YogicBites: How to continue our yogic practices and routine

Habits are dif­fi­cult to form. You will need to keep it in your aware­ness con­stant­ly and put it into prac­tice. Intel­lec­tu­al­ly we under­stand that habits have cor­re­spond­ing neur­al path­ways and pos­i­tive habits bring about pos­i­tive changes to our behav­ior, reg­u­lar prac­tice becomes a dif­fi­cult thing. In many of our pro­grams, peo­ple are curi­ous to know about keep­ing up their yog­ic prac­tices and exer­cise rou­tine. They attribute to the lack of con­ti­nu­ity to lack of time, moti­va­tion or sup­port from the envi­ron­ment.

We have seen in our pre­vi­ous post on how the tap­a­treya (three obsta­cles) : Adi Deivi­ka, Adi Bhau­ti­ka and Adhy­a­timi­ka have to tak­en care of for suc­cess in any­thing we take up includ­ing our dai­ly rou­tine.

We also saw how tak­ing up a prac­tice for atleast a man­dala (48 days) can help us to inte­grate it with­in our dai­ly lives. Some­times it also helps to keep the prac­tice active in our thought process so that we can catch up from where we left instead of total­ly get­ting dis­con­nect­ed from the prac­tice. Adi ji beau­ti­ful­ly explains this in this video.

Hata Yoga Pradipika

The Hata Yoga Pradipi­ka, which is a man­u­al of yoga writ­ten by Svā­mi Svāt­mārā­ma who belonged to the Natha sam­pra­daya, has some excel­lent insights on fac­tors that facil­i­tate yog­ic prac­tices and those that can be obsta­cles.

Six fac­tors sup­port yog­ic prac­tices:

Utsah: Enthu­si­asm

Sahas: Open­ness to exper­i­ment and adven­tures that one may encounter

Dhairya: Courage

Tattvagyana: Knowl­edge of the truth

Nis­chaya: Deter­mi­na­tion

Janasan­ga Par­itya­ga: Avoid­ing com­pa­ny and being in iso­la­tion (atleast for some time)

Fac­tors that act as obsta­cles include:

Ati­a­hara: Over eat­ing

Prayasa: Over exer­tion

Pra­jal­pa: Talk­a­tive­ness

Niya­m­a­gra­ha: Over adher­ence to rules and reg­u­la­tions

janasang­ha: over indul­gence in com­pa­ny of peo­ple

Laulyam: Insta­bil­i­ty of waver­ing atti­tude

The prob­lems we face now are not new and have been rec­og­nized by the yog­ic com­mu­ni­ty long back. We just need a redis­cov­ery of these prin­ci­ples in con­tem­po­rary times.

TAGS: habithata yogahata yoga pradipi­kaman­dalayoga

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