Dig one hole a thousand feet deep
The journey of committing to a daily yoga practice
I came to yoga in my 30s, after a couple of earlier failed attempts when I showed up to classes only to sweat and grunt my way through postures, mortified by my ineptness, while the rest of the room made it all look effortless. On those occasions I left with my tail between my legs, feeling sore and wounded the next day, having used muscle groups that hadn’t been oiled in a very long time. I did not return for some years.
Like most people I arrived at the mat wanting to be fitter, stronger and maybe a little bendier. I had probably heard too that yoga can help with stress, though I don’t think I had much clue as to how.
My first regular yoga class was at a gym, a mirrored room and a back drop of muscle-bound folks pumping and grinding away on shiny metal machinery. The gym membership quickly lapsed - it was never really my thing - but the passion for yoga grew and I’m grateful to that gym class for sparking my love affair with the practice. I wasn’t sure what it was all about but I knew that I left that room feeling tangibly different after class from when I arrived. Calmer, clearer, brighter in my outlook, and, yes, perhaps a little more bendy.
It is often said that to call yourself a true yogi, you must devote time to practice every day. By this definition I’ve been a yogi for 10 years. The turning point came when I signed up for yoga teacher training with Ashram Yoga NZ. After some years of regular classes, my curiosity had got the better of me. I’d begun to notice interesting things happening on the mat, emotional releases, energetic shifts and sensations of aliveness and activation in parts of my body yogis label ‘chakras’ (the heart centre and throat centre for example). The psychologist in me was deeply curious to know more. I wanted to understand the technology behind this mysterious practice and perhaps be able to share its medicine with others. The training required 9 months of daily practice and, by the end of this, I was hooked. Yoga had cemented its place in my daily routine, and was working its magic in other areas of my life. I’ve never looked back.
Prior to that point I had tried (and failed) many times to create daily practices of various types for myself. I’m sure you know how it goes. It sticks for a week, or maybe two, and then the excuses start showing up, the missed days, the low energy, the promise of tomorrow and before you know it you’ve fallen right off the wagon of good intentions. What changed for me was when I stopped entering into a conversation with myself about it. The debate is the danger-zone where you talk yourself out of those good intentions, find excuses or make false promises of ‘later’. Once I decided it was a non-negotiable part of my morning routine, like making tea or having a shower, this all changed. I don’t ask myself ‘should I take a shower?’ I just know that it’s what I do when I get up, and yoga is now the same. I carry a mat when I travel, like I carry a toothbrush, and I have even been known to practice in airport waiting lounges and down the back of aeroplanes in that tiny space by the toilets. For me it’s the best way to start a day, to wake up the cells and tissues and focus the mind, and it often gives me energy rather than taking it away which was a radical discovery.
The yogic word for a daily practice is Sadhana. It refers to the discipline of showing up for a daily ritual, while surrendering the ego’s attachment to a specific outcome. Yoga teaches that it’s the consistency and regularity that create the transformation. In this sense, a 10-minute practice done every day will likely take you deeper than a full hour done sporadically. The mind, body, and especially the nervous system, respond well to consistency, particularly when there may be chaos or instability in other areas of our lives. It creates an anchor to return to.
The words of one my original teachers, Shantimurti Saraswati, have stayed with me:
‘Dig one hole a thousand feet deep instead of a thousand holes a foot deep’
Many of us are practicing something more akin to ‘spiritual shopping’, trying a bit of this and a bit of that, dabbling into different practices and traditions but not really following anything through. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, and it is possibly useful at first to find out what really resonates with you. I’m sure there are many different paths to the same end and it doesn’t necessarily have to be the yogic one. In some ways anything can be sadhana, it’s your attitude and intention that makes it sacred. However, the beauty is ultimately in the act of committing to something and showing up over and over again.
Connecting with yourself each day creates a container in which to notice what’s arising. There’s an internal cast of characters we get to meet and greet on the mat. Alongside feelings of calm, clarity or energy, we might also meet boredom, restlessness, the ego or the inner critic. You can think of the practice as a microcosm of your life and it will show you all your patterns and habits. In some ways it’s a bit like committing to a relationship with another person. The relationship, like the practice, will hold up a mirror and show you all of your rough edges. The invitation is to stay and face the challenges, to allow yourself to investigate them, instead of running away. Yoga offers us space to meet these parts of ourselves, as well as a vast library of tools to navigate them.
My daily practice includes asana (postures), pranayama (breathwork) and meditation. How that weaves together can vary and is sculpted around what I need on any given day. If I’m tired, I might choose an active practice to energise or a gentle practice to restore. If I’m depleted or sick my practice might simply be breathwork, meditation or some restorative shapes with bolsters and soft blankets. I’m not attached to it looking a certain way, but I am committed to showing up (barring maybe a handful of exceptions over that decade).
Now that I’ve reached the 10-year mark with my daily practice it’s prompting me to wonder what difference it has made to my life? What has changed over that decade? What happens when you dig the metaphorical hole for 10 consistent years?
I’ll be sharing about this in my next post, so stay tuned if you’re keen to hear more, and add yourself as a subscriber if you don’t want to miss an update. In the meantime, can I encourage you to consider that committing to a daily practice is not completely beyond the realms of possibility? You might start small, maybe it’s simply 5-10 minutes, and just see where the journey takes you.
I really resonate with this Vicki, in my own practice as an artist. It took me half a lifetime to call myself that, because I always thought there was a ‘bigger, better role’ I was meant to be playing and that the artist was the sidekick. Only when lockdowns spurred me back into a steady routine of sitting down at the bench, relaxing the mind and setting the hand free, that it all started to flow. Art became my sacred daily practice, and my sacred practice became my job.
This may be part of what you want to write next time, but I have been conscious that being in my 80s and having done yoga regularly for 30 years, I am so much more flexible and supple than almost all my peers. I don't think about it much, because it is normal for me to climb under the desk if I need to retrieve something or even climb up on a ladder to get something in a high cupboard. Recognition of this fact as turned me into something of a proselytiser for yoga. A young woman in her 50s said to me recently "I really ought to do yoga, I used to enjoy it" and instead of just nodding gently, I replied "yes, because it will make a big difference in 30 years time if you keep it up". I never thought about this when I was younger, so it has been a positive accident, if you like.