How to gain the most out of your yoga practice

Yoga lessons in Brookvale can take different forms, ranging from daily Ashtanga sessions to hot yoga to five minutes of restorative yoga poses in bed at night. No matter what your yoga practice looks like or where you are at in your journey, there are some steps you can take to get deeper and get the most out of your yoga lessons.

Take your yoga practice beyond Asana

Asana involves the physical postures that we know from our western yoga classes and these postures are just part of yoga. Traditionally, yoga has been more about spirituality rather than exercise. Asana was used to prepare the body for meditation and not a practice on its own.

Serious yoga practitioners have more robust yoga practice than physical movement. Studying and practising different components of yoga such as breath work, meditation, the yamas and niyamas, and chanting will introduce you to a big yoga world beyond the popular asana. Understanding yoga poses as they relate to the purpose of yoga will only help with your physical yoga practice.

Reading the yogic texts

When you read the yogic texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, Sutras of Patanjali, the Hatha Yoga and so on, they teach students about the origins of yoga. These and other texts are notoriously dense but reading summaries and excerpts will still provide an important introduction to yoga near me.

In the West, a lot of people practice yoga as a workout or just a stretching routine without knowing where the practice came from and what it was meant to do. But for people who want to get deeper, studying texts such as these will help us understand the yoga philosophy and history and this is one of the most important things you can do as a student.

Practice at home

While most practitioners in the west get started by attending yoga classes at their studio or gym, practising yoga at home can take your yoga practice to the next level. Whilst teachers can be great guides, a home yoga practice is more personal. It gives you a chance to get deeper inward. It will also give you the freedom to experiment with new things, spend more time doing poses you love and develop a yoga practice that works for you.

Yoga students often feel intimidated by practising at home but you can get started by doing small and simple things and advance gradually. Start with the basic poses, focus on restorative postures and try to perfect the poses you did in class. Practising alone at home gets easier with time and sometimes the hardest part of it is just getting started.

Go to seminars and workshops

Apart from yoga lessons Brookvale, you can seek more ways to learn from your teacher. This way, you will deepen your yoga practice. Yoga instructors can cover so much during regular drop-in yoga classes. However, a lot of studies offer special seminars or workshops on some types of poses or other yoga topics such as breath-work, chanting, meditation, or philosophy.