So you want to begin a daily practice.
I bow to you.
I honor that in you.
It's so incredible.
You are the rare one who desires a life of more clarity and freedom and meaning and truth and that is what is revealed with the daily practice.
The daily practice comes once we begin to understand and master the pillars of yoga sadhana.
There are many many pillars we can put into our sadhana toolbox but these five I have found so extremely beneficial to call on each and every day whether just one practice or five they are there to serve your higher awareness to help you cultivate that habit that mastery of showing up just by mastering these five pillars.
The first pillar is meditation.
We begin in our seat.
The moment you open the eyes you move to your meditation yoga sadhana area and simply sit and be and observe what's there.
You have nothing to do.
Meditation is not to be learned it's to be experienced.
So sit for 1,
3,
20 minutes whatever you have the time for we begin and end the sadhana with a brief meditation.
So number one pillar of our sadhana of yoga,
True yoga happens in the seat of stillness and silence and meditation.
Our second pillar is pranayama the power of breath practice.
The manipulation of our breath.
Why?
To create spaciousness in the lungs and the being.
The prana shakti is pushed and moved through the body to awaken,
To vitalize,
To cleanse,
To purify not only the physical body,
The pranic body,
Energetic body but the mental emotional bodies.
Research shows that deep yogic breathing stimulates our parasympathetic nervous system and helps us regulate.
We cannot be expected to sit in meditation and transcend all relative body-mind experience when our nervous systems are dysregulated.
So pranayama is a beautiful practice.
You can begin with simple 4,
8 breathing.
4 counts in 8 counts out.
4 counts in 8 counts out.
That is the most perfect breath practice to begin with.
The third pillar for your sadhana toolbox is asana,
Asana practice.
We live in a world that is so obsessed with the cult of trickster asana in yoga studios.
Don't be dissuade.
Asana can be as simple as a few stretches,
Sun salutations,
Twists,
Forward folds,
Balancing poses.
You have the wisdom inside you to know what your body needs.
When you start with meditation you can understand how to listen to the whisper of your body amidst the loudness of your mind.
So really take the time to listen to what your body needs.
It will tell you.
It is wise and brilliant and there to serve you.
So the third practice is our asana practice.
Moving through a physical practice to move that prana through the body.
The fourth pillar is mantra.
We use the power of our voice in the practice and if you're in a place where you can't speak loudly,
You have family or children,
You can use the power of mantra in your mind's eye and you can begin with a mantra as simple as Aum,
Which is the sound of the whole.
It's all potential manifest sound in one syllable,
Aum.
Or perhaps the mantra Sohum,
I am.
Or even the mantra I am.
Whatever you use you can let the mantra roll.
Let the mantra be the guide which allows the thoughts,
The awareness to elevate,
To rise beyond the busy,
Contracted,
Fearful,
Individual,
Egoistic mind and intellect.
So we can repeat mantra for as little as three times to 30 minutes.
It's your practice.
It's about exploring what works for you.
And the fifth pillar,
Remember these are in no specific order,
Is swadhyaya,
Self study.
Now in the scriptures it is defined as a two-part practice.
Study of the self with a capital S through the study of scripture,
Poetry,
Music,
Anything that connects your awareness,
Your consciousness to something higher than the individual egoistic mind.
So for me as a yogi it's the Bhagavad Gita,
It's Patanjali Yoga Sutras,
It's Hatha Yoga Pradipika,
It's Rumi,
It's any spiritual literature that brings the awareness upward.
Whatever it is in the morning that you can take,
Read,
A line,
A verse,
A paragraph,
A page,
Listen to your teacher,
Listen to a beautiful audio,
A beautiful song to invite your awareness to elevate.
Invite your awareness to transcend beyond the limitations of the mind and the body.
The second part of swadhyaya is study of yourself.
Study of yourself in motion,
Watching yourself in your seat,
Observing how your nervous system,
Your mechanism works.
Observation of the self.
This is such a powerful tool we can begin to bring off the mat once we practice it on the mat because when we're aware of how we show up on the mat and in the world we have more power,
More resilience,
More capacity for spaciousness,
For pause,
For clarity,
To know what the next right thing is.
In the yoga scriptures it said that when we come from this space we are able to do more with less.
So these are the five pillars you can begin to play with and explore in your yoga sadhana.
Meditation,
Pranayama,
Asana,
Mantra,
And swadhyaya.
I would love to hear how you get on.
I wish you the best in your daily practice and remember it's an independent work but you can't do it alone.
We need one another.
I wish you all the success,
All the liberation,
All the enlightenment.
Amaram ham madram ham om tatsat.
Hari om,
Hari om,
Hari om.
