Building Discipline through Yoga

After your first few yoga classes, you may find that you’re not completely in love with sun salutations, or down dog, or vinyasa, or pigeon…the list can go on and on. But the peace and calm energy you created and felt at the end of class brings you back. You tell yourself, if the instructor will just stop having us do those chatarangas, my yoga practice will be on its way! Here comes the bad news – one of the Yoga Sutras is Tapas, which means discipline. In yoga, we find those postures that we don’t like and learn to face them head-on, embrace them. Soon, those postures we despise are no longer issues.

The mental and physical process we go through to overcome these objections is actually what creates the incredible peaceful feeling we have at the end of class. The more objections we overcome on the mat in our practice, the more peace we create in our bodies and our minds. A part of building discipline in yoga is learning to let go. As we learn to let go of expectations, we find ourselves liberated from the constraints we normally place on ourselves, and our yoga practice flourishes. As we face those postures we don’t like, accept them, breathe through them, build discipline and strength of mind. Learn to trust in the process of our growth rather than rigidly attempting to control our progress.

As we build discipline through our yoga practice, we bring discipline to our lives off the mat. Slowly, but surely, we become stronger mentally, physically and emotionally through our own practice of our yoga on the mat.