How yoga can break habits for life

There are two ways to change the way you move in yoga and in life:
1. by making physical shifts
2. by changing the underlying drive or emotion

When you begin with yoga you will mostly be using the first way. As yoga works its magic, the second way kicks in – underlying drives and emotions change – and this is when big, lifetime changes are happening.

This is why it is important to Resist the Shortcut – because you want to break habits for life so that it becomes effortless to sit with good posture, to eat well, for your mind to be calm.

So what are the shortcuts, and why do they happen? In yoga the main shortcuts are:
1. leaning off a stretch
2. counterbalancing with our body weight

Here I am just leaning from calf muscles and compressing the lower back and then leaning off the ankle and hip muscle to take the body over to the side. This creates imbalances with long, weak muscles and short, tight muscles. These movements mimic postural tendencies that we have in our daily life.

So why do we do this? Why do we choose to move our bodies in a way that increases the chances of future pain? This will be something you can find the answers to yourself over time. For a start though, the first thing is that we tend to want to be further than we are. Maybe that sounds familiar already – particularly if you are an alpha type like most people that are eventually drawn to try yoga.

If you can drop the impulse to deny where your body is at for long enough to have a taste of something else – a light bulb moment of understanding – this begins to break a lifetime habit of striving, fearing failure, comparing, forcing, and cycles of forced activity and crashing.

The more we drop the old drives and approach yoga with the desire to understand ourselves, the more natural it becomes to resist shortcuts because we recognise that we have been denying ourselves the opportunity for that light bulb moment. I have seen many clients go teary-eyed with this realisation (which is something to see in itself). This is also true of meditation where there many shortcuts available to us!

Where to begin?

We begin where this began, with:
1. making physical shifts

This is why foot awareness is given so much attention with Linea Yoga. Our feet are a reliable guide to how we are using our body. If you are willing to ease back enough to check in with the feedback they provide, you are on your way to a process that leads to changing the underlying drives.

Note on this asana
Mainting hip/ankle alingment in extended tadasana requires core strength. While this strength is being developed, be good to your back and do not force the pose by shifting the hips forwards.