Consistency is the key to the biggest rewards.
Why does consistency matter?
With almost everything in life, if you want to get better at something, people say “practice makes perfect”. But can you ever truly perfect anything? Or do you simply keep practicing, keep doing your best and keep getting better?
Although yoga may never be perfected and you may only achieve samādhi , nirvana, or enlightenment for a fleeting moment, yoga has vast benefits, and you definitely get the most benefit out of your practice when you are consistent and dedicated.
Just like any other physical activity, the more you do that thing, the stronger you get, the more endurance you build, etc. You must keep practicing, keep pushing yourself to continue to build skill and maintain what you have already built.
Yoga goes beyond the physical practice though and truly as deep as you decide you want to go with it. You can expand your physical practice and try things you might have never thought yourself capable of doing, build the skills needed to achieve that particular pose in your body and get there eventually. You can also go beyond the fancy postures and dive deep into all that yoga has to offer.
If you feel you have plateaued at the physical level of yoga, (you probably haven’t, BUT), consider focusing on a prāṇāyāma practice to control your breath and your energy. You can do this simultaneously with your āsana practice or independently. There is some scientific research showing that a roughly 5 second inhale and a roughly 5 second exhale breath ratio helps increase your Heart Rate Variability, which can be used as a marker of overall health. Your HRV is the measure of time between heart beats over an extended period of time, which varies every day for everyone. Your heart beats slower when resting and higher in times of stress. We want our hearts to be able to do both, and adapt throughout the day to different circumstances and experiences in our lives. The higher your HRV, the more adaptable your heart is. Consistent intentional breathing can help increase your HRV, which naturally declines as we age. This is only one benefit of prāṇāyāma practice that is better with consistency.
You can go beyond the body, the breath, the energy and deeper into your mind as well. If you develop a concentration practice, working towards meditation every day for just a few minutes a day, you will eventually find yourself slowly becoming a master of your own mind. Simply observing your thoughts, recognizing your own thought patterns and honing your concentration allows you power over your mind. The mind is the only thing that truly holds us back from reaching our highest potential.
These are some examples of how consistency and dedication in your practice can help you reap a few of the vast rewards of yoga. The 8-limbs of yoga are meant to be done all at once for the greatest benefit, but don’t worry if that is not your reality at the moment. The practice of yoga is called that for a reason, it always continues. Sometimes we take two steps back before we take another step forward, and that is life. We do our best and we keep going. Progress is almost never linear, and that’s okay. Just remember that yoga is vast and you can go as deep as you like into the heart of yoga and receive so much more than simple physical benefits.
Thank you for reading,
Taylor
Resources that support and expand on the topic of breath work/prāṇāyāma practice in relation to HRV:
Articles:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24380741/
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/21773-heart-rate-variability-hrv
Podcast episodes: