself to the mat. Light a candle, play some music, or open a window. At the end of the day, it matters less what our practice specifically entails, and more that we actually do the practice.

Much love 🤎