Unusual Advice For Improving Your Yoga Practice

As a yoga teacher, a common question I get is – How can I improve my yoga practice?

One less obvious answer is to Be Curious.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it’s essential if you want to get better on your yoga mat.

Be Curious

While yoga may seem like it’s all about stretching and contorting your body–yoga postures are a means to an end – which is to discover more about yourself. Ultimately, to advance your yoga practice, you must go deeper into yourself. That’s why it’s so important to be curious on your mat. When you’re curious about something you’re interested, you’re engaged. You explore. You pay attention. That’s the level of engagement you want to have about yourself on the mat.

It starts with your physical body. We spend a lot of time in our heads in our culture. Appreciate the time on you mat to tune in to your body. Your body has some amazing capabilities, many of which lay dormant because we don’t know how to fully tap into them. Yoga can help you activate more of your bodies capabilities by teaching you how to expand beyond your physical body.  As amazing as the body is, you are more than your physical body.

You Are More Expansive Than Your Body

In yoga philosophy, it’s believed that we have multiple bodies including a mental, subtle or energy, and a spiritual body. Each body has unique purposes, functions, and processes which require different skills to cultivate. Through yoga, which incorporates not just physical postures, but also breath work, meditation, and self-reflection, you build skill with these different bodies.

As you increase in both awareness and skill, you activate more aspects of yourself including  your inner resources like resilience, inner strength, clarity, wisdom, and inner peace  which serves your advancement both on and off your mat.

So if you want to be a better yogi and human being, Be Curious!