Kickstart your Home Practice | Part 1: Discipline

This is the first part of our series to kickstart your daily practice. Hands up who sometimes lacks motivation to get on the mat? And what about those folks who simply say that home yoga isn’t for you, because you can’t trust yourself to roll out your at each and every day? Well, my friends, you’re not alone.

You’re in excellent company. Even those of us who are ‘home yoga junkies’ like me need inspiration and advice sometimes to roll out the mat at home. So this month we doff our caps to you – we’re ready and on-hand to offer you advice and support for making this the 28 days that forms the habit of your life!

“Decide what to do, then do it!”, Kat Farrants

They say that it takes 21 days to form a new habit. So in a month, your habit will be formed and you’ll have an extra week to put your good habits into practice.

Throughout the next month we’re going to explore hints, tips and offer pieces of advice and practical solutions to get you rolling out your mat.

But we’re going to start with the hardest thing, and we’re going to tackle it head-on. Discipline.

The first thing about starting a daily yoga practice is that it does just take sheer discipline to get your butt on the mat.

As our teacher Zephyr has said, “It takes Effort to feel Effortlessness.”

We can (and will, in the course of the next 4 weeks!) offer you sage advice and pieces of inspiration to make this happen, but newsflash – ultimately, you’re in complete control of your life. You get to create the thoughts, words and actions that make up today and each day for the rest of your life. You are in charge of your own life, is the good and the bad news.

The good news – because you get to create your own world, you get to decide if you use the tools that are there for you to bring you energy, bring you strength, give you positivity, help you sleep soundly and reduce your stress. That’s great news. You can opt to change your life if you so choose and you can decide the thoughts and things that you feel! Getting on your mat and using the tools at your disposal is just a choice, and to exercise that choice, you just need a little discipline.

The bad news is that you will need to cultivate discipline. Discipline is like a muscle, if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. But I would love to show you that this muscle is a very useful one to cultivate in life.

I feel that discipline is like a trust that you have in yourself. Once you know that you have ‘discipline’ you know that you’re the kind of person who can be trusted to follow through on the things that you say and do. You can trust yourself to make the right choices, to keep yourself healthy and happy, to do the things that are right for you and those around you, even if it means you might have to re-jig your schedule or go a little out of your way.

And once you know this – once you know that you are to be trusted in life, you’ll start to commit to doing more things, because you know you’ll follow through on them. You’ll start to think of those things that you’ve always wanted to do, but have never got round to – because you’ll know that once you decide you’re wanting to do something, you’re going to do it!
My little motto in life is ‘decide what you want to do, and do it’. But the second part of this is the hard part, it’s the part that requires that muscle ‘discipline’.

You’ve decided that you want to practice yoga, you want the benefits of a daily practice? So the next step is you simply have to do it!

Your daily yoga practice makes you feel more positive, stronger, more focused, more energetic, more excited for life, helps you to sleep better, yes? It helps to ward away feelings of stagnation, listlessness and sleeplessness. You manage to brush your teeth twice daily to ward away tooth decay, this is a discipline that’s been instilled in you from childhood. Yoga is, in my mind, just another discipline. If you want to live a fuller, better life – you really can’t short-circuit, you have to get on the mat every day, even if just for a few minutes each day.

There are certainly tips to help to excite you, inspire you, get the practicalities of making sure that you’re just the kind of person who can trust yourself to roll out your mat every day. But this is what your yoga journey is all about. It’s making sure that you’re the best person that you can be, you can trust yourself, and others can trust you to do the best for you, and for them.

Often people ask me how I manage to work from home, they say don’t you find things distracting at home. I do think that my daily home yoga practice has enabled me to hone this discipline muscle which has meant that I had the focus and discipline to start my own business and work my own hours.

So if you think of discipline like a muscle. You may not enjoy the feeling of using your muscles – it often hurts, but we all LOVE the post-exercise feeling of fitness afterwards. And that’s what discipline is all about…

So just go ahead, set your alarm 10 minutes early and start using that muscle, and I can guarantee that you’ll find the knock-on repercussions in life are way greater than just having a wonderful daily home practice. Here’s one to try!