I remember my Mysore students telling me they would come back to the daily practice when their life had calmed down, when they were in the right space again. It’s funny, because the practice is the one thing that could give us stability in turbulent times, and for many it does exactly that, and for others it becomes another drain of energy, energy they don’t have to spare.
And that is the trap we get caught in, the morning practice that would help is the one practice we have no capacity for. Knowing this doesn’t get us out of it either, because knowing was never the part that was missing.
When the practice feels like it’s only available to us on the days we can step onto the mat or sit on the cushion, and when we’ve no capacity for it, that’s enough to make us think we’ve lost the practice itself.
But what has actually gone is just the slot, the place in the day the practice took up, tidy and separate from everything else, and because we’ve only ever met practice inside that hour we assume the two were the same.
The next thing we do is argue with ourselves about finding a smaller gap somewhere else in the day, getting up twenty minutes before anyone else is awake, or waiting for the weekend that promises to be calmer. And the more depleted we are, the more obvious it becomes that the gap stays a fantasy, and that looking for it has become another thing we are failing at by bedtime.
The way out isn’t another gap, instead, the whole day becomes the practice, not only on the mat or the cushion. There’s no extra time to find, it’s already there in the middle of whatever is happening.
Think about what actually happens on the mat or on the cushion. We connect to the body and the breath, and that one connection is what keeps us centred, and once we are centred the mind and the nervous system follow along. Doing our daily morning practice reinforces it, of course it does, but the connection itself doesn’t have to go away just because there is no energy for the hour in the morning.
We know the feeling of being connected from the morning practices, and it is only a matter of training ourselves to hold it for the whole waking day rather than losing it an hour after we step off the mat.
None of this stops anything from happening around us. The demands keep coming and the people around us carry on being who they are. What changes is that we are no longer pulled into every single one of them.
After a long morning practice it usually takes a few hours before the sense of being centred fades. And in those hours it takes a lot more to rile us up, something said in a meeting that would normally throw us barely registers.
Keeping the connection to our body going throughout the day, with or without the morning practice, is what gives us that distance. From there we begin to notice when we put pressure on ourselves and when it comes from outside. And the morning hour is no longer what decides whether we practise or not. The practice has moved into the day itself, and instead of asking for energy we don’t have to spare, it gives some back.
If you want to learn how to stay with the practice through the rest of the day, not just on the mat or the cushion, that’s exactly what the Inner Practice is. It’s the work I teach one to one, yoga for the mind rather than the body, no mat and no postures, just direct work with how your own mind is running. We begin with whatever is actually present on the day, and work from there.