Doing yoga on your own is more than rolling out your mat at home and following along with your favorite yoga media. There are many benefits to having a personal yoga practice and developing your own yoga.
In an article for Kripalu Center for Yoga &Health, Cristie Newhart discusses why having a self-guided practice is so important. She writes...
"Personal practice supports you experiencing the postures at your own pace and not your teacher’s. You learn for yourself what works for your body and what doesn’t, what’s open, and what needs more coaxing. Without a teacher moving the class along, you may be inclined to find new ways to explore and feel a posture. You can pause and slow down where you need to, and learn to follow prana where it takes you. In the process, you strengthen the muscle of svadhyaya, self-study."
Svadhyaya translates to "self-understanding" or "self-study." It is one of the five niyamas (or personal observances) in the eight limbs of yoga. Sva means "one's own," or the power of one’s self. Adhyaya translates to "practice," to study, contemplate, or examine. In the book The Practice of the Yoga Sutra (2017), Tigunait's definition of svadhyaya is "to study, examine, and reflect on ourselves, our internal states, the objects of our senses, and the condition of our body.”
Self-study goes beyond the observance of our emotions and the mind. It is studying with the heart and understanding that what you know is limited by your conditioning. The goal is to see things in a new light each time we encounter them and elevating ourselves to grow a little more each time we reflect on aspects of ourselves. Tigunait goes on to discuss that to really practice self-study we must employ our mind to flow peacefully inward for a long period without interruption and with reverence. This is how we find fulfillment and freedom.
If you are in search of tools and the means to accelerate your wellbeing and mature your yoga practice, will find that a strong personal practice can help you regain the lost innate wisdom of your body. Spending time developing a personal practice helps us restore the natural wisdom and knowledge of the body and infuses us with self-trust and self-confidence.
We rarely experience yoga at our own pace and are often asked to move on before we are ready or to stay longer than we need. In his translation and commentary of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (2017), Sri Swami Satchidanana talks about experiencing your own yoga and being able to "quote" from your own experiences while learning. He directs the reader to what Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa said...
"Forget all you have learned; become a child again. Then it will be easy to realize your wisdom."
Through personal practice, you have the opportunity to observe your own experiences and to really tap into what is arising. You also have the space to tend to what is coming up for you in your own time and in your own way. You are learning about the true self and not what you have been conditioned to be and believe. Regular personal practice becomes a study of your patterns. Perhaps those are ways of thinking, or ways the body positions itself. Through self-guidance, we can observe the effects yoga is having on us in the moment without interruption to move on or to stay put.
Between the music, demos, and teaching cues, yoga classes have become primarily externally focused experiences. You might be resistant to the idea of practicing yoga without instruction from a teacher, and if so, ask yourself why that is. How has your relationship with yoga been constructed? What resistance is coming up when you think of giving the body and mind some freedom? How might the way you practice change if when you are not being guided, but listening to your innate wisdom with self-trust?
These are some of the first questions to ask yourself as you begin to work on your own yoga. This is not to say that you will never go to a yoga class again. You can always enjoy the freedom that comes from being guided from one posture to the next. Allowing your mind to relax and be led by the instructions you hear. A yoga teacher is one of the best sources of inspiration and knowledge. But to truly practice yoga, you need to find an intrinsic state of being. Only then will you see the power that becomes available to you through your actions, choices, and the ability to listen to your internal world.
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