What is “practice” anyway?

Just feeling the environment is a “practice.”

Almost anything can be a practice. Walk outside your door in the morning and feel the moisture in the air, the weight of your body on your feet, the swaying of your torso in the wind and with the gravity below. And as cliché as it is: the wind in your hair. Even if you’re slightly hungover, you can feel last night’s alcohol on your brain and sense the smell of the city in your nose. In the distance a car or a baby cry. Your yoga is your unique awareness of the world and your body, mind, and spirit experience of it.

I love the phrase “practice makes practice,” and I say it a lot. It means that this practice, and whatever form it takes, is constantly unfolding, never perfected, but always evolving. This is true of your asana, physical practice, as well as you meditation practice.

A careful reading of Yoga Sutras 1.33-1.39 unpacks a lot of different ways to practice meditation. Patanjali recognized that just walking along a street could be a practice. The sutra says when we notice people who are joyful, we are happy for them; for people who are suffering, compassion; for those who we perceive to be virtuous, we offer admiration, and for those who are not virtuous, we are indifferent. That last one is the hardest for students to grasp. It does not suggest that we are condone violence or evil. It simply, not so simply really, means, that we are careful who we judge to be non-virtuous, and we don’t get caught up in engaging, scolding, judging.

This is one of many ways that your practice extends off the mat.