Suggestions for Home Practice
1. Set up a little space in a room where you do it at the same time every day. The space will grow in power and momentum for you as you continue to practice. Best to lock the door, turn off the phone. Best not to practice with pets/small children for right now (although it is fun and can be engaging, they tend to take up all the attention. Your attention will not be inside on sensations and breath, but always focusing outside your body, caretaking. This is not what we want right now.).
2. Altars create a focal point. Try it. Fill it with special things that evoke your love. Set up a picture of a loved one and some meaningful objects that engage you, speak to you. Light a candle.
3. Heaven or high water, keep showing up, whether you are "cleansing", tired or dont wanna. Honor your resistance. Acknowledge it, then go ahead and show up anyway.
4. Set up a timer. That way you are not looking at the clock during practice or worried about getting ready for work or your family duties etc.
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Attitude
Where are you coming from?............
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If you come from yoga as a sport paradigm, where you are trying to improve to be better, better ultimately than someone else, this will wind up as a judgment, a separation and you will have endless obstacles. This leads to dukkha. The kind of dukkha that increases dukkha.
If you think of your yoga practice as "sports training", injuries will be your obstacle. old age will be your obstacle. Your practice will be short lived and ultimately unsatisfying. The focus will be mostly on improving the ego's opinion of itself relative to other people, rather than yoga's true purpose of transcending the ego's personalities and limitations.
The yoga as sports paradigm has a tragic flaw: its not coming from Love.
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The ultimate place to come from is to let your morning practice be a prayer: a prayer to your higher Self, a prayer to the "god of your understanding," a prayer to the universe that gave rise to you.
Let yourself go into it. Instead of beginning from "achieving/fixing mind," surrender into what is. Let your body, mind, emotions be just as they are. Begin from the place of total acceptance.
Ask for the life force to awaken and heal your body, heart, emotions and mind. Let the universe wash through you and make you whole again.
If you come from this place, NOTHING will ever stop your practice.
If you come from this place, no matter what what is going on in your life, no matter what the results are, you will feel complete at the end of it. The purity of the intention matters most.
