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It’s still dark when the alarm rings at 5:18 am. I roll over and silence it before it wakes my son, who’s tangled within the sheets next to me. He got here in after a nightmare a number of hours earlier, chasing my husband to the bedroom down the hall, and I never fell back asleep. He kicks and grasps. I listen for his respiration to slow.
In my head, I comprehend it’s time to get off the bed, make coffee, and roll out my mat. But my body is begging for something different. The few hours I slept will need to have been on my injured shoulder since the pain is already creeping up my neck. I’m stuck between wanting to rest and remain a comfort for my son and getting in my practice before the day formally begins. I feel paralyzed, knowing I’ll struggle with regret irrespective of my decision.
My yoga practice
For years, I steadied myself with a lengthy, disciplined home practice each morning. I performed Sun Salutations while the celebrities were still visible and I practiced Chaturanga, Handstand, and intense backbends while everyone else in the home slept. This allowed me to receive the inevitable chaos of the day in a fashion that was relatively peaceful and balanced. I trusted my practice for that.
Then, after 15 years of home practice, I tore a labrum in my right shoulder. My doctor advised me to not carry my two-year old on my right hip. Sleep was painful without medication.
I told myself that I used to be the explanation for my injury. That my Chaturanga had gotten sloppy. I became hyper-focused on my alignment and increased my attention on core work. Things got worse. I modified my practice however the pain continued to be relentless. I struggled to drive a automobile and kind on a keyboard.
The conclusion that my yoga practice was introducing suffering into my life forced me to ask whether my perception had change into clouded. I needed to discern whether or not, after years and years of a demanding physical practice that took time away from my family, I used to be truly living a lifetime of peace and health.
I ultimately responded to my situation by changing the shapes I created on my mat. I finished critiquing my form within the mirror and as an alternative began listening at a cellular level to what was happening, what I used to be needing. Chaturanga became optional, arm balances rare. My pace slowed, my breath deepened. I continued to wake early, but to meditate. My practice was no less intense than before, even though it was completely different.
Was I quiet quitting yoga?
It was late afternoon on a weekday when a friend calls in tears. Her work had been intense for the last couple of years with unrealistic standards and not possible workloads. “My boss is afraid I’m quietly quitting,” she says. “But I swear I’m doing my job.”
While she talks, I silently seek for “What’s quiet quitting?” I skim article after article depicting corporate malaise and worker disengagement. What I examine doesn’t describe my friend in any respect—she’s the toughest employee I do know. But she, like so lots of us, associates her success as a person with work well done. To have her work questioned is to have her price questioned.
As we end our call, I feel to myself, is that this what I’ve been doing? Have I been quiet quitting my yoga practice?
My evolving relationship to yoga
I used to be taught that yoga practice is a direct connection to Source. In some unspecified time in the future, my brain decided that the more intense my practice, the more intense my connection. When my physical body began to interrupt down, setting critical boundaries, a component of me couldn’t accept the lack of that connection.
Whether it’s a part of the fantastic thing about the discipline of yoga or one among the more frustrating features of it, ancient texts are hesitant to verbalize a regular of practice. The common refrain amongst scholars is that inside Patanjali’s yoga sutras, just one actual asana is described. In these texts, the practice of yoga is elaborated upon in a fashion that as an alternative guides and protects us, often from ourselves.
Three sutras specifically reference the character of practice. Sutra 1.12 reads, “Mental modifications are restrained by practice and detachment.” This is often understood as a willingness to practice with none sense of need or consequence. We don’t practice because it’ll make us feel higher throughout the day. We just practice. We don’t practice to realize followers. We just practice. We don’t practice because our back is aching. We just practice.
Sutra 1.13 continues the conversation. “Of those two [practice and detachment], effort toward steadiness of mind is practice.” My teacher way back instilled in me some modicum of balance with my practice by including the word “any.” Any effort toward steadiness of mind is practice. Once we consciously place ourselves on the planet, we’re practicing yoga. There may be meditation in rocking a toddler back to sleep. There may be alignment present in a lover’s embrace.
The third, Sutra 1.14, provides the larger framework. “Practice becomes firmly grounded when well attended to for a very long time, without break and in all earnestness.” Yoga is a way of life alternative, not an exercise. The practice continues after we roll up the mat or come away from seated meditation. We’d like to still be yogis after we post the reel and when someone gets our green juice order improper. The essential word here is “earnestness.” The work that we put in, whether on our mats or at our desks or with our family members, is supposed to sustain our lives, not define us.
The practice of yoga and meditation is a training ground for the entire other moments in our lives. Once we begin to practice presence, we realize that this, too, is yoga as much as any elaborate asana.
Coming back to connection
I check in with my friend after I put the youngsters down. She stayed at her desk late, fully knowing that her presence was meaningless because her work relies upon others who had left for the night. Her phone chimes within the background with texts from her boss.
The relentless pushing is aggression disguised as discipline, and it’ll hurt her ultimately. I can see it in her just as I had seen it in myself. She finds inspiration in lunch hour walks as much as in sales spreadsheets. Conversations with kittens on the animal shelter where she volunteers prepare her for giant corporate audiences.
She understands balance and its necessity. And so do I. “Possibly that’s why they call it Warrior Pose,” I say. “There’s quite a lot of standing up for ourselves.”
When my alarm goes off the subsequent morning, my son is there. Again, I’m exhausted upon waking. But today I’m not afraid of being unaligned with my agenda. Of simply being. I head downstairs and make coffee, then trek across the dark lawn to my practice space. I settle myself on a cushion and start to listen. My presence has disturbed a cricket living in a corner of the shed, and when it chirps, it feels as if the universe itself is chatting with me.
Inside every moment exists the chance to practice, and in that knowledge rests the true connection.
About our contributor
MacDuff Perkins is the co-owner and co-founder of Blue Lotus Yoga Studio in Annapolis, MD.