On establishing (and maintaining) a regular home practice

The challenge embed a regular yoga in my daily life is better described as a battle. Tiredness, work trips, other commitments and other people sometimes seem to work in collusion to derail my practice. Again and again, the subject of how to ensure that I work a yoga practice into my day causes me to scratch my head and eventually come up with the same solution; an early morning practice.

The upside to an early morning practice is it's hard to be derailed by external forces. You claw back a bit of time from sleep in the morning when the boyfriend, the tiring day at work, or the social meet up can't stop you from your practice. That leaves only one thing to stop you from your practice; the lure of a big warm bed and blissful sleep.

I aim big and always have done. For me, morning practice meant waking with the rising sun to spent 90 mins blissfully floating through a complete morning routine. In reality this translates as 2 hours less sleep. Unfortunately I'm one of those people who needs 7 hours a sleep a night (and rarely manages to get to sleep before 11) so, looking at this logically, it is no wonder that on the rare occassion that I did manage to get up so early, I staggered through my practice like a zombie, and felt a bit crap all day.

Yesterday I came across the artice '5 Things I Love about My Morning Practice'  on Yoga Journal's website and it was a bit of a revelation. Of course; why did the perfectionist all-or-nothing part of me insist on 2 hours when 30 minutes is plenty? 30 minutes doesn't loom in my head menacingly, instead in entices playfully. As a matter of fact I lose that 30 minutes anyway as my dear partner insists on setting his alarm 30 mins early so he can get the requisite 6 snoozes in the morning (I can't begin to tell you how strange I find this) so the benefit is two-fold.

This morning I put aside that half hour and got up a little early. It was not painful, and was plenty of time to do a little meditation and run through one of my 20-min yogadownload sessions and guess what; I feel fantastic.