On the Value of Personal Practice

Yoga classes are great. They provide structure. They hold you accountable. You can learn a ton. There’s a certain emotional contagion that a class generates went they start breathing and moving in synchrony.

But yoga classes have their limits.

To speak puritanically, the real* yoga happens when you’re alone. When you’re following your own rhythm. When there’s no instructor babbling away. Again, I’m not knocking going to yoga classes, but there is a degree of intimacy and quietness that you can experience in a personal practice that just isn’t possible in the context of a class.

Most students I talk to and even many teachers practice exclusively in studios or gyms - a recent study found that only 24% of regular practitioners practiced alone at least once in the last year. The percentage practitioners who have a daily solo practice is far lower. If you put a gun to my head and told me to pull a number out of my butt I would say something like 2%.

Why?

"I wouldn’t know what to do practicing yoga by myself."

Sure, it takes some initial instruction and guidance to get a hang of things on the mat. But you don’t have to know every single asana to have a regular practice. You could just have a few basic movements you string together in a way that feels right. Or even one! It doesn’t have to be some complex acrobatic routine - all that mumbo jumbo often just gets in the way. Simple is potent.

But the rarity of solo practice in the modern yoga world goes beyond inexperience or laziness.

Patanjali, an Indian sage who codified yogic philosophy in the influential Yoga Sutras, frames the purpose of yoga in sutra 1.2 as “chitta vritti nirodha” - to still the fluctuations of the mind. Quietness.

Quietness isn’t very highly esteemed in our culture. Silence is perceived as awkward. But it’s not the silence that’s awkward, it’s the people who are uncomfortable with it.

Yoga is a process of getting comfortable in the stillness, but we’re so used to the constant buzz, the noise, the stimulation that we’ve become afraid of going there. So it’s no surprise that the most popular breed of yoga in the west involves bone vibrating music. Please, anything to drown out what’s going on between my ears. We’ve taken the quietness out of a practice of quietness.

If you’ve been attending classes for awhile and you’re curious about diving further, I’d highly recommend playing around with a regular solo practice. The only person who can take you deeper into your practice is you. A great teacher can point the way, but you’re the one who has to walk the path.

*dubious usage