Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Hello, Happy New Year and welcome to Deepen your yoga practice. I'm Lauren Leduc, owner and founder of True Love Yoga in Kansas City, Missouri. And yeah, it's the first episode of a brand new year and I wanted to talk about creating consistency really in your goals today in general, but specifically in your yoga practice as well. I think that we share this common struggle of finding consistency. It is such a key for our growth to be able to tend to our goals and values and care on a consistent basis. Yet for some reason it is just so hard for humans to do that. I know this because I've struggled with it quite a bit in my own life, especially in my younger years. I found it so hard to show up for myself on a regular basis. I would have this life in mind that I wanted or a goal in mind, and I just couldn't seem to take the steps on a daily basis to get there. And I do feel as a 40 year old now that I have learned a lot of different ways to do it. And I don't want to say I'm a master at consistency now, but I have been able to set goals some lofty, like opening a business, publishing a book, doing this podcast, showing up for my daughter, et cetera, that require a lot of discipline and require showing up consistently and enthusiastically. So I feel like over the years I've really picked up a lot of ways to do this. I also know this because there are so many industries built around, I think, helping people feel motivated to meet their goals. There's a huge self help industry out there. There are products, podcasts, all kinds of things. Yet it remains this big problem, right? Like a lot of people set New Year's resolutions but don't actually ever meet them. So today specifically, we'll discuss maintaining consistency and why it is key for growth on and off the mat. And we will support this concept with a few yogic concepts. One being abhyasa or practice, another being vairagya or non attachment acceptance, and another being tapas or discipline. So if you listened to my previous episode about sankalpa or intention setting for 2025, you may have taken a moment to set an intention for the year. If not, I definitely recommend going back and listening to that because I think it helps you align your values with your goals and sort of condense that into a drishti for the year or a focal point via this sankalpa or this heartfelt resolve. So there are a lot of different intentions that you could set for the year. Maybe it's to Laugh more. Maybe it's to find more self love. Maybe it's to be more focused. Maybe it's focusing on self care from the inside out. Maybe it's to serve more. Maybe it's to discover your superpowers. I'm just spitballing here, but there are a lot of different ideas on what could be your sankalpa or perhaps your main focus for this year. And we can tie this to tapas or discipline. So tapas is one of the niyamas in the yoga sutras. And when we think about tapas, it's not an appetizer at a Spanish restaurant. It's this fiery heat of discipline that fuels consistency in our practice. So we create this fire in different ways. And one is to really consider who or what we are devoted to. So oftentimes I think of my daughter. I've talked about this in previous episodes. And even if I'm not feeling particularly motivated on a specific day, I can draw upon that inner heat, that inner devotion to fuel myself to get one foot in front of the other if I'm having a hard day so that I can be the best mom that I can be for that day for her. In a yoga practice. Say that our theme for the day is tapas. We might experience that through creating some fire through the practice, we might even do breath of fire and really cultivate a lot of awareness. Or around the solar plexus point, we might do some planks that last a long time or a flow that creates some heat and some sweat. We show ourselves on the mat that we can do hard things and that can be extremely motivating. So it's like setting fuel to the fire to propel you forward. So I would maybe think about the things in your life that you already feel very committed to. And you might consider, do I see these things as a gift or a chore? And could we possibly flip it if we're seeing it as a chore, to see it or them or whatever it might be as a gift? And can that be the spark that we need for our fire or the fuel that we need for our fire? So tapas is discipline. A lot of my YTT students don't love that word discipline. So often we say devot. To me, devotion is this mix of, like, fire and heart. So we light our fires, we show up, and we do it with love because we are so devoted to something that is maybe beyond us or bigger than us, that could be within us or outside of us. All of these gifts in our lives are a Reason to show up and keep going. And that can be very motivating even when things are really hard. And I think true tapas shows up not when things are easy, but when we come up with a little bit of resistance in our lives. If you think about strength training, we become stronger by creating resistance and then increasing that resistance over time. Right. So if everything is just easy all of the time, we're never really building strength. So tapas really asks us to get out of our comfort zone, to meet resistance as a friend and to overcome it over and over. So that doesn't necessarily mean purposely seeking out really hard situations all the time, but just noticing when they come up in life, noticing what our reactions are to them, and then calling on our inner fire to propel us forward to become stronger. So tapas, a super important aspect of creating consistency in your yoga practice or whatever your goal is for the year. I also want, want to talk about these two concepts that go hand in hand in the yoga sutras in yogic philosophy, which are practice and non attachment or practice and acceptance. So our practice we might think of as our actual yoga practice, like showing up on the mat. But practice really encompasses all action that we take in our lives. It encompasses this sense of trying. In yoga we call our spiritual practice that we tend to daily as our sadhana. So you can think of it as sadhana and that can look at a lot of different ways. We can, we can talk about that in a little bit. But when it comes to this practice, according to the sutras, it needs to happen kind of in three different ways and one is long term. So we need to tend to our practice in a way that is a long term term commitment. So it's not, I'm going to go to yoga today and then we'll see what happens after. This is a lifelong practice. For me, if this is something that you want in your life, right. For me I think of it as like a long term relationship even or a marriage where it takes that discipline and devotion to show up for fully for a long period of time. So yoga isn't about quick fixes, it is a lifelong relationship. The next aspect of practice is that it needs to be uninterrupted. So that means that it needs to happen consistently. Right? It means that maybe if something happens, we get sick, we go on vacation there, we have a big shake up in life. If we get knocked off our mat for a couple of days, that we're able to come back to it and really consistency over perfection is really, really important. So like I said earlier, consistency was definitely something that was difficult for me for a lot of my life. And part of that was this all or nothing perfectionist mentality. It kept me from showing up imperfectly. In my mind, it was like, if I can't show up perfectly, then I'm just not going to show up at all. So I was meeting resistance. And then instead of pressing, pressing forward, I was pulling back and staying in my comfort zone, which eventually became really uncomfortable for me. But what I've learned now is just to keep showing up. So say I'm writing, I'm going to write every day. Even if some days it is horrible, like it's coming out slowly, it doesn't look or sound good. That time writing is still valuable. Same thing with my mat. I'm a woman who cycles. My energy is different every single day of the month. My practice is going to look different every day of the month. So some days I might be doing handstands and lots of arm balances. Some days might be more about deep flexibility, and some days might just be about rolling around on my mat because that's really all that I can get myself to do. What's important is that I haven't interrupted this devotional path because I can't show up perfectly. Right? And what is perfectly anyway? It's just important to show up. And I think that that is really like 75%, if not more of the battle is simply showing up and being there. Like we tell students all the time, if you show up to our class and you lay in Shavasana the whole time, great, you made it, you probably got what you needed and then you can move on through your day. So again, that is this concept of uninterrupted. It doesn't mean that interruptions won't happen. I think I've said before, when I do my yoga practice at home, I'm often interrupted by cats or kids or something like that. But I come back to the mat over and over again.
[00:11:51] And this last aspect of practice is that it needs to be done with joy and enthusiasm and respect. So with this sense of devotion, this can be hard to do. Like to I said showing up is about 75% of it. Can we then also bring some joy and enthusiasm into that? And I think that a big key to that is letting go of the sense of perfection. It's being able to roll with whatever happens, to roll with mistakes, to not get overly emotionally ruffled by it. And that can be very motivating to keep going. So think about when you are in Warrior 3, for instance, in a yoga class, and maybe it's just not your balancing day, you're wobbling, you're coming out of it. This happens three or four times within the duration of holding the posture. And you have a choice in that moment. You can get mad, you can decide that you're terrible at yoga, you can go into a dark spiraling place in your mind, or you can say, huh, wasn't that interesting? Or haha, that was a little bit hard today. You can roll with it and know that tomorrow's balance likely will look a lot different. And that aspect of practice really starts to fold into, like I said, practice is in one hand and then non attachment or acceptance is in the other. So we have practice, of course, we do it consistently with devotion for a long duration, right? Maybe lifetime. And then on the other hand we have acceptance or non attachment or vergaya. And this hearkens back to what I was saying within the practice of letting go of the idea of perfection or even specific results, and just showing up without expectation, having curiosity and compassion for the process itself. So I think of coming to my yoga mat almost like a laboratory, and I'm the scientist, right? And the scientists of my own mind, which is a practice of self study or svadhyay. And I'm observing everything that happens, and I'm observing with curiosity and I'm observing with compassion, but I'm not observing in such a way that I am clinging to a specific outcome.
[00:14:19] And if I do that just by the nature of clinging, I'm probably not going to get the outcome that I was hoping for. So we let go of perfection and we can help combat these feelings that come up of failure or frustration when things happen and our practice gets disrupted, right? So like I said, we can get sick, we go on vacation, things come up in life. How do we handle that when it happens? Do we give up? Or do we come back to our tapas, to our devotion, show back up the next day and show up enthusiastically, imperfectly, as human as we can possibly be. So we practice, we try, and we accept the results of that. And I really think that these two things are what fuel consistency through anything in life. If I expected every single word to be perfect as I was writing my book, it would have never been written, right? Instead, I was intent on kind of letting go of mind during the process and just letting things flow without any kind of judgment of what was happening while writing. And then I was able to go back and shape it and, and perfect it and it's still not perfect, but perfect it as much as I can as time went on. But even in that process, at a certain point I had to reach a state of acceptance like, okay, this is as good as I have the capacity to make it right now, whatever happens, happens. Right? So I think that mindset is so important and it might feel a little bit counterintuitive, right? Because it feels like if we're devoted to something and we want to meet a goal, that we should really care about whether or not we meet the goal. But there's something about loosening our grip on it and allowing it to be what it is. In my opinion, that helps us show up more consistently and more enthusiastically. So I have a few more just little tips for creating some consistency in your practice or in your sankalpa, whatever your goals are for the year. One is to start small. So part of long term planning and thinking is breaking it down, breaking this goal down into little, little tiny steps and then tending to those steps. So for a yoga practice, that might mean 10 minutes on your mat a day. To start off, that might mean getting out of bed and doing a couple sun salutations. That can be enough. That can be enough to get started.
[00:16:58] That can be enough to create some consistency that becomes habitual. And in my opinion, we know that a habit is well established when it's almost harder to not do the thing than it is to show up and do the thing. And then things do become a bit easier. So we can start small. And that might mean, again, showing up for short practices. If we're looking at different kinds of goals here, I'll go back to the book. Right. I broke down the book into sections or chapters and then broke those down even more. And then I committed to a specific period of time to write every day. So instead of feeling like I had to write this whole book at once, I got to look at these little sections. And doing those each day was very doable for me. Even as a business owner and a mom, I was able to set that time aside because I had an action plan. I knew it was what I was going to do and I knew it was going to be a small bite. I'm not trying to eat the whole book at once, if you will, just take little bites of it. So starting small helps us create ritual. So in creating a ritual, we set a consistent time in space for the practice. So again, that might look like getting out of bed and doing a couple sun salutations or doing our breath work or meditation, whatever that might be. And sadhana, like I said, is your spiritual practice. And that what it looks like is completely up to you. Yes, you can follow specific protocols or guidelines, but I think finding what works for you is most important. I also think that just using our modern technology is important in creating a ritual that's putting it in your calendar alongside all these other things that are important to us every day. That might mean like at True Love Yoga, we have an app and you go in on Sunday and schedule all your classes out for the week. So they're in there. You don't even have to think about it. It's just part of your ritual. So for me, ritual is not only showing up itself, but it's the planning process in setting my goals or my practices. For me, I have a planner and it literally says move and breathe every day. And while I have specific goals that I'd like to meet, like I have different things I do each day of the week, I know that checking move and breathe off is enough that I've tended to myself. I've done the thing. Anything else is really a bonus. Another thing that can be really helpful is tracking your progress. So you might use a journal, like a yoga journal, to track your progress, which is really fun actually. You can write down maybe what you learned in class, any insights that you've have that come up. Or like in the True Love Yoga app, you can just look back and see all of the classes you've taken. And that can be a way just to reflect on how you've shown up for yourself. That might mean, you know, depending on what your relationship is with technology and trackers, if you're able to use them in a way that is constructive, I guess Apple watches or rings, whatever that might be, you might find that tracking really helpful for some people. I think over tracking can be detrimental in a way because it can pull us in the direction of perfection. So I would just monitor on your own what works for you. Do you need sort of a loose accountability system or do you need something that's tighter with lots of data and stuff like that and then follow through with that. Being flexible is another tip. So you can adjust your practice to your energy level levels and your schedule. Like I said, my yoga practice looks different every day just depending on what I am needing. Also, some of them are like recovery from my strength training practices. So I allow myself a lot of flexibility there. I'm not going to be practicing certain things every day because I need to give my muscles a chance to relax or maybe my Energy is not just there. Maybe my daughter didn't sleep well the night before, therefore I did not sleep well the night before. So I'm going to again show up without this, like, clinging to this sense of perfection. Instead, be flexible and roll with it. I love the next tip, which is finding community. So you might feel really intrinsically motivated or self motivated, but I think that can take a lot of time. So being able to like make friends with your yoga buddies, to maybe have a friend that you get together and schedule classes with, to have somebody that you talk about your yoga practice with, or whatever your goal might be, can be so incredibly nourishing and important. Having that support can be the fuel to our devotion. It can spark the fire we need for our tapas when we're feeling low. I think there is this modern push to be able to, like, really find everything within our own selves. And while I do think that with a lot of inner work, many of us can become very resourced, I think that looking to us others for strength is also really valuable and really important. And whether that's because I'm devoted to these other people or because they are stepping alongside me in this journey, it's just so incredibly valuable and special, I think.
[00:22:20] And lastly, celebrating wins. It is so easy to look at our past actions, at our practice, if you will, and point out all of the mistakes. It's so easy to go through life and never celebrate the wins or victories. What ways can you acknowledge and celebrate your efforts, even on challenging days? One thing I like to do, especially if I felt really challenged that day, whether or not I actually physically write this down or not, is to make a list of the things I did. And it usually really surprises me. And even if I didn't quote, unquote, do a whole lot, there were still, there were still things I did even if I just unloaded the dishwasher. Well, I did that because I'm devoted to my family and having a clean living space and having dishes to eat off of. Right. So it's a small action, but it's a big thing. Celebrate that you showed up on your mat five days last week or three days, even. Celebrate that you held your Warrior three a little bit longer. Even though we're not attaching that to too much, we can still celebrate these little wins or big wins as they come up. And that can be really motivating as far as developing consistency and longevity. So whether that's a little journal entry or a pat on the back or, you know, a fun little treat at the end of the day or sharing your victory with somebody do find a way to celebrate these wins as they come. So I hope this episode was motivating for you today. Again, let's practice this year with consistency, enthusiasm and acceptance. Let's lean into this feeling of fiery devotion, of discipline, of tapas, and show up regularly and consistently for ourselves in small ways and in big. You might be really surprised how showing up consistently in small ways can build to something big. It might not be writing a book or opening a business like I gave examples of earlier in this episode, but maybe you've moved closer to your Sankalpa, to embodying your values and ethics this year. Maybe you feel more at home and at peace in your own body. Maybe you feel more connected with yourself and others. What a beautiful outcome from showing up in these small ways every single day. I would encourage you, after listening to this, to maybe take a moment and write down your intention for your yoga practice for 2025 and commit to one small action that you can do right now, today to honor that intention. I would also perhaps come up with some kind of action plan. How many classes a week am I going to take? How much time am I spending on my mat each day? And start small, right? Start with a goal that feels attainable, maybe that stretches you just a little bit, and you might find that your enthusiasm grows as you show up consistently. And then you might be able to take on more and more. Maybe your life opens up some space for this thing that is so effective, that makes such a positive difference not only in the moment, but really transfuses into the other moments of your life. Yoga isn't something we achieve in a day. Yoga is a lifelong journey, and consistency really is the thread that weaves this journey together. And so happy you're here. I'm wishing you a beautiful 2025. I'm telling you that you deserve to show up for yourself on a consistent daily basis. And I cannot wait to see what you do. Om Shanti, Om. Peace. Till next time.
