Please Don’t Give Up on Yoga

There seems to be a growing feeling that yoga is somehow “not enough.”

Perhaps it doesn’t feel athletic enough. Perhaps we have been told that we need to lift heavier weights, build more muscle or challenge the body in different ways—particularly as we grow older.

And much of that is true. I believe in strength training, walking and moving the body in many different ways. Yoga does not have to be the only physical practice in our lives.

But that doesn’t mean we should give up on it.

Because yoga was never meant to be only a workout.

Yoga is more than what happens on the mat

The postures are one part of a much larger and richer tradition. Yoga also offers us breathwork, meditation, philosophy, self-inquiry and deeply practical ways of working with the nervous system and the mind.

Through yoga, we can learn how to slow and deepen the breath when we feel anxious or overwhelmed.

We can discover practices that help the body settle when sleep will not come.

We can begin to understand the nature of the mind—how it moves, worries, plans and creates stories. Rather than becoming frightened or consumed by every difficult thought, we learn to step back and witness what is happening.

That small space between ourselves and our thoughts can be profoundly freeing.

The purpose isn’t the perfect pose

Yoga is not ultimately about achieving the deepest backbend, balancing perfectly or placing a leg behind your head.

Nor is it about being able to say that we meditated for an hour.

These things may be part of someone’s practice, but they are not the point of it.

The deeper purpose of yoga is to bring us into contact with something quieter and more enduring: the light of awareness within the heart.

We might call it the soul, our true nature or simply the deepest part of ourselves—the part that remains whole beneath all the noise of daily life.

We do not have to experience this in a dramatic way. Perhaps we touch it only briefly: in one conscious breath, a moment of stillness or the feeling of being completely present inside our own body.

But even the smallest glimpse reminds us that we are more than our appearance, our productivity, our worries and the circumstances unfolding around us.

A practice for living

Yoga will not prevent life from being painful. It does not ask us to bypass grief, fear, anger or uncertainty.

Instead, it gives us ways to remain present when life is difficult.

It helps us build the inner steadiness to bear what must be borne, while keeping the heart open to beauty, connection and joy.

And when we learn to create a little more space and kindness within ourselves, that naturally begins to touch the people around us too.

Yoga has survived for thousands of years because it speaks to something timeless in the human experience. Its wisdom reaches far beyond the physical shapes we make with the body.

So enjoy other activities. Become stronger. Move in new ways. Let your physical practices complement one another.

But please don’t give up on yoga because you think it is only what happens on the mat.

Explore the breath. Explore meditation. Become curious about the mind. Read the philosophy. Sit quietly with yourself.

And return, whenever you can, to that steady light within your heart.

That is where the real practice begins.